Sadly, the headline is somewhat amiss.

Researchers have actually figured out a way to steal data from hard disks which are encrypted in full by operating systems’ resident protection schemes. In other words, I don’t believe this method would work on file/container encryption with passphrases (which happens to be my personal preference).

It is the last day of 2006. What better time for predictions…

From the experts:

• The security threats that will bind us in 2007

• If you are more inclined to make (or lose) money next year, here’s “the take” from the Washington Post

Spamroll says:

• Spam will not end in late January (and Bill Gates will remain mum thereafter)

• Some spyware companies will be getting sued again by February, while the rest change their company name
• The government will quit buying consumer data in March, after determining that who is buying TMX Elmo is in no way correlated with who has a tendency to be a terrorist
• Everyone will be backing up their hard drives by April, but only if external hard drives are free
• They’ll be encrypting them by May, because everyone will be running hacked versions of Vista
• We’ll all take the summer off, since phishers already do
• Back-to-school will piss off millions of children, and not much else
• October will be much like September
• Telcos will implement IPv6 for Thanksgiving, and everyone on the internet will know who everyone else is, once and for all (with the exception of MacBook Pro users, which are already being tracked via heatsink)
• We’ll get a ton of self-serving predictions for 2008, a week early at Christmas

Happy New Year!

UPDATE: Sarcasm does work - someone is thinking about backup.

VMWare creates a virtual drive on a machine to run other operating systems. Set up the drive, install the operating system of choice, launch, and run….easy. But can VMWare be used to run an operating system wholly contained on another fixed drive (meaning hard drive) installed on the same system?

If someone knows the answer to this, including how to do it, let me know. You can read about my dual operating system laptop under Open Source Love if you can’t understand why anyone would want to do this.