Unencryptable folders!

Who said there was not enough comedy in slashdot ? Or is that unsayable?

Uh, yeah. I got as far as the wall of text (that outdoes anything I’ve ever written) that uses insane troll logic to link Linux to homosexuality (just search the page for “gay”, you’ll spot it).

Reminded me why I don’t read /.

Life’s too short for that sort of rubbish.

What interested me about the notion of unencryptable (as opposed to readonly ) folders is how Captain Dork is demonstrating the inadequacy of ordinary speech when it comes to IT. This inadequacy is very rarely addressed in technojournalism, probably because authors are unaware of it themselves. They use words like folder , encryption , etc without realising that these are very vague terms which do not refer to objects or processes about which ordinary language necessarily makes any sense. To encrypt a file means to read it as a sequence of bytes, to permute that sequence in concealed way, to delete the original file, and to save the permuted sequence back; that is the encrypted file . The very word file means different things: does the word indicate the contents, or do we include other attributes? the meaning can vary with the medium of storage. To some people a suggestion that a database, say, smells of fried onions is no more outlandish than any of the other jargon they do not understand.

What interested me about the notion of unencryptable

The interesting item about a notable portion of the ransomeware encryption instances is that they have no encryption capability but actually utilise the built in feature of recent Windows versions:- BitLocker.

i.e it does an all or nothing encryption of the disc but can’t encrypt anything at all if you already have BitLocker deployed on that disc.
It does leave you wondering how the extortionists propose to send you a key for the encryption when they don’t have access to your hardware to generate the key on…

You were expecting a two-way transaction…?

The very word file means different things:

Yes, I believe some people call it a rasp. ;-)

This isn’t really that unusual. Go to any specialised subject you care to name and you’ll hear a lot of phrases that might just be understandable but probably not the way it was intended.

Garter stitch?
Double axel and triple lutz?
Brake horse power?
Plain Bob Minor?
Bipolar junk tranny ¹?
Three car set?

And so on.

¹ I had a nightschool electronics teacher that used to shorten everything like this. Very annoying.

It does leave you wondering how the extortionists propose to send you a key for the encryption

You send the cash and…….that’s about the last you’d hear from them.

Until next time, sucker!