It has been quite a journey, this BitLocker debacle. A quick recap: you may remember from two months ago (see issue 344, p120) that I couldn’t access any data from a Windows 11 machine due to BitLocker encryption. To the best of my knowledge, I had never activated BitLocker, nor did I have access to the code that would release it.
There’s a certain amount of mea culpa coming up, but bear in mind that I have enough spare laptops in an almost-ready state that I could afford to throw the BitLockered brick into a corner, rant about it in this column, and then get on with my life by picking up a trusty ThinkPad X1 Carbon and heading out of the door. In practice, while my little stack of X1s are from the relatively early days when battery life was sacrificed in favour of svelte casing, there’s little I can do better on a 2023 laptop than I can on an X1.
With just one important exception: hotel Wi-Fi. I have spent far too much time in hotel rooms trying to work out what combination of hardware and configuration would actually give me internet access. This is mostly controlled by the hotel’s access point, which are often leading-edge in terms of the freedom given to website designers to big up the hotel brand and its telco affiliations.
Now consider what happens when the access point wants to hook the SIM card in the iPhone it thinks you’re carrying. Why? So the provider can
