What do you do with an old PC? Most of us just give it away; if you're mindful of privacy issues, you might format the disk first. There have been lots of recent cases where organizations have failed to properly clean disks of confidential information before decommissioning the disks and selling or giving them away. The BitLocker Drive Encryption feature of Windows Vista can help solve this, though-- when you decommission an encrypted volume, you can remove the keys (as detailed in this column) and render the volume permanently unreadable. Sweet!
April 2007 Archives
This weekend, we had several firsts:
- Tom had his first baseball practice. The league he's in now allows stealing, bunts, and some other subtleties that they don't use in the 8-and-under league. He and his teammates have a fair amount to learn (as do I). The only mar on an otherwise perfect practice was the fact that it was 40° and blustery. Hopefully the weather will improve soon!
- David had his first young men's campout. The Scouts went to the church granary, had an overnight campout, and did some service work around the granary and grounds. He came home happy but tired, because he stayed up all night ("most of the night", in his words) talking to his pals.
- David gave his first talk in church, on honesty. He'd prepared a talk, but (true to his genetics) he started extemporizing about halfway through. He did a great job, and I know he was relieved to have it out of the way.
- Arlene made her first trip out of the house since her foot surgery-- first to Meijer with Mom, then to church. She was getting a little stir crazy, so both excursions were welcome.
Microsoft updated their BitLocker FAQ, which now answers every question you've ever had about BitLocker (plus some you probably haven't.)
