Re: Get a grip!
Of course there is a disadvantage to using AES256. Processing time for one, and program (application) size for another. To prevent casual snooping by friends & relatives a simple XOR is sufficient for almost all cases. Anyone who needs to hide their terrorist plans from GCHQ forensics should be using something that has been *proven* to have a high grade encryption standard and no backdoors rather than place any reliance on any advertised claims by the application vendor. If a person cannot educate themselves sufficiently to know how to vet an encryption application and also learn about other potential leaks from their OS and storage technology, they should not be handling highly sensitive or illegal data without guidance from someone who can. Heck, mobile phones store data on flash memory, which means that any data that was ever in the device will almost certainly be recoverable from that Flash after it has been encrypted no matter how secure the encryption algorithm, because data in Flash memory is usually not erased or overwritten until the memory device becomes full - it's a lot harder to get rid of old data on a Flash drive than on a conventional HDD, because sectors are dynamically renumbered so the logical sector you are over-writing is not the same physical sector that the data was originally written to, and an application probably does not have access to the physical sectors, because only the hardware Flash controller can address the memory by its physical address. (Also applies to USB memory sticks in a conventional PC).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
