Officers examined almost 300 computers, 1,800 disks, CDs and hard drives, and scores of books, documents and notepads, using fingerprinting, DNA, computer forensics, linguistic analysis and facial mapping.
The engineer whose data they wanted still kept it on old-fashioned floppy disks that he simply took out of his computer every night.
At most, it might open up a new range of applications, from clothes that change colour to dimmable windscreens.Solid phase-change materials are already used to store data in optical memory disks.
SoBig.F was able to spoof this system by "harvesting" e-mail addresses from the hard disks of infected computers.
For two decades, programmers have distributed their wares as "shareware", initially through dial-up bulletin boards or via disks given away with computer magazines, and later via the internet.
When programs were small enough to fit on floppy disks and were swapped among users like cigarette cards, viruses could be easily sneaked into them (because the disks themselves were writable) and spread around by hand.
In a parallel move, earlier this month Google offered free software that searches the local hard disks of PC users and displays the results much like those of a web search.Naturally, this has struck fear into Microsoft, whose Windows system runs 94% of the world's PCs and which sees itself as the ruler of the desktop.
Computers have exploited magnetic data-storage media, from tapes to hard disks, ever since they were invented.
The iPod's market share has grown from about one-third to two-thirds in the past year, at the expense of cheaper "flash" players (iPods use hard disks to store music, rather than flash-memory cards).
A firm with a lot of hardware could make money by providing instant processing power or leasing out space on its hard disks.
This is equivalent to half a million libraries the size of America's Library of Congress, or about 800 megabytes per person per year.Almost all new information (92%) is stored on magnetic media, primarily hard disks.
