Food for thought?

[Styles-N-Heidi]

What would you do if your secret files got out? For all of you discreet people that have secret, private photos of yourselves, others, or play dates on your computer, here is an interesting scenario for you.

Last month I got a call from one of our super sexy, very regular, borderline poly playmates while I was at work. She was frantic, but once I got her calmed down enough to understand what she was trying to tell me the message became clear. "My house was broken into." So I asked her what was stolen. The thieves went in through a window and left through the door carrying a gun, some jewelry, their digital camera, a thousand dollars in cash, and a laptop. As soon as she said laptop my mind went into overdrive. They had every picture we had ever taken with the couple. Now honestly we are not very discreet. Our life is an open book to most. We are both professionals and we don't go around wearing t-shirts that proclaim we are swingers but everyone knows, and that's fine with us. However these guys are very discreet so my heart went out to them. Let's face it folks most of the time when someone commits a crime against you it's someone you know and while you may not be at all concerned about their opinion you never know what damage a devious person could do with that kind of knowledge.
Since then I have been checking out some encryption software to lock or hide personal folders. I would also suggest storing private files on an external hard drive. I have heard swingers say before,"I am the only person that uses the computer so there is no need for a heightened security." and that has always made sense to me, until now. You never think aout things until it's to late, and you never think it could happen to you. Our friends live in a great neighborhood and it happened to them.
Just some food for thought if you are not worried about protecting yourselves so much, stop and think about the other people with sexually explicit files on your computer. It could happen to you.

-Styles

[DandS]

Good post styles. Here's something to think about though if you go with encryption software (I use it). Make sure you have a good back up somewhere. I had my entire hard drive encrypted and then when the boot sector of my HD went bad I had a real problem. I took the hard drive out and was able to cable it up so it looked like an external storage device but I couldnt get to any of the data because it was encrypted.

I went out a bought an 8 gig memory stick for about $100. Its about the size of my thumb, plugs into the usb port and I can store all of my private information on it. Its so small you can hide it anywhere.

Di

[charms123]

Yea, hubby did that with a thumb drive. then he lost it. or better, it was stolen. In a public place. We nearly shit as some of our banking statements were on it. Hey, I keep the drive with me, no one is going to get it. Yea right.

We changed all our passwords, bank accounts etc, and got SS# monitoring. We sweated for a few days. He went out and bought a SanDisk 4GB with encryption. Now if its stolen, who cares.

Oh, he had maybe 100 pictures of mostly me, in mostly nothing! Will they get out? I am sure they will. Will a family member run across them? Maybe. Will it be embarrassing? Yes. Will my kids, husband or I die over them getting out? FUCKING NO!

Put it all in perspective. Once you have no control anymore, let it go!

good luck and let us know what happens.

N

[havefuninsun]

We, too, use thumb drives to store private information (from budget/banking data to naughty pictures) and the data is encrypted. We also have backups.

It is scary!

[ncmd_couple]

It all depends on your storage requirements. I'm a shutterbug and backing up my photo folders takes seven DVDs. That won't work with thumb drives.

S

[sweet_tna]

Originally Posted by charms123

Put it all in perspective. Once you have no control anymore, let it go!

Excellent point! Styles, it's a real shame that happened to your friends (and by proxy, you). And you raised some good points too, about security of information. Hopefully, your friends won't be discovered, or will at least weather the storm o.k.

As for us making things more secure, I use a memory stick and hope for the best.

=)

[Chris&Amelia]

That concern has been hanging over our heads. Unfortunately, I am in something of a "high-profile" occupation, and I have had people approach me as far south of Allentown (about an hour and half away) to say "Hi! Long time no see!" It's a little unnerving to say the least.

But, if my "cover" was blown... oh well. Several of our vanilla friends know of our "hobby". Also, one of my co-workers knows as well, but only because I told her (I found her SLS profile one day and I felt guilty "holding" that secret over her head, even if she didn't know that I knew.) My predecessor in my position was, oddly enough, also in the Lifestyle and quite open about it, so if my boss found out, I think he would just shake his head and wonder "why me?"

