I read the article but am not smarter than before. I heard some time ago that windows does encrypt the drive but you need an active online account and the key will be saved online. So do people forget their online passwords and methods to recover that said account? I dont like m$ and am using linux, but people loosing their passwords, being uninformed about their systems and dont so backups is not the direct fault of the operating system.
Lose access to your MS account = lose your data forever. No warnings, no second chances. Many people learn about BitLocker the first time it locks them out.
It seems like they just got locked out of their Microsoft account (which stores the bitlocker key). Idk why they can’t just reset their password or if this article talks about the times where people couldn’t do that due to missing email access or maybe resetting the password deletes the bitlocker keys?
Either way though, the problem is that Microsoft is forcing encryption on everyone and not properly educating them on the consequences like “Backup your decryption key if you care about the data” in a way a normal user actually listens to.
I helped my sister deal with this. Bitlocker activated itself, the keys were in her account which she had access to. She had done everything properly but nothing worked to resolve it.
There’s countless forum posts on it since about 2021 if you go looking for it. None of the recovery processes worked so I reformatted and enabled bitlocker at the start. Next time I visit, she’s getting Linux Mint.
Fuck Microsoft. End users shouldn’t be expected to troubleshoot like that.
Setting up encryption has previously been an affirmative step wherein the user opted into being unable to access their data if they lose their password. Because of this users have the opportunity to back up their recovery key you know after they even learn what one is.
Having it happen on upgrade to an existing machine is inherently confusing and its easy to see how it could lead to data loss.
Bitlocker can be turned on without having an account on device iirc.
you need an active online account and the key will be saved online
Is there a legit reason for this? Why can’t they just encrypt the data with the password used to access the online account?
Because then you can’t change your password. Since you would have to decrypt all the hard drives that use windows with that account, and then encrypt them again with the new one.
This also means that if you forget your password you are fucked.
Typically an actual key is effectively just a very long pseaudorandom binary blob and the passphrase is just used to unlock the actual key. This means you can add a new key just by encrypting the actual key with the new passphrase
You can merge the choices and resolve the conflict: Microsoft users are dumb.
Found the Linux user.
Not Arc though, they would have said so
Maybe he uses a Mac?
(I use arch BTW)
Clearly you’ve never used a Mac. It wasn’t until 2024 that you could snap windows, they have a built in dark mode but the word processor that ships with their computer requires you to use a dark page template if you want black background/white text, and lord forgive you if you want to take a screenshot.
I think the vibe is kind of “works for grandma out of the box“, “someone in the small-but-mighty dev community made an [open-source] app for that”
Yeah frustrates me too but seeing it as a kind of culture would probably help me be less frustrated
Then Apple gets tiny bits of occasional flak for Sherlocking
Apple is almost the tale of two companies.
From the software usability perspective, they have the “it just works” reputation and that might be true if you’re doing really basic stuff. I’ve found both windows and Linux to be much more user friendly if you want to do mildly advanced things.
Their hardware is generally pretty solid but comes at a premium, especially once you start talking about increasing RAM/SSD capacity. I have both a MacBook pro M3 pro and a Snapdragon X Elite Lenovo Yoga slim 7x. The 7x can give great battery life, but is much more inconsistent in doing so. On the other hand, the 7x has an amszing 3k OLED screen, has a removable m3 SSD, and you can upgrade to 32 GB of RAM for around $100.
What I find interesting is that a large swath of developers have macs. I get it for some use cases (ARM emulation on ARM vs doing it on x86), but it seems like it’s a bit of a status symbol for others.
Thanks?
I didn’t expect Windows to become THAT shit. Well it’s good for Linux I guess.
It tech here. Yup sure does. For enterprise customers it gets saved in active directory anyway. But for home users, no way. For new devices I always create a local account and turn off bitlocker if it happens to be enabled. Most people don’t remember their email password, some don’t even remember their email address. So many times I’ve had to remove the drive of a dead PC or laptop and copy all their files off of it, because people just don’t make backups. But already happenend a few times now that a private customer got suckered into making a Microsoft account by one of those full screen pop ups. Probably set it up with an E-Mail some relative of theirs created just so they can download stuff of their Phones App store. And all their stuff just gets automatically encrypted. Bye Bye all the photos you had taken for the last 10 years. Thanks Microsoft.
