John Andersen wrote:
On Monday 06 December 2004 06:50 am, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
This isn't sufficient for a sufficiently determined and resourceful adversary. E.g. the intelligence services of major countries and corporations.
Aw Jeeze, that this crap again....
Nobody want source code that badly. Why does this bugaboo of national security heroic efforts to painstakingly recover a disk's content bit by bit always rear its head when ever someone talks about erasing a drive?
There isn't one person on this list that has ever seen this done to a drive written over by normal software. Its theoretically possible in a closed lab to recover known contents, but in actual practice it just can't be done. Was that stray bit set by the most previous write, or the second most previous write? Or was it set by the 57th most previous write?
People: Its a myth. Even the NSA does not bother to try to recover fully whiped drives, the cost and time involved renders any data recovered useless. Osama would be 5 countries away by the time you even the first sentence of his email.
Um, are you sure the NSA hasn't tried this? When I worked on a Top Secret project for a defense company, we kept our computers in a special room. When it came time to replace any of the computers, the old computers would be resold, but without the hard drives. The hard drives were taken by courier to an incinerator. I was told that this was because it is possible to recover erased information from the hard drives. And they don't care about Osama - he and his ilk aren't a threat. The fear was that other countries like Russia, China, Great Britain, or France might get a hold of the disks and recover the information. Steve
The only disks recovered are those where the user simple does rm *.* which is simple.
To the OP: Run Wipe and get on with your life. If really paranoid, bet a bigger hammer.