Where did Private Folders go?
Wow - yesterday, you could download "Microsoft Private Folders" (if you were attested as Genuine) from Microsoft's downloads site.
Today, it's gone.
There's a brief synopsis of the story at the Seattle P-I's site here - as usual, I'm patient enough to wait while you go and read it.
As a security engineer at a company that cares to manage its domain environment, I'm very comfortable with the argument that it's not something our users should be installing it - but it's a service, and our users are not local admins, so they can't install a new service.
What bothers me, though, is the argument that this is dangerous because "It also didn't offer a way to retrieve a forgotten password, raising the possibility of effectively losing access to files if people forgot the phrase they chose."
People, this is encryption.
That's what it's supposed to do.
You encrypt data that you would rather lose than leak.
You want to lose the data if it falls into the hands of people who don't know the password, even if that means you.
If you can't handle that, then encryption is not what you want - you want "protection", or "concealment", where there's a back-door for people with powerful tools, a little training and some time.