Seems Microsoft will never mollify its critics. Or at least the author of “The Hidden Shadow”. The brief 600-word narrative details a reporter getting skittish over government surveillance, and decides to encrypt his “major investigative piece” with TrueCrypt.

After deleting and repeatedly overwriting his unencrypted copies, the reporter finds himself served with a search warrant, and agents stream into the reporter’s home. One of the government lackeys uses Windows 7’s ability to save previous versions of folders to render the precaution useless:

He located the Documents folder, opened its Properties window, and clicked on the “Previous Versions” tab. Just as he thought, there were five previous versions of the folder – daily “shadow copies” made by the operating system as part of the System Restore mechanism. As these snapshots were prepared silently in the background and stored on a hidden disk volume, few users were aware of them. Agent Trallis was smiling. The good guys from Redmond were going to make his job easy again.

C’mon now Mr. author! I doubt anyone using TrueCrypt would remain unaware of Windows 7’s ability to save old copies of data—a feature that can be disabled by the way. Maybe the reporter in “The Hidden Shadow” was guilty of overconfidence in his counter-intelligence abilities, a narrow-mindedness that’s similar to the outlook of those who think anything Microsoft is necessarily bad.

In any case, this is a great heads-up for anyone using Windows, and with secrets to keep. Make sure to disable those Previous Versions!

Post from: The Gadget Blog