Why isn’t this a thing for me? Because I skipped MS account creation? So many Win11 issues I read about on here and I get almost none with my vanilla ISO install.
Something broke.
I blame bitlocker.
What a stinker of an OS. Linux never looked so good
Its why I switched to Linux.
We use Linux by the way.
But I use arch BTW
I’ve been a Linux user since 2010 and I’m glad I developed that skillset
Same. Except my first pc was running DOS on a black and amber CRT…so switching to Linux even part time in 2010 was pretty easy for me to wrap my head around in terms of CLI stuff.
Since when is Bitlocker required? None of my files are encrypted, and I’ve been using 11 since it came out.
It automatically encrypts the drive only if admin has a Microsoft account (to backup the key on their cloud servers for easier
LEO accessdata recovery) and the PC is a prebuiltIf one of the condition is not met, the automatic ransomware isn’t enabled
Bitlocker encrypts your drive, not single files. Once the computer is booted up, it’s completely transparent to the user.
But my PC doesn’t even have a password. So how can my files be encrypted? I thought a password was manditory for file encryption to work.
You probably haven’t activate Bitlocker. Up until now it was optional with Windows. I would argue it isn’t necessary for a desktop computer at home, but you should seriously consider activating disk encryption for a laptop.
TPM keys, and without your knowledge
Every retail PC I’ve seen with win11 has bitlocker enabled. Screwed one over as they forgot their password…
Did you use Rufus? You can bypass Bitlocker. Or your machine does not have TPM 2.0 (which you can also bypass)…?
Yeah I used Rufus. Always do for every OS install. Explains it lol
Yeah it can happen, when you force people without their consent encrypting their data.
Forcing people is one thing, not telling them its a thing is completely different. Most Windows users dont even know their Windows has bitlocker enabled and those keys are out of their sight
Isn’t that what Iphone and Android already do?
The only phone manufacture that does that is Google with pixel. Any other phone is for my knowledge either “weakly” encrypted or not at all.
Still your Mobile OS isnt just upgrading and encrypting your SD card and main drive. Thats the point.
All devices launching with Android 10 and higher are required to use file-based encryption.
To use the AOSP implementation of FBE securely, a device needs to meet the following dependencies:
- Kernel Support for Ext4 encryption or F2FS encryption.
-
Keymaster Support with HAL version 1.0 or higher. There is no support for Keymaster 0.3 as that does not provide the necessary capabilities or assure sufficient protection for encryption keys. -
Keymaster/Keystore and Gatekeeper must be implemented in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to provide protection for the DE keys so that an unauthorized OS (custom OS flashed onto the device) cannot simply request the DE keys. - Hardware Root of Trust and Verified Boot bound to the Keymaster initialization is required to ensure that DE keys are not accessible by an unauthorized operating system.
https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/encryption/file-based?hl=en
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Yeah, nothing important. Just your banking apps, personal documents, photos, government apps, emails, all the services linked to your phone via mobile number, personal chats, work chats, 2fa codes, some other not important stuff. But at least it doesn’t have your games. Unless you play games on your phone, then you are fucked.
No you’re right, nobody has precious photos or videos on their phone 🙄
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You’re assuming they actually understand proper data protection procedures. You have a very misplaced amount of faith in the knowledge of the average person. Plenty of people just expect stuff to work and are horrified when they realize they’re not.
I saw that all the time when I worked in mobile phone sales/support.
This is a post about people who don’t understand encryption.
I backup my precious dick pics at several offsite locations by sending them to as many people as possible as often as possible.
8-
For many, a mobile device is their sole computer, and things of importance to them are stored on it.
Le banking app.
But THAT is recoverable EASILY, not like lost forever if you dont recover data from that phones storage.
Something like OTP are rather more important.
Well, I wasn’t talking about recovery, but need for encryption.
Android I think just uses same credentials you use to unlock account, at least I am not aware of any recovery key. And you are prompted for credentials from time to time so it is harder to forget. I use fingerprint as main unlock + pattern and I have to enter pattern roughly once a week I think.
On Windows if you set up Windows Hello (fingerprint or PIN usually), you are not reminded to enter password afterwards so eventually you can forget it. And if you do not know your password and cannot recover account, you will not be able to retrieve BitLocker recovery key. So fix to this problem could be another annoyance to users if it would be implemented as Android does it.
