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Today we can’t escape he fact that computers rule our lives. Every little piece of data about us is stored somewhere on a computer. If you think about that for a minute, and how valuable that information is, then you might think twice about leaving that stuff out in the open. You might think about protecting it.

In this episode I show you several different software solutions available to help protect your data from hackers and other bad guys by using encryption. I show you how you can protect individual files, and even how to encrypt your entire hard drive operating system and all.

Not only that but I show you how to encrypt your communications with others using email, instant messaging and VoIP (Voice Over IP). After this video you can be just like James Bond, and be a super secret person of mystery!

The software mentioned in this episode is:

• Microsoft EFS
• Truecrypt
• Microsoft Bitlocker
• Compusec
• Filevault2
• S/MIME
• PGP
• GnuPG
• GnuPG For Windows
• MacGPG
• Pidgin

  Image via Wikipedia

• Pidgin-Encrypt
• Zfone

I forgot to mention it in the video, but there are some really great Firefox and Thunderbird plugins that support GnuPG. The first one is called FireGPG which allows you to encrypt pretty much anything in your web browser. That’s great because you can send encrypted emails from Gmail from your browser without having to use a client. The second is Enigmail which plugs into Thunderbird to allow you to send and receive encrypted messages as well as manage your keys.

I also mentioned in the episode when talking about S/MIME, a free public certificate authority where you can get free SSL certificates for setting up S/MIME called StartSSL. I once blogged about StartSSL on Bauer-Power, and you can read that post here: (Bauer-Power Free SSL Certificates)

Finally, I mentioned setting up your own PGP key server for email encryption. You can read my Bauer-Power post on that as well here: (Bauer-Power PGP Key Server Ubuntu)

If you have any questions, about this, or know of any other free encryption software that you like to use, let us know in the comments!

del.icio.us Tags: how to,encrypt,file,hard drive,email,voip,im,instant messenger,pgp,ssl,s/mime Related articles

• Protecting your mails with GnuPG (furidamu.org)
• Browser plugin brings strong crypto to Google webmail (go.theregister.com)
• Passware Claims To Break FileVault 2 Encryption In 40 Minutes (essayboard.com)

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