Five of the Best Free Linux Disk Encryption Tools 135
An anonymous reader writes "Disk encryption uses software to encrypt the entire hard disk. The onus is therefore not on the user to determine what data should be encrypted, or to remember to manually encrypt files. By encrypting the entire disk, temporary files, which may reveal important confidential data, are also protected. Security is enhanced further when disk encryption is combined with filesystem-level encryption. To provide an insight into the open source software that is available, we have compiled a list of five notable disk encryption tools. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants easy-to-use data encryption and security."
loopback-AES changed recently? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've had some loopback containers using AES-256 since years and years. Recently after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04, the same containers no longer will mount, yet I can create brand new ones which work fine. It seems that the old ones are not forward compatible.
Has anyone else noticed this, and if so, what can be done about it? It's really kind of annoying to have to install a whole VM of an older OS just to access my old loopback container files!
Re:There can be only one (Score:5, Interesting)
dmcrypt for me!
But yeah, truecrypt and dmcrypt are all people really need to know about. They both do mostly the same thing with slight variation, which people choose is down to preference.
LoopAES is outdated, cryptsetup is a userspace tool linked to dm-crypt, and the other is specialized.
Pretty lame article.
Re:Link? List? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can't the editor, "Roblimo," proofread the submission? Isn't that practically their entire function?
Can they? Yes. Do they? No. They don't even run basic spell-checkers as evidenced by multiple finalized submissions. I'd personally be ashamed to put my name to much of the work they produce. If they worked in the other 99.99999% of job positions bearing the title "editor" they would be fired due to poor job performance. In this shitty job market I imagine there are many thousands of people who would be happy to do better.
I don't get to slack like that in my job. If the "editors" here started acting like they were semi-worthy of the title I would seriously consider a paid subscription. Note, I don't expect perfection or anything like that. I just want them to at least try.
They should stop calling themselves "editors". Another title like perhaps "reposters" would be more appropriate and would remove the expectation that they act like, well, editors.
I notice that any post pointing out that the ad-laden blog they chose to link in the summary is one of the worst and least-direct (second-hand or third-hand) sources available for the story, or pointing out that (particularly for book reviews) the story itself is likely a Slashvertisement, well those get very quickly modded to oblivion. And I do mean *quickly*. I wouldn't notice most of them at all except that I browse at -1.
While I cannot prove that it's solely the editors doing that, it is known that editors have infinite modpoints. So I consider it quite plausible, especially considering that I can't be the only user who considers it useful information when someone points out what may be an undisclosed marketing motive. I tend to mod those "Informative" myself so long as they are thoughtful and can back up what they say. I have seen more unlikely things happen, I admit, but I have a hard time imagining that the majority of moderators find such information so objectionable.
Re:There can be only one (Score:5, Interesting)
Which leads to another benefit, my mom is no system administrator, but she can open a file, enter a password, and double click the file within.
Further more, if I want to deal with it - I can put it on my Linux machines.
Finally, if a technician needs to fiddle with the system, I can unmount the drives and let them in with (less) worry about what they may find. (Tend to deal with health care information.) In other words, I can compartmentalize who can see what.