Huh … I never noticed. Probably because my phone OS never failed to boot, requiring me to pull data off the HDD directly.
Samsung is notorious for this.
One major difference is that it is so much easier to lock yourself out of the desktop TPM chip compared to mobile device security chips because they’re not tightly coupled.
and phones make you use your unlock pin often, so people are forced to remember it. on the other hand windows lets you use a short pin instead of your full account password pretty much forever which results in people forgetting the password completely.
That isnt even the part it is encrypted, the TPM encryption is either “Automatic” or over a password (any length) on startup so far i know it from my work with Bitlocker (tpm 2.0) on windows 10. Idk if this is different on windows 11.
Different threat model and usage scenario. See the spilled milk comment.
I had a small Win11 machine that I now have Ubuntu on. Win11 wouldn’t let me use the whole disk because of the BitLocker bullshit. I had to dig through the menus and disable it then wait hours for it to finish decrypting. Fuck Microsoft. I’m proud to say me and my GF dont have a single Microsoft product in our home, and I’m keeping that way.
Why couldn’t you just format the entire drive with the linux installer?
I could only format the free space not used by the windows partition.
I’ve decided to switch to Linux come october. I have some reasons I wanna wait as long as I can, but come october I’m leaving Windows behind.
Get started early so you have time to acclimate and address issues. You are going to hate it if you urgently need your computer for something and something unexpected happens.
I’ve decided to switch my gaming PC to Linux…a few weeks ago.
No ragrets. My games run faster, I no longer need extra shit to make Windows work the way I want it to work, and I can remote into it however I want without running into artificial roadblocks.
If you’re new to Linux, I suggest at the very least starting to learn now. If you have a spare device you can install it on, an old laptop or something, dual boot on your existing machine or use Virtualbox…Start learning now, while you still consider Windows an option.
My own journey to the Linux platform included several instances of the following scenario:
I need to get something done. It’s simple, in Windows 7 I know how to do it in seconds. It’s so simple that I don’t know the words for it, just the thing to click to do it. But it doesn’t work that way in Linux, even the vocabulary is different, and you need this done right now because you’re working on something and you don’t have time to stop and learn this right now.
Boot into Windows, get your job done and turned in. Then look up how to do it in Linux later. Eventually you stop hitting that wall.
You’ve decided you have seven months. I’d get to it.
They’re making an increasingly compelling case for me to switch to Linux.
Surprise, surprise.
Forcing security measures onto someone who doesn’t understand them or know how to recover their data if something goes wrong is a bad idea.
I’m of the opinion that encryption based security should be compartmentalized. IE, an encrypted folder, or “safe” app. Safes in housing are already a concept that is already commonly known so it would be natural to extend a safe into the digital realm. This would also help in the idea that safes are locked with a key, so if the user loses their keys, whatever is inside the safe, might as well be lost.
Now if EVERYTHING is a safe, (always on encryption). People will never known the difference. Its a dangerous type of security that is likely to be more a loss than a benefit.
You are arguing for selective encryption, but I can’t really find any technical argument in your comment.
Whether we are speaking of encryption at transit or rest, there’s a general consensus that encrypting everything is best in every way except possibly performance for select cases.
For example, it allows hiding (meta)data about the really important bits, and with computers it’s really difficult to tell which bits of (meta)data could be combined to abuse. Tampering is a consideration as well.
For most folks they could just write down their encryption passphrase in a secure location with the rest of their papers since 99.9% of the risk is thieves stealing their laptops. For most folks the biggest secure item they have is the one they use constantly their browser and all the passwords it stores to all their services. You know the thing they use constantly.
A compartmentalized approach makes sense when the laptop contains really vulnerable data like laptops which have been stolen with bunches of client data on it or a journalists communication with confidential sources etc etc. In that case you STILL want to encrypt the whole thing but you want to separately encrypt the really important stuff with a different key so that every time you open your laptop to watch cat videos on youtube you aren’t also unlocking all the data you will have to tell your companies users you lost.
This is already looking like Microsuck is asking for a Windows 11/BitLocker based Class Action Lawsuit against them for this data lose blunder, and hopefully get their currently CEO fired.
