A few days ago, someone mugged one of our tech writers outside her apartment building. She had a laptop computer that was company property, and which contained among other things, an application the company licenses to registered users at a quarter-million dollars a pop, in a release-candidate version that we're not going to be sending out to customers until it's been in testing and doc for another couple of weeks. And all the docs for it (up to that date), And a list of license keys corresponding to various configurations. These license keys are decrypted by the software so it can find out what it's authorized to do on behalf of the user - of course the QA department and Documentation group need a wide variety of them -- including some that would sell to paying customers for upwards of a million dollars. So, there was a board meeting, and some board members and major investors waxed wroth. Odds are, the drive got wiped within hours of being swiped. Odds are, the laptop is sitting somewhere in a pawnshop and the damage to the company has been limited to the cost of a single laptop computer. But slightly longer odds have a much MUCH higher cost to the company: if the mugger realized what the hell he had in his hands, he could match my annual salary by selling it to one of our competitors. If the mugger was hired in the first place by one of our competitors, then... that's not good either. And of course, if he's willing to face a bit dicier risk profiles, and has criminal confederates inside some Fortune 500 companies, he can track our sales and marketing force, and try to undercut us with pirate versions of our software and potentially cost us millions in sales. These are in order of decreasing probability, and the last, while only very remotely likely, is pretty disturbing. And I was sitting there, listening to all the worst-case scenarios, and thinking, "Damn, I wish we had laptops with solidly encrypted hard drives." Enter the key, boot the machine. Wrong key, hard drive appears to be full of random garbage. Encryption handled in the BIOS. The BIOS password protection is garbage for protecting hard drive contents - the hard drives are unencrypted and can just be popped out and stuck into a different laptop of the same model. Bear