On Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:36:26 +0100 Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk allegedly wrote:
Another thing worth mentioning that rarely comes up.
If you really are *that* paranoid how do you know that a "secure erase" command built into the drive firmware is really doing its job and not just hiding the data from you after it is run ? I mean if you can't inspect the code or physically verify what is actually on the platters after then it could be just setting a flag on the drive to say "return nonsense from now on" and you'd be none the wiser. In that respect I feel it offers less assurance than using tools like dban.
<black helicopter alert>
And I recall reading something similar recently which postulated that given the current recording density of disks it would be perfectly feasible for manufacturers to have built in "secure mirror" partitions on the disks which would hold copies of all "deleted" data. Such partitions would only cough to their existence when prodded by those with the requisite secret incantation. :-)
So - short of total physical destruction you have no real assurance that your porn browsing history is just that - history.
</black helicopter alert>
Mick ---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------