At 3:55 AM 11/10/1996, tom bryce wrote:
Here's a question: if one were designing for oneself a secure personal computer system, for use in, say, word processing, spreadsheet, communications, the usuals - what system would one purchase and how would one set it up?
For example, on the Mac I would envision this as the ideal system:
(1) Get a power mac (2) Partition the hard drive into two partitions: install the system folder on one and a copy of CryptDisk make this the startup partition and make it READ ONLY with aliases to folders you want to be modiyfable (such as Eudora Folder in the sys folder) place these folders on the encrypted partition (3) Completely fill the other partition with a CryptDisk file so there is no room for other stuff to be written. Adjust the partition size if needed. (4) Install a screen saver (such as shareware Eclipse) that will password lock the screen after a few minutes of inactivity, and set CryptDisk to dismount the external partition after a few minutes of inactivity (or longer)
Watch out for the clipboard which appears to be stored as a file in the system folder. Unfortunately, it has to be a real file - aliases not allowed. This makes it harder to have a read only system folder and, of course, every time you cut and paste something you leave a ghost on the disk for an undefined length of time. It's hard to work on the Mac without using the clipboard. I would love to know a workaround for this. Peter Hendrickson ph@netcom.com