Another laptop stolen with unencrypted data on.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7197045.stm

Hopefully it’s been formatted and is running some naff games but maybe it has passed a whole load of personal info on to criminals or worse to terrorist who are very interested in soldiers home addresses, parents, spouses, …

There really is no excuse, yes stuff can get nicked however careful you intend to be but windows has it’s own directory encryption options - right click in explorer, properties, encrypt. Not that I’d recommend it. I did that but various exe’s wouldn’t run from it and then I couldn’t unencrypt it. I managed by copying the data out into another directory, deleting the original and renaming the copy back to the original.

These days I use true crypt which has all sorts of sneakies. Not only does it do serious encryption it can hide the data your encrypting so no one knows it’s there and so can’t force you to reveal the password.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

My main complaint with it is it is another of those invisible apps. Maybe the version I have is for windows 3.11 but it doesn’t appear on the task bar & I forget I haven’t entered the password and get all confused when the encrypted drives aren’t there.

And… both options are free, so where is the excuse?

Is your data encrypted? Is your personal data at home encrypted? Is your personal data at work encrypted? You could hide your cv & mp3’s!