Posts by Fuu Baa

Flash drives dangerously hard to purge of sensitive data

Simple Solution

Use the same methods which allowed the researchers to recover the data and overwrite it.

No problem.

Unlike magnetic media, where heads can take slightly varying paths, leaving trace of previous data, we're dealing with a digital medium.

Or, as one of the posters said - always encrypt your all drives, without the key they're random data.

Soot warming 'maybe bigger than greenhouse gases' - NASA

"Localized phenomenon"

The NASA news release also says:

"Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally," said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play."

This implies that soot is a problem in the Himalayas, not that it is the major cause of planetary warming.

Also, what about ocean acidification from CO2....

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125631.200-ocean-acidification-the-iotheri-cosub2sub-problem.html

Ofcom talks to spook firm on filesharing snoop plan

Proof of Concept

Encryption is not the issue. Here's a simple proof of concept that you can identify the content shared by individuals.

Say you want to download the latest Star Trek movie using bit torrent. You search for the torrent, put the details into your bit torrent client and it downloads the content (encrypted or not) from various IP addresses belonging to people across the UK and elsewhere. Eventually you have the file on your machine.

Obviously, the P2P system contains all the information you need to go from identified content.

The only extra steps a surveillance system has to do is verify that the downloaded file is indeed copyright, then repeat the P2P query process to obtain IP addresses.

This isn't necessarily the only way to do this, but it proves it is possible even when the streams are encrypted. Encryption is good, but it isn't magic. TOR on the other hand...