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Do you lock your PC when you walk away?


Galacticruler

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I tend to put the laptops in sleep mode, but the desktop is always on, I just let the screen sleep to keep the light level low. I can't stand lights on in my apt at night. Especially those excessively bright blue LEDs that are on lots of electronics nowadays to make them look futuristic. I disassemble things and replace them with diodes if it's not hard, otherwise I'll just put tape over them.

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At home, no.

In work, always (I'm a sysadmin.) I've seen cases in linux where people set up scripts that check for their phone's bluetooth connection and lock the screen automatically when it's not present, but I've never quite gotten around to doing anything like that.

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I don't. I don't even have a password on my computer so there wouldn't be much point.

Honestly, there isn't a huge amount of point if you aren't encrypting your hard drive, not from a security standpoint anyway.

Last I heard, and I've got no indication it's changed, windows login's password storage and setup aren't really all that well protected. My understanding is that with physical access to the system, a bootable USB drive or CD, and the right software, you can break it wide open in a matter of minutes. At most.

The Bootable CD/USB isn't strictly speaking always a requirement: particularly on older versions of windows I'm led to believe you can do it within windows. I suspect the advent of UAC has limited this somewhat, but it's still nothing like robust.

The only thing it's really useful for is keeping people from using it casually. Anyone that seriously wants into it and has half a clue what they're doing can get in.

Drive encryption, on the other hand, is an entirely different critter. But frankly an EXTREMELY paranoid one for most purposes.

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Yeah getting access to the local filesystem is rather trivial as you say. The way I use my work laptop it's basically a dumb terminal, I'm more worried about what someone can do with my logged on credentials than what's on the hard disk tbh.

And drive encryption isn't just for the paranoid. Every single person has something they would like to keep private. What if your pc gets stolen, just to give the obvious example. And that should go for your mobile phone too. A lot of nasty stuff is happening at the moment that is very much being facilitated by the 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' mindset.

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Currently my only computer is my laptop, so I have a password set on since I carry it around at school. If I'm sitting somewhere and need to go to the bathroom or something, I'l usually just switch to the lock screen and go, else if I go for longer I'll switch it to sleep and take it with me. I know cracking it up is easier than it sounds, but at least it keeps away Sunday thieves, and if a real hacker wanted access to my hardware (which I doubt would happen, I really have nothing interesting on my laptop), he would crack open pretty much any defense system I could set up, so I don't bother.

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My laptop goes into sleep mode if KSP is not running. It takes a finger swipe on the built in scanner to reactivate it.

Best safety is to have all personal info encrypted with secure passwords and, or a fingerprint scanner and keep several backups elsewhere. It won't stop Homeland Security from snooping and storing everything on their cloud system, it will only keep the petty ID thief criminals out.

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In the office, always; I have access to too much private data to NOT lock up whenever I'm away. (Indeed I think my boss could write me up if I didn't lock my work station whenever I was absent.)

On my laptop, always but more for the battery savings than for security.

At home, no... the lock on my door serves adequately, though when I'm away I tend to "sleep" or shut down my desktop to save on power.

-- Steve

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