Gadgetory

a lot of the talk about encryption these days centers around securing things like internet connections and passwords on a server somewhere and it makes sense considering how much data is constantly being tossed around online but let's say that you've done everything you can to hide your online activity using a VPN making up a 20 character freaking password for your social media accounts and overwriting your browser cache what if despite all of this someone just walks off with your hard drive or computer or breaks in while you're out of the house and starts trying to get into your stuff this is where an equally important kind of encryption could really help you it's called whole Drive encryption or full disk encryption and just like the name says the idea is to encrypt your whole Drive so a thief can't just access all of your private data if they walk off with it but how does this work many full disk encryption methods such as Windows BitLocker try to give you a fairly transparent experience when you're actually using the computer to do this all of the data on your drive is encrypted and the next time you boot up your computer you'll be presented with a special pre boot environment that will ask you for an encryption key this could be something as simple as a password or a key stored on a physical drive like a USB stick if you'd rather go that route after you supply the appropriate credentials your hard drive will be decrypted and you'll be able to carry on business as usual of course if someone steals your hard drive and your encryption key isn't terribly strong it might not be too hard for some miscreant to crack it so many users who use full disk encryption add another layer of protection through a trusted platform module or TPM this is an add-in chip found on some motherboards and even if you don't have one many modern motherboards including lower-cost ones have TPM headers so you can just buy one for not a lot of money and install it yourself what a TPM does is generate encryption keys and stores them at least in part on the module itself instead of just the hard drive TPMS can also detect tampering attempts so if someone steals your hard drive out of your computer and tries to put it in their own it won't work and speaking of tampering TPMS can additionally tell if someone has injected malicious code like a rootkit which you can learn about up here into your boot sector which often can't be encrypted by full drive encryption schemes this way it can lock down the system and help you recover it later without exposing it to rootkit malware some people even take this a step farther and buy hardware encrypted drives that have a built in chip that can encrypt the entire enchilada including your boot sector but despite all these ways to secure your drive they don't really do much at all to keep your data safe once your computer is up and running remember how I said it decrypts your entire Drive instead many people who are serious about security especially if they have to leave their computers on 24/7 for whatever reason use some sort of file system level encryption that can encrypt and decrypt individual files on demand very useful if you don't want someone to randomly use your PC and pouring through all of your questionable downloads so let us know if you'd like to see a video on how to keep your files safe from prying eyes if you have to leave your window session unattended after all you definitely don't want everyone knowing it was you that created that piece of fanart fortune just really can't stop talking about are you coding for online easy payments if you're building a mobile app and searching for a simple payment solution check out Braintree brain trees vi0 sdk is just one small snippet of code and allows you to accept Apple pay Android pay PayPal then mo credit cards even Bitcoin and if something new pops up Braintree will support that too it's used by uber Airbnb github it's scalable integrating it into your app is as easy as just inserting a few lines of code so try out that sandbox and learn more about Braintree and get your first $50,000 in transactions fee free at Braintree payments dot-com slash tech quickie don't forget to let John know in the comments down below if you want to see a file system level encryption video like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it don't forget to get some - tech quickie check out links to the video description we've got a bunch of cool ones there they're interesting I'm sure if you get bored by those links you can check out channels over which is more interesting and if you're wondering what the hell that incessant whispering was in the background of this entire video say hi Linus Linus is doing the wine show so I'm gonna go do that now all right