Hey, now that is pretty cool! Hot on the heels of a report suggesting that some 280 million people around the world have suffered some kind of data loss (through theft or incompetence mainly) during the last three years, Dell just might have the answer.

It would appear to be shipping laptops which can, quite literally, encrypt themselves. Well, OK, encrypt the data that is stored upon them so making it useless to anyone who steals said machine or buys it second hand on eBay.

The laptops, which have yet to be priced, will feature Seagate Momentus drives that have full disk AES 128-bit government grade encryption options. This is really cool, because the encryption key never has to depart from the drive itself which means that even relatively complex cold boot attacks are ineffective at gaining access to the data stored within. Dell, it seems, will be coupling drives with McAfee software which allows for easy user management of the self-encrypting systems via user policy application.

Maybe someone should let Gordon Brown know?