Leave it to human ingenuity. As soon as a need arises – sometimes even before – some clever-clever crackpot gets on the case, drawing up plans and filing patents and contacting Chuck Norris’s people to negotiate an acceptable fee for the infomercial. We’re assuming we missed the big news story about the stolen USB thumb drive full of nuclear secrets, because we can’t figure out why else somebody bothered to invent the SecurityDR Data Guard Thumbdrive Lock.

Attention: these items are NOT thumb drives! They're more like a solution in search of a problem. This surprisingly hefty pair of rugged metal drive caddies clamps onto the USB ends of your thumb drives, making them twice as big while doing a mediocre job of protecting your data. The three-dial combination locks ostensibly ward off prying infopirates, but is that any easier than just encrypting your data in the first place? Maybe, if you don't know how to encrypt data.

In any case, if you’re the kind of person who carries sensitive personal, business, or military information around on a tiny little USB drive, you probably need to make a thorough review of your security policies in other areas of life. But as long as you’ve got ten bucks, a Woot account, and a mailing address in the lower 48, this particular “need” is taken care of.

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