You mean that thing everyone knew about since the authorities derailed open-source TrueCrypt and forced them to message their users that they should migrate to BitLocker?
It’s true that the TrueCrypt developers retired and said that commercial packages like BitLocker were finally good enough and available enough that they didn’t feel compelled to maintain TrueCrypt. I remember that. I think it’s plausible that Microsoft has (or has provided to someone) back-door access to BitLocker, but I don’t remember any hint that the TrueCrypt developers had been coerced; have you got something you can link to?
Certainly at the time there was talk of coercion, there was talk the developers had been asked to put in a backdoor, had refused and then been encouraged to cease and desist their work on TrueCrypt and provide written recommendation of BitLocker, the wording of which did not seem to be their own. But people like conspiracies, maybe the authors did just move on, and if that was encouraged it probably was not as sinister as suggested. Security and privacy will always be duking it out.
In spite of the fact that they never happen and that government mass surveillance isn’t a thing and hasn’t been exposed repeatedly for decades and that we all know they have not been aiming to do this exact thing for the better part of a century and that they are genuinely evil and literally never prove themselves to be over and over and over.
There is that, but in a more general sense I think people like conspiracies because they have a deep need to believe that there is an intelligent direction to human affairs, even if it is malign, and that the world is not actually chaotic and uncontrolled at the largest scale. It stems I suppose from infancy when even while we pushed at them we needed to know the unfathomable rules our parents set came from a better understanding of things than was available to us.
This take I buy. My grievance is like, with people who lambast “conspiracy theorists” (because apparently that’s a term for a fucking social identity we actually have to use in 2026) fall in the same trap as those who drop Dunning-Kruger effect- as we all know we all think we are smarter than average, and dumb people especially believe this, alas, just because you think you’re smarter than the average doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong.
Just because you believe in a conspiracy doesn’t mean there isn’t one. There are informed opinions. They are rare, and hard to come by, but still. Technically correct = best correct.
These days, if you’re not on Windows you can use luks or just zfs with encryption enabled. Code is open and can be audited by anyone. But yes, VeraCrypt to my knowledge is also still a viable option.
You mean that thing everyone knew about since the authorities derailed open-source TrueCrypt and forced them to message their users that they should migrate to BitLocker?
There’s an open-source successor to TrueCrypt called VeraCrypt. For that matter, as far as I know, one can still download the last version of TrueCrypt. It hasn’t been disappeared.
It’s true that the TrueCrypt developers retired and said that commercial packages like BitLocker were finally good enough and available enough that they didn’t feel compelled to maintain TrueCrypt. I remember that. I think it’s plausible that Microsoft has (or has provided to someone) back-door access to BitLocker, but I don’t remember any hint that the TrueCrypt developers had been coerced; have you got something you can link to?
Certainly at the time there was talk of coercion, there was talk the developers had been asked to put in a backdoor, had refused and then been encouraged to cease and desist their work on TrueCrypt and provide written recommendation of BitLocker, the wording of which did not seem to be their own. But people like conspiracies, maybe the authors did just move on, and if that was encouraged it probably was not as sinister as suggested. Security and privacy will always be duking it out.
In spite of the fact that they never happen and that government mass surveillance isn’t a thing and hasn’t been exposed repeatedly for decades and that we all know they have not been aiming to do this exact thing for the better part of a century and that they are genuinely evil and literally never prove themselves to be over and over and over.
There is that, but in a more general sense I think people like conspiracies because they have a deep need to believe that there is an intelligent direction to human affairs, even if it is malign, and that the world is not actually chaotic and uncontrolled at the largest scale. It stems I suppose from infancy when even while we pushed at them we needed to know the unfathomable rules our parents set came from a better understanding of things than was available to us.
This take I buy. My grievance is like, with people who lambast “conspiracy theorists” (because apparently that’s a term for a fucking social identity we actually have to use in 2026) fall in the same trap as those who drop Dunning-Kruger effect- as we all know we all think we are smarter than average, and dumb people especially believe this, alas, just because you think you’re smarter than the average doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong.
Just because you believe in a conspiracy doesn’t mean there isn’t one. There are informed opinions. They are rare, and hard to come by, but still. Technically correct = best correct.
These days, if you’re not on Windows you can use luks or just zfs with encryption enabled. Code is open and can be audited by anyone. But yes, VeraCrypt to my knowledge is also still a viable option.
Well, there’s a big difference between “knowing” something and knowing something (i.e proof your intuition is right).