I was pretty unenthused by Vista a full year ago, and I’ve not warmed to it since. (I’m not the only one, either.) It’s been a while since I said bad things about Microsoft, but new news reports about the monopolistic giant caught my attention.
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While researching whole-disk encryption solutions, I came across an interesting archive of lost, stolen, or misplaced computers containing personal information; some further searching turned up other sites which contain similar lists. Depressing, and fascinating, reading there, seeing how poorly potentially valuable data is protected.

On a related note, Forensics Magazine recently published a news article on data recovery from “formatted” hard drives; they don’t address the even bigger problem of flash-memory devices, like thumb drives, where it can be nigh impossible to remove all traces of previous contents. (A flash drive of mine will still, to the right piece of free software, yield the names, dates, and sizes of files that used to be on it - despite being defragged several times, fully overwritten several times, and “wiped” with PGP a full seven times.) Complete destruction might be the only way to permenantly hide all traces of data on a flash drive, but they point out a simpler, and geekier, technique for hard drives.