Mike, On Sunday 04 September 2005 09:56, Mike wrote:
On September 4, 2005 10:30 am, Randall R Schulz wrote: ...
As for swap, you'd have to write junk to the partition on shut down.
How?
Just copy /dev/null to the swap area.
Who are you defending your data from?
Defending? I'm under no delusions that any data I have would attract such attention. The only thing I have of value is a credit card (number), and that's more easily, reliably, safely and efficiently accessed in a variety of other ways that don't involve breaking into my home and stealing the hard drives from my computer.
Data recovery experts are able to undo several writes to a disk, which is why wipe disk programs do several passes, and agencies that are concerned about loss of data grind up the disk afterwards rather than take the chance that someone may have improved the technique to read wiped data.
Even assuming this claim is valid, why on earth would anybody go to these lengths? And does anyone ever stop to apply logic to this claim? Do you think this retained data is neatly layered so you can distinguish the remnants from each of those previous write cycles? But by all means lets get paranoid here. We're all in possession of information that is of such immense value that not only do we need iron-clad vaults capabable of deflecting armed terrorists and nuclear attackes, encryption that will defend against quantum computers and above all, the ability to protect us from science fiction scenarios such as those seen on TV shows like CSI. Get real. Wipe the swap space once and forget about it.
There have also been rumors that they can read data from old ram, and the EM leaking from your screen can be read from across the street.
I've got some rumors for you. Sheesh. Randall Schulz