Yesterday's article about a Windows XP vulnerability brought a bumper post bag. It seems that Windows XP hacks might be used in plenty of places already...
How lame can you guys get in running this story this way instead of bashing the stupidity of the first story?
It's not true that you cannot do this if the CD did ask for a password. And it's also not true that you cannot do this with 2K and an install CD. It's trivial to get around the same thing in 2K also. Here is one simple way - just install another parallel install of 2K and boot into that as Admin, then you have access to all un-encrypted files on the other install. So the CD protection is nothing at all (whether 2K or XP).
Most likely MS realised how futile all this was and made the XP CD simpler to do troubleshooting. So how is this an XP specific issue? I hope you realise all this and put it across in the right way in your story. If you have physical access to a machine there is only one proven way to protect data (encrypt files) and XP/2K makes that trivial to do using Properties->Advanced->Encrypt contents ... That uses public key cryptography and as long as you protect and save your key no one can easily steal your data (try seeing how easy it is to do something like that in Linux). No matter what whiz bang OS you have, your data can be stolen with physical access to your machine unless you encrypt files.
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