Whole disk encryption for dumbies?

A case study in the pit falls of whole disk encryption and how it can be real pain.

After countless news stories of laptops lost while filled to the brim with juicy patient and employee data our UAB wise bureaucracy has leapt into action. Now mind you, the less informed might wonder why personal information was being stored in such a portable form as a laptop, and why such a tantalizing piece of electronic convenience was left unguarded. No, my university has in its wisdom declared that all university laptops be fully encrypted with university issued software.

Why should that involve a lowly grad student who's research will never involve any private data? Why should this affect the hundreds of researchers who would never have non anonymized data? Well aparently the univerity is also worried about some one stealing our scientific data too. Frankly as a scientist I can barely make a living with it; what would a common thug do with it? We're NHI funded anyways so any papers we write about the data is pubic access within 6 months.

So why the rant? Well, six month ago the people who have graciously offered to pay for my education under a federal training grant program asked me if I wanted a free laptop. Well duh, my faithful Toshiba is showing its age. Because my computer is university owned I have to go bring it in to have it encrypted. Mind you I don't keep any data on my machine for convience; instead I just remote desktop my machine at school. That machine has all the software I need and access to a shared network drive for the lab. But the university insists that all my mp3s, family vacation pictures and saved half-life2 games are safe should my computer be stolen.

I also happen to be ward clerk and keep some sensitive information on my computer too, but they didn't know about that. So in part to keep things safe and in part to play around with some freeware I had created a hidden encrypted partition with Truecrypt that I doubt the FBI could have cracked. So frankly I had things under control.

But, I aquiessed to their demands and bring my computer in to be encrypted. Three days later, after some confusion about my already encrypted partion, I get my computer back on a friday. Sunday morning at 7:20 am (yes it's early) my computer goes to sleep (not fair I wanted to sleep too). I turn it back on for the next meeting and enter my password and it crashed, the full enchalada, bluescreen, something about a memory dump, and it resets. Odd, but it reboots and the encryption software asks for my password. Then, windows declares my boot record is fubared and it needs the windows disk. Now such an catastrophe has been anticipated for. Windows can repair itself, as a Dell it has recovery partion that is bootable, once the boot record is repaired windows can use a restore point if more than just the boot record is fubared. BUTT, all of this is worthless to me becuase booting from the window disk won't allow it to read my fully encrypted hard drive and I can't get to the Dell recovery partition (als because of the encryption).

Good news I'm not fixing it, bad news it's going to take the university guys a few days to make an image of my hard drive (for safety), decrypt it (can take 24+ hrs), fix windows (this is the short part), and then reencrypt my hard drive.

Next time I ingnore the emails.

To honk or not to honk?

First, a little background. A large number of people in the state of Alabama are unable to merge properly. Instead of finding a gap and matching speed like any sane, intelligent, or generally not stupid person they pull up right next to you or directly in your blind spot and wonder why they can't move over. Or they try to merge going 10 mph slower or faster than traffic. To further complicate the mess there are a large number of last second mergers that not only slow down traffic but when the try it in peoples blind spot it makes for a very dangerous habit.

Today I was driving to school at around 10 (because I can, and to avoid rush hour). I move over to the right lane about a mile before my exit and as I drive by an on ramp I catch a glimpse of a car in my blind stop. I saw a little yellow and thought it was a cab. I was a little ahead and so give it a little bit of gas. Now mind you it's 10 and traffic is light. I was following a car and so ahead of me there wasn't a lot of space but there was no one behind me for 2/3 a mile. Instead the car next to speeds up just enough to pull up right next to me. Now he's running out of lane and right after that the intersate goes over a short bridge. This guys running out of space. He pull a little bit forward and starts moving over forcing me to slam on my brakes. I was about to honk my horn. Because if you don't tell them they're stupid they'll never learn. Turns out the yellow on the car was the sheriff's logo on the sqaud car of a policeman talking on his cell phone. I thought better of it. Instead I yell and wave my arms and rant and write a blog post about it. I would feel much better if I'd honked my horn.

So this brings me to my survey question. If you get cut off by a cop (no lights or sirens), in one of those hey you idiot learn to drive moments, not one of those please don't hit me moments, do you honk your horn?