Innocent iPod a sucker for pernicious practices

Tech is so treacherous. Outwardly innocent devices and discoveries can so easily be put to evil purposes.

Just look at Marie Curie's dubious baby, uranium: handy both for cancer therapy and nuclear bombs but perhaps better suited for the latter. This century, that once mundane tool, the box cutter, took on a sinister connotation.

Even that friendly blob of plastic we call the mobile phone can be sinister when in the hands of the English, who forget that it is meant for phone calls and, in snuff film spirit, use it to photograph individuals they have thumped or set on fire (it's called happy slapping).

Now even that cute gizmo, the iPod, has moved to the dark side, becoming involved in a practice called podslurping. It sounds kinky but means a clean, silent hi-tech way of stealing information - heaps, truckloads, oodles of information. All you need is the following: the world's most overexposed dinky gadget for playing music, a hard drive to leech from and a permissive value system. Or, even better, no values at all.

You plug your multi-gigabyte portable storage device into the target and then simply suck up every file you like, which is theft because these days information amounts to so much more than bits. It is the new hot commodity, which we trade like oil and silver.

Whether iPod-driven information snatching deserves to be seen as a threat to civilisation is doubtful, however, judging by the scorn Abe Usher has attracted. Abe who?

Mr Usher is the founder and head of United States security consultancy, Sharp Ideas, which is responsible for slurp.exe: a 'crippleware' theft program that copies no more than 200 files. He also broke the news about slurping, on the back of a Gartner report that ran last year.