Ask Leo! #589 – Security Questions, Bouncing Email, Ignored Email, and more…

Good article, but much more useful to let us know WHAT to turn off.

There's no simple answer. It's different for everyone and every computer.

I just wanted to add that a way I've described RAM and HDDs to people in the past is analogous to a library:

Think of the library building as a hard disk. The buiilding may be huge like a warehouse or small like a shop - but it's empty until you actually put books in it.

Think of your programs and data files as the reference books or essays and dissertations which would be stored in the library. If you have a lot of such books, your library building will need to be large (like a warehouse) rather than small (like the shop) to hold them all.

Think of RAM as the library tickets. If you have only two library tickets, you may only get 2 books out to have open on your desk at any one time (analagous to only having a small amount of RAM). You could have a vast warehouse with all those books stored in them but if you can only have two at a time, rather than reading from a reference instruction book or writing an essay into an exercise book, you are going to have an awful lot of getting up and down going back and froth through security between the study area and the book repository itself if you only have 2 tickets! If you have 8 tickets or better 20 tickets then you can have multiple reading books and multiple notebooks open on your desk in the study area at any one time saving you having to spend a lot of time going back and forth to and from the book storage area in the warehouse.

So to recap. The hard disk is like the physical building; the programs and other files you have are like the content of the building (a big building doesn't mean it has anything in it) and the RAM is the amount of items you can get on the desk you site at when your read fromor write into what you actually keep stored in the building itself.

And Leo - your stuff is almost always very informative and easy to digest - keep up the good work.... And I hope my analogy will prove helpful to the bemused and lost in the fog! Paul Faulkner

'You're trusting that the key will always and only be owned by the right people.' - Indeed, and this is the - no pun intended - key issue. Create a backdoor and sooner or later - likely sooner - the mechanism to unlock that door will become public domain: it'll either be discovered by hackers or leaked/sold by an internal source. Adding an extraordinary access mechanism to a system invariably makes that system less secure (remember the CALEA/DoD phone systems debacle?). Or, to put it another way, if you create a backdoor for the good guys, it's almost inevitable that a bad guy will step through it.

Solid encryption is absolutely essential: it's what makes things like online banking and commerce possible. Break encryption, and you break the internet.