DiskCryptor, a useful drive / volume encryption application for Windows may have disappeared after an 8-9 year run. Here's the facts: (1) Website has been offline for more than 24 hours. It was last cached by google on May 17th. https://diskcryptor.net/wiki/Main_Page (2) The last stable release was almost 2 years ago (July 2014). DiskCryptor was not compatible with bootable WDE on newer UEFI hardware. This obstacle may have discouraged the developer. (3) The anonymous developer stopped participating in user forums shortly after the last release. Has yet another encryption tool bit the dust?
Yes, I noticed that it was down a few days ago too. I had been waiting to see if it came back up. I find it somewhat unexpected that it went down, because the DiskCryptor forums were active, and posters who appeared to be very knowledgeable about DiskCryptor, such as Alfonsino and Italick, were posting on the forum only a couple of weeks ago. Although as Tadoussac rightly says, the last stable release was in July 2014, I didn't see any announcement that DiskCryptor was going to be discontinued. Regarding the UEFI / GPT issue, the advice a warning, really, rather than advice - given was to disable UEFI, and enable BIOS if at all possible, because using DiskCryptor with the UEFI boot method would render your computer unusable. I am sure that I also remember a senior poster on the forum saying that UEFI was insecure, and that this was the reason that DiskCryptor would never support UEFI booting.
I am not an industry insider, but I wonder how long hardware manufacturers will support both the newer UEFI/GPT boot and the legacy mode (BIOS) over the long term. I believe that now dead TrueCrypt was also incompatible with UEFI/GPT. Its successor VeraCrypt is just now testing a compatible beta version - worth keeping an eye on if your PC can't use BIOS. The sudden, unannounced disappearance of DiskCryptor is a mystery to me too.
I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that support for BIOS is dwindling fast. I currently only have BIOS. DiskCryptor would never use UEFI, because, of security vulnerabilities, I have read this said in their forum, I am not technically savvy enough to know whether they were / are right, but I know of one Scandanavian company, with a very good reputation, marketing very sophisticated encryption, which is currently offering UEFI boot encryption. I don't know why this company would sell products compatible with UEFI boot if the Scandanavian company felt it was insecure, and I don't feel myself to be technically literate enough to understand the problem - but there might be a problem there with UEFI / GPT.
I have an older BIOS laptop too, but I think the industry migration to UEFI is inevitable. DiskCryptor site is back up again today (May 24). No explanation of why it was down can be found on the website or in their user forums. I downloaded a copy of the installer for safekeeping. My confidence in this project has evaporated - and I'll be moving on to VeraCrypt, GnuPG, or (gulp!) MS BitLocker.
there will be a point in time that UEFI is all there is, but that is years away. e.g. we have had 64bit cpus for a decade now and still 32bit is not dead.