I'm pretty sure my friends (or at least the male ones) would most likely say something along the lines of "You are the luckiest guy we know."

What we're really concerned about is our families. I'm fairly certain that my brother and father probably couldn't care less, my mother is deeply religious and it would "break her heart" that we were "damned to burn in hell". I can see many arguments and attempts by her to "save us" if she found out.

Her mother is also very religious, and I'm sure her reaction would be... unpleasant.

I keep a stash of "regular" porn on my computer, in the spots where you would expect to find it. Our Lifestyle-related material is stored in a hidden, encrypted directory, using military-grade encryption. I regularly clean our computer's cache (especially on our laptops). Also, our laptops are set to automatically delete cache files, cookies, and browsing history when Firefox is shut down.

Yes, there is always a chance that somebody can still get our secret data through other means, such as using some serious computing power to "brute-force" their way though the encryption, or sitting outside my house and intercepting wireless packets between our laptops and our router (after they break the router's WPA2 encryption.) But if they go through all that trouble, they deserve it.

[JustAskJulie]

Originally Posted by ncmd_couple

It all depends on your storage requirements. I'm a shutterbug and backing up my photo folders takes seven DVDs. That won't work with thumb drives.

S

That's where portable Harddrives come in handy. I got an 80gig for like $60 a year ago, it's no bigger than my hand.

[ViSexual]

Good post!

And, don't forget that you can't completely 'delete' from a computer unless you really know what you're doing.

We had a tower go completely out and Bestbuy, for a small fee, captured all our info for us.

So, be careful giving away an old computer.

Also, be considerate to your friends. We had exchanged lots of explicit photos with friends, and as much as I'd love to have kept them, we enjoyed them a few times, then deleted them.

Photos of us, in any attire or position, can be explained easily. If they're of other couples we know on our computer or us with others, not so easy at all!

Hey there! Been lurking around this site for a long time, but being since we haven't "gotten there" yet, haven't been inclined to sign up and post. This is a great site though and have learned a ton from all the great people here. Anywho, to the reason for my anonymous post, and Julie, if you could merge this into that thread somehow....

I felt compelled to share some of my computer geekness with everyone regarding the question to securing personal info. One thing I wanted to share is the use of WinRAR. It's a compression tool and it uses AES encryption (I believe) and is really pretty secure way of locking files from would be snoopers. The only way to crack a password on it is by brute force which can take a very long time depending on the length and complexity of the password. A combination of character, letters and numbers also makes a password stronger. Anything over 10 or 12 characters long I would suggest. Some examples of passwords, "buffy" (weak password, doesn't take long to crack), "buffy1234" (ok password, would take a couple days to at least to break), "mynam31sbuffy!6543" (great password, would take a LONG time to break that one). As with anything it can be broken, but it would take someone with a lot of determination and skill to do it. I've attempted to crack a long password rar file before, it wasn't gonna happen.

To address wiping a hard drive to eliminate left over data that you can't see. The best way to do it is to hook the drive up to another computer as a second drive, format it, and then fill it with junk data. Large video files work best just keep copying them untill the drive is full. Then take a bunch of little files like some program directory with a bunch of little supporting files in it and copy it over and over until the hard drive is stuffed. This will ensure that almost all of the original data on the hard drive is overwritten by junk. If you don't have that ability to hook the hard drive up to another computer just delete all you can off the drive (reinstalling the OS would be a good way to start) and then do the above steps. To be extra sure you can delete the junk data and repeat the process a couple times. After that it would be real unlikely to recover any of the original data.

Now, for the extra computer literate among you there is another method. Something I've never used before but have heard is really good. There's an opensource program called truecrypt that will create a hidden encrypted partition on a drive. It even has a dual layer password protection on it. We're talking super secret spy stuff here, but I personally haven't taken the time yet to play with it. I would post a link, but I don't know Julie's policy on that.

Anyway, I hope that information helps. For the record, I'm not real fond of the idea of using flash drives or small media to secure files. External hard drives are better IMO for such things. Harder to loose track of and still small enough to get in a safe or hide somewhere.

Stay safe and stay informed, Cheers!