Our next live seminar will be held TOMORROW,  September 8, 2012.  Our topic will be "Come Rain or Come Shine!"  We'll start up our seminar series for the season with a look ahead: what software is just over the horizon; what new electronic devices are scheduled for release soon; and, how to avoid gloomy days of computer problems and intrusions.  This is going to be a packed-full two hours.  All for only $8 a person.  Please join us and bring a friend!

If you don't live in the Jensen Beach, Stuart, Port Saint Lucie area, you'll be able to watch the seminar at your computer but space is limited and you should register now by clicking HERE.  Here's all the important information you need regarding the seminar:

When:  Saturday, September 8, 2012  10:00 a.m.-12 Noon

Cost:  $8 per person

Where:  Trinity United Methodist Church, 2221 NE Savannah Rd. Jensen Beach, FL  34957

Come early: for coffee, juice, donuts and other "goodies."

Give-aways:  We'll have our usual computer-related stuff to give away at the end of the seminar so don't leave early!

See you there! 

Answer:  We've been hearing this question more and more recently so we thought it was time to touch on the subject here in the QOTW email.  We'll do our best to put our answer in terms everyone can understand! 

Computer encryption is based on cryptography which has been around since the ancient Greeks.  Just about everyone reading this has done some encryption in his or her lifetime.  Have you ever written a "secret message" when numbers represented letters in the alphabet?  For example, if I sent you this secret message:

21-3-10-13-20-3-1-13-11-14-19-18-3-16-17, you'd be able to know what it meant IF you had (or were able to figure out) the "key."  The key is what enables someone to convert this message from random numbers into a sentence.

Although none of us are old enough to remember the ancient Greeks, many reading this email are of sufficient age to remember how the US and the Allies in WWII worked round the clock to find the keys to break the secret messages sent during the war.

Well, computer encryption works basically the same only way more complicated.  That's a discussion we won't go into here because you'd be sleeping instead of reading!  Still, if you understand the basic idea, you know what's going on.

That answers the question of what encryption is but, should you be using it?  The answer to that is the Microsoft answer - it depends!

Many companies now demand that employees using laptops for work have their laptop fully encrypted.  Health and insurance industry-related companies are prime examples of this.  Since a company laptop might contain all your personal information, from Social Security number to your full medical history, companies can't take a chance on having that stolen, so they require full hard drive encryption. (A recent study by Kensington shows that a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, world-wide.)

That leads us to a secondary question: what is the difference between encryption and full encryption?  Full hard drive encryption simply means that you need a key to see any file on a hard drive.  But, if you don't want to encrypt the entire drive, you can encrypt just one file or one folder, etc.

Now, to the question of whether you should use encryption: obviously, if you work for one of the companies that we mentioned above, you may have no choice.  However, if you're not in that situation, then the answer depends on what's on the computer and how vulnerable the computer is.  If you take your laptop everywhere and you have data on it you wouldn't want anyone else accessing, then encryption might be right for you.

Next week, we're going to continue this topic. (I don't want to throw too much at you at one time!)  We'll explain what software you need to encrypt and we'll also tell you the pros and cons of encrypting.  Please don't miss next week's QOTW email!