On Sun, 06 Jul 2008 10:48:57 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> That's good to know - I know this can be implemented a number of
>> different ways, and not being a Windows user, I wasn't sure which
>> method was used.
> 
> The main drawback, of course, is that you're still limited by your login
> password's length. You can't have a 90-character pass phrase locking the
> files like you can in some other systems.  But it's probably good enough
> to keep out random curiousity seekers, general laptop thieves, and so
> on. Just don't store your child porn that way and expect to get away
> with it.  I wouldn't trust lives to it, but it *is* convenient that you
> can encrypt some files and not others.

What is the current max length of a Windows password?  I know my 20-
character password had to be cut down to 14 IIRC on WinNT and possibly 
Win2K - the dumb thing seemed to be that when setting the password, the 
password got truncated and then hashed, but when checking, it was hashed 
as is (or vice versa), so if you set your password to a value that was 
too long, you could never login.

> Plus, I'm pretty sure that if you (say) encrypt files on a USB drive,
> the actual private key to decrypt the files isn't on the drive itself.
> Rather, it's only stored on the C: drive on the machine you log in
> to[1]. So if you encrypt your backups, it's probably pretty secure, and
> certainly better than nothing.

That's handy.

> [1] Bonus points to any flames about AD, that you can install windows on
> something other than C:, and so on.

Not sure I follow here - unless you're saying that with AD the key isn't 
stored on the local machine...

Jim

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