Basic tech facts a layman must know - Because we're stupid

[Fish-Eyed Fool]

If you really want to fuck someone put bitlocker on a drive of the ones computer. Make a usb part of the key and just hide the usb somewhere or keep it. If they ask you for help you can just plug the usb in.
Instant gratitude from someone who hates you or you can just get them fired for not meeting a deadline.

Be even more of a dick about it, just start the encryption on the whole drive while they still need to use the computer and leave them to suffer with it.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Where you put your computer is very important: a bad environment (too hot, too humid, too dusty) it's like giving a person constant junk food.

Advice for people who want to hire someone to make a website: check their portfolios or other jobs they've made. Yes, it's ok to ask what they've done before. Even newbies have some samples of what they've done while learning. If you notice many websites are similar to each other, they this person is likely just reusing or downloading the same template and just changing the colors. You can do that yourself as it's in fact very easy to install and set up a website. The hardest part of making a website is to make a good and original design.

 

[Irrelevant]

RAM "memory" CAN make your computer faster. Its not going to make your 2009 celeron run battlefield 4, it probably wont make your bootleg movies download faster, but if your computer runs like ass when you've got more than 3 windows open ram may help (unless you have a celeron from 2009, then its just your cpu is shit)

Since all RAM is DDR these days people have forgotten some of the benefits of actually setting it up as DDR such as it will make a huge difference to integrated graphics that share system memory. It's like a 10-20% FPS increase in games. So if you have a laptop or HTPC etc then 2x4GB is a lot better than 1x8GB for gaming. You'll often see people on budgets buy 1x8GB and plan to upgrade in the future but that's the wrong decision.

If you really want to fuck someone put bitlocker on a drive of the ones computer. Make a usb part of the key and just hide the usb somewhere or keep it. If they ask you for help you can just plug the usb in.
Instant gratitude from someone who hates you or you can just get them fired for not meeting a deadline.

I'm pretty sure there's a coming wave of people about to get caught out by Bitlocker in years to come.

The problem is that with new PCs with the required Secure Boot chips on the motherboard Bitlocker can be enabled by default (common with laptops, HTPCs, uncommon with self built). This is a problem because if your PC blows up you won't be able to recover your files from another computer. If you have this feature enabled (there will be an open padlock icon on your drives if this is the case) you should log into your Microsoft account and check that the Bitlocker recovery codes are there just in case.

I think it's actually a good feature but it's the enabled by default and not telling people about it that's going to be the problem.

 

[a_lurker]

I'm pretty sure there's a coming wave of people about to get caught out by Bitlocker in years to come.

It has already started. I've had a few customers with Dell laptops with bitlocker enabled from the factory, and the customers were completely unaware of the fact.

I got one where they spilled sugary coffee all over their laptop, corrosion everywhere so the board was fucked.
The TPM (trusted platform module) that stores then bitlocker key and auto unlocks the drive at boot was built into the motherboard .



I ended up telling them they needed to talk to drivesavers IDK if drivesavers was able to help them.

 

[Kiislova]

It has already started. I've had a few customers with Dell laptops with bitlocker enabled from the factory, and the customers were completely unaware of the fact.

I got one where they spilled sugary coffee all over their laptop, corrosion everywhere so the board was fucked.
The TPM (trusted platform module) that stores then bitlocker key and auto unlocks the drive at boot was built into the motherboard .



I ended up telling them they needed to talk to drivesavers IDK if drivesavers was able to help them.

Can a bitlocker installation be migrated if the motherboard has a dedicated TPM? Those addon boards many mobos have.

 

[a_lurker]

It may be a setting that can be changed (i know a TPM can essentially just be used for storing keys (rsa/gpg/etc), but I think most TPM's won't give up the key if the motherboard is different.
maybe if the motherboard is an identical model it may be possible, not 100% what TPM's use for verification (bios checksum/version, mobo sn,etc)

my thought was if the chip got fried due to a short even forensics recovery might not be able to recover the key.

It could be the customers "tech guy" in house had a recovery key or something, I thought it was kind of weird at the time for the system to have bitlocker enabled without the customer being aware, but i've seen it several times since on consumer machines running win10 pro on off the shelf dells without any sort of asset tag stickers or big dell support contracts tied to em.

Its a good thing that they have full disk encryption on machines that are relatively cheap and all, but doing so out of the box without any warning or doing something to indicate to the customer theres a very good chance your shit is absolutely fucking gone if you don't do proper backups is kind of shitty IMO.

 

[Irrelevant]

Can a bitlocker installation be migrated if the motherboard has a dedicated TPM? Those addon boards many mobos have.

I don't think it works because the modules become tied to the motherboard. It would defeat the purpose if you could just swap the module along with the drive.

You can put drives in a new computer by either inserting the recovery codes into the new TPM or using them to unlock the drive and then relock it with the new TPM.

If your Windows account is connected to a Microsoft account then the recovery codes are automatically uploaded to your account which is the only thing that could save you if you don't have a print out or USB copy.

I thought it was kind of weird at the time for the system to have bitlocker enabled without the customer being aware, but i've seen it several times since on consumer machines running win10 pro on off the shelf dells without any sort of asset tag stickers or big dell support contracts tied to em.

It happened to me when doing an OEM install of Windows 10. If all the features are enabled in the BIOS at the time of install then Bitlocker will be enabled during Windows installation without any prompts. My guess is that Windows has been this way for years but only more recently have all the required features been turned on in BIOSes by default rather than simply being optional power user features.

 

[Horrors of the Deep]

> Bitlocker
Guys, guys. Here's an idea: VeraCrypt. No hardware fuses to delet everything but actual honest to god virtual encrypted volumes. Portable too.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

The Internet :

It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.

 

[XYZpdq]

The "series of tubes" line gets way more shit than it ever deserved.

back to the topic:
Every tech person I've worked at was a lot happier to field ten stupid questions about resetting random shit than deal with what would have been the eleventh time and everything would have exploded.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

The "series of tubes" line gets way more shit than it ever deserved.

I always found the "It's not a big truck" part to be much funnier.