2009/4/23 Damian Gerow <dgerow [ at ] afflictions [ dot ] org>: > John C Nash wrote: > > Before I say anything else: <http://xkcd.com/538/>. Please keep that in > mind through all of this. Thanks very much for raising this topic, and for the xkcd reference - it was the second thing I had thought of. > There are more topics in this area, but I'll leave it there. Hopefully this > will kick off some discussion. > > Here's a more direct question to the list: > > What do you encrypt, and why? I was going to post a little more about my experiences, but it's already clear I have much more to learn than teach, so I'll be more circumspect and describe my situation instead. I have a laptop, and decided some time ago to use some encryption. On my laptop I have a lot of financial information (financial software, household budget spreadsheet, tax data, etc). I also carry around my work e-mail and several work documents. The work stuff is not any kind of security matter, but I reasoned that it's not really mine, and so I should take some nominal steps to protect it. My solution was to use the alternate disk installation of Ubuntu and set up an encrypted partition on my disk. The encrypted partition holds all the material listed above, with softlinks from my home directory to the files in question. It's 256 bit RSA (IIRC) with a passphrase that must be entered on boot. I'm one of those guys whose ignorance could easily fool me into thinking I've protected myself when I haven't. In terms of perception; one of the disadvantages of what I've done is that I don't believe I can use suspend/hibernate while travelling, as the data is not then protected. I'm also forced to consider that the extra time and effort spent upon every boot-up is not equal to the risk of my data getting compromised, or the risk to me and my employer if it does (call it the xkcd equation). After all, I don't use the secured data every time I start-up. A clean upgrade to 9.04 is in my future, and I'm considering a different encryption approach, and so am very interested in the discussion at play. Cheers. -- "My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." -- Thomas Paine