[Mad Vlad]

(Original post by Anna150)
I'm just a student . And my lecturer thinks it's suspicious if someone uses ubuntu . Because only evil criminal geniuses are smart enough to use it.

Your lecturer is an idiot. What do you study?

[Anna150]

(Original post by Mad Vlad)
Your lecturer is an idiot. What do you study?

Computer Forensics. Don't even get me started >.< i'm about to graduate but it's put me off wanting to work in forensics at all.

[Mad Vlad]

(Original post by Anna150)
Computer Forensics. Don't even get me started >.< i'm about to graduate but it's put me off wanting to work in forensics at all.

Ouch. That's pretty poor if your lecturer's encouraging you to think in that manner. Context, in forensics, is everything.

Don't give up on it as a career though. If you get in with a good company, you can have a very interesting career.

[Inverse]

(Original post by Anna150)
It doesn't mean the government are going to start 'monitoring the internet'. If they want to know what you've been doing on facebook, how often you've been logging in, where you've been logging in from then they'd have to go to facebook and find out what information they have.



I'm just a student . And my lecturer thinks it's suspicious if someone uses ubuntu . Because only evil criminal geniuses are smart enough to use it.

Ubuntu is one of the easiest to use operating systems I have ever come across. Try something like Arch-Linux.

[Psyk]

(Original post by SoulfulBoy)
Who is psychocustard?

Someone on TSR. Don't know if they still post. I have sigs turned off so I don't even notice my own sig still has that on it.

(Original post by Anna150)
It can and It's actually pretty easy. The only reason they can recover the data because data is never really 'deleted' It's just removed from the user view. It'll stay on the harddrive untill it's overwritten. There is software that can fill your harddrive with with random data so it would ovewrite everything but that looks suspicious in it's self because who would go to those lengths to permenantly remove data if they weren't up to something dodgy? That goes for anything that holds digital data; phones, camera's, usb drives, satnavs...

But if it's on an SSD and it is overwritten, is there any way to get it back? I know that it is possible to get overwritten data back from a regular hard drive if you have the right equipment.

Going to those lengths to delete data may be suspicious, but it's not proof of any wrongdoing. So I'd say that if you have some incriminating data on your computer, it's still better to do it than to not from your point of view.

[Mad Vlad]

(Original post by Psyk)
But if it's on an SSD and it is overwritten, is there any way to get it back? I know that it is possible to get overwritten data back from a regular hard drive if you have the right equipment.

Going to those lengths to delete data may be suspicious, but it's not proof of any wrongdoing. So I'd say that if you have some incriminating data on your computer, it's still better to do it than to not from your point of view.

No there isn't. The previous state of a bit on a solid state drive cannot be recovered after being overwritten and it's not really possible to get overwritten data back from regular hard drives, either. I think you're referring to something called Magnetic Force Microscopy here. There's an excellent research paper on it that explains why it's next to useless at reliably recovering overwritten data. The following quote from the paper sums this issue up quite effectively:

The other overwrite patterns actually produced results as low as 36.08% (+/- 0.24). Being that the distribution is based on a binomial choice, the chance of guessing the prior value is 50%. That is, if you toss a coin, you have a 50% chance of correctly choosing the value. In many instances, using a MFM to determine the prior value written to the hard drive was less successful than a simple coin toss.

You'd have a hard job convincing a court that evidence gathered by this method, even if it was 90% reliable, was admissible.

[TheHansa]

It will be stored somewhere and could theoretically be used to identify you.

(Original post by Psyk)
Err, who exactly records everything you put into Google? Sure Google do probably keep information on what people in general search for, but I don't think they keep enough information to link it back to you. There are data protection laws. If you delete a post you made on Facebook they're probably under obligation to delete that data from their records eventually.

No google does record it all for advertising purposes and this has to be handed over to the police if they ask for it.

[mimx]

(Original post by Psyk)
I know that it is possible to get overwritten data back from a regular hard drive if you have the right equipment.

Erm, this is a myth as far as I know.

Edit: OK already been addressed.

[Mad Vlad]

(Original post by TheHansa)
No google does record it all for advertising purposes and this has to be handed over to the police if they ask for it.

It's worth noting that Google keeps personally identifiable data for a fixed period (the last time I looked it was 18 months) before they then anonymise it.

[hannahchan]

Do they know that we know they know we know?

[ChocoCoatedLemons]

XD Your hard drive? Of course everything is stored - Big Brother is always watching you. Anyway, the only way I know to erase the hard drive completely involves magnetic strips, and is quite complicated. Don't worry about it - for a start, there are rules on what can and can't be used against you in, for example, a court.

[estel]

(Original post by Psyk)
I know that with a regular hard disk, even if you write over a section of the disk with junk data, it's still possible to recover the data from it. It takes quite a lot to make the original data unrecoverable with the sort of technology law enforcement organisations have.

It was theorised that it might be possible to recover a previous value of a digital bit from a harddrive by looking at strength of its magetisation (or somesuch); but this hasn't been once demonstrated at any scale. It's inconceivable that there are methods in the wild that allow rewritten HDD blocks to be read to the extent that forensics could recover data.

Edit: Bah, Vlad beat me

[Aspiringlawstudent]

(Original post by DarkTitan)
I can't tell you , my solicitor Mr. Slaughter has advised me not to say anything because consequences...will never be the same

What did Mr. May say?

Are the state police also involved as well as the cyber police?

[Psyk]

(Original post by estel)
It was theorised that it might be possible to recover a previous value of a digital bit from a harddrive by looking at strength of its magetisation (or somesuch); but this hasn't been once demonstrated at any scale. It's inconceivable that there are methods in the wild that allow rewritten HDD blocks to be read to the extent that forensics could recover data.

Edit: Bah, Vlad beat me

(Original post by Mad Vlad)
No there isn't. The previous state of a bit on a solid state drive cannot be recovered after being overwritten and it's not really possible to get overwritten data back from regular hard drives, either. I think you're referring to something called Magnetic Force Microscopy here. There's an excellent research paper on it that explains why it's next to useless at reliably recovering overwritten data. The following quote from the paper sums this issue up quite effectively:



You'd have a hard job convincing a court that evidence gathered by this method, even if it was 90% reliable, was admissible.

Cheers, you learn something new every day. Or in this case, unlearn something

[Mad Vlad]

(Original post by ChocoCoatedLemons)
XD Your hard drive? Of course everything is stored - Big Brother is always watching you. Anyway, the only way I know to erase the hard drive completely involves magnetic strips, and is quite complicated. Don't worry about it - for a start, there are rules on what can and can't be used against you in, for example, a court.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

Replace the highlighted part with the mountpoint of the drive you're looking to wipe.

It's not rocket science.

[ChocoCoatedLemons]

(Original post by Mad Vlad)
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

Replace the highlighted part with the mountpoint of the drive you're looking to wipe.

It's not rocket science.

Hey, I never said it was! I find that complicated - I know next to nothing about technology.

[Mad Vlad]

(Original post by ChocoCoatedLemons)
Hey, I never said it was! I find that complicated - I know next to nothing about technology.

And that's fair enough. I'm just saying that there are software solutions to this issue - just using very simple *nix command line fu, or with dedicated distros like DBAN.

[Repressor]

I think OP needs tailsOS and a tinfoil hat.

[semiotically]

(Original post by tsveta)
Someone...

Try this www.startpage.com
The searches you do pass through them (i.e. as their search) before reaching Google...

There is a https add-on for Firefox...