And I thought double-male dryer cords for connecting generators was dangerous. This one takes the cake. Be sure to watch the videos.

TAKE A LOOK AT THIS CONTRAPTION

Note that they fail to mention what you do with the live ends of the wires/cords after the transition is made. Man, this thing has lawsuit written all over it. OHSA would have a field day with this one.

I love it ... "we developed this for our government customers." Sure they did. Just like I'm sure that law enforcement seizes computers 'in the act,' yet without also securing the power supply - or that there are no other ways to access the information.

Time to click you heels and get back to Kansas, Dorothy!

The best laugh are the 'accessory kits." Kit $2 is listed at $275, but I'm pretty sure I can get everything in it at the box store for less than $50. Gee, they even furnish a 40 cent roll of electrical tape!

As bill Engvall would say: Here's your sign ...

I've seen this before. For Law enforcment, it's actually a good tool, and probably about the only way to handle certain situations.

Nowadays, more and more people with something to hide will use some sort of hard drive encryption, which requires a passphrase when the machine is started. If the machine is powered off, the passphrase is lost.

Without the passphrase, there is no possible way to decrypt the drive, short of guessing the passphrase, which could take a very long time, (up to a few billion years) depending on how many characters were used...

Interesting.
Wouldn't they just treat the office and such as a crime scene and search in place?

I like it.

I imagine small police departments would prefer to get the system "running" and take it back to "their" geek. Like they say several times, if this machine is "logged on" the disk encryption is probably disabled. They want to dump it before the thing times out, assuming you walked away, and locks encryption back on. It sure sounds a lot easier to me to just bring a terabyte USB drive and let this machine dump to your unencrypted drive.
"XCOPY <i> <your drive> /S/H/E/R/C" on each drive will get most of it.
After you got all you could, reboot this with a hardware disk maintenance program to be sure you got all the partitions.
A real geek could still hide stuff out there but they probably won't find it anyway.
I am sure the NSA/FBI could eventually crack any encryption or data hiding scheme but if you are the Fumbuck Arkansas Sheriff department I doubt you would get much cooperation if you were trying to bust a guy who sold a pound of pot. It is a whole lot easier to just read and capture the data yourself.

Let me put it this way .... though crooks are famous for doing silly things, even the dimmest of them can figure out that simply flipping the power strip 'off' is going to shut down the computer.

Therefore, that product has the most marginal application.

As I see it, the stuff is like the 'audio grade' stuff ... a lot of sales kant intended to separate the gullible from their money. My theory is further supported by the ridiculous mark-up on those tool sets.

If the crook is a lumen brighter than the power on LED he will have all of his secret data encrypted on a thumb drive and it wouldn't even be in the computer unless you were "doing business". Things like this are best made to look like something else and hidden in plain sight.

I assume they have a warning somewhere that you should ensure that the UPS and the PC are on the same phase.
In real life that may really be all this magic box is. Just a N/C closed relay that picks if the two cords are not in phase preventing switchover, an OK light and a switch. Relay optional. It could just be a 'not ok' light and a be careful sticker.

And I was kind of looking forward to that 240v 'oops' moment.

"Yeah, I thought the cops had me for sure but when he plugged in his gizmo he blew the breaker and shut the machine down."
"He is easy to spot, the guy with black fingernails on one hand and no eyebrows"

SOP for evidence collection of computers is to unplug it. The techs pull the hard drive, thus bypassing anything in startup/shutdown that might destroy the data.

Unless said computer is attached to "the bomb", in which case you have to get it out of the city so Jack Bauer can disarm it.

If these guys have any decent encryption on the hard drive, taking it out is just a start on a long road in the lab. Your average local law enforcement agency is not going to break that encryption.

Even when the password is known, we have deleted encrypted data and were unable to recover it with the best of equipment and bit for bit forensic duplication. But then again, I am not in law enforcement. The other side is, the same equipment was able to read a dead hard drive (would not even spin up) and recreate the entire data set without any loss. Sometimes you win, sometimes you loose.

Wow, I was just pointing this out from a safety perspective.

You are right Ed this is a safety nightmare. I hope they have a dummy receptacle to protect the power strip plug when they are transporting this.

Oddly enough, we had a gent in the chat asking what would happen if he made a cord with two male ends, and plugged it into two receptacles.

It was pointed out (by others) that this is the wrong place to ask those sorts of questions.

What that device needs is a pair of asbestos gloves and a blast shield.

I think the idea is, that anyone who's smart enough to use encryption is probably not going to fall under local jurisdiction. The locals are probably only going to be taking care of common identity thieves or the casual internet predator, who probably aren't going to have a high operational level of computer knowledge.

It is 2009, high school kids know about encryption, if only to hide their porn from mom. Your average local cops can't break PGP and that is free on the net.

I was looking at this thing, thinking it probably just has a sync relay built in that prevents you from throwing two out-of-phase. Which really wouldn't be much of a problem if you're plugging both sides of HotPlug into the same circuit, but would at least prevent a big bang. So at first glance, they're trying to make an inherently unsafe operation as safe as possible- worst you have is an exposed plug which is only exposed a few seconds. But then I saw this gem on their one pdf:
$50, John? You can replicate this thing for $2 with a double-ended extension cord. All this box does is give the illusion of safety.

All this is is a redneck generator cord with an auto transfer relay!

PGP is good enough that the government got really freaked out when it was introduced. Any kid can use AES these days.

It could be a serial killer and I doubt the FBI would be willing to allocate enough computing resources to brute force AES if he used a truly strong password or phrase. You'd need a pretty nice supercomputer.

Luckily, most users use dictionary words as passwords, so a dictionary attack is usually all you need to get in. A dictionary attack can be done on a good PC in minutes.