Free Jammie

ENCRYPT YOUR HARD DRIVE!

That way, if you ever inadvertently share a folder full of copyright material on a P2P network and the Net cops (MPAA and their ilk) show up with a seizure order for your box, all they'll get is garbage. Therefore, they'll be incapable of PROVING you ever even had copyright material.

I can guarantee it will stop them in their tracks.

Below are some links for public domain free software that will encrypt your hard drive and make it impenetrable for all intents and purposes. They won't be able to afford to even try to discover what is there because it would require all of the computing power currently available in all of the computers on Earth till the end of time to decrypt your hard drive by brute force and you cannot be compelled to disclose your passphrase because of the 5th Amendment.

Barring any new technology (like quantum computing which could theoretically provide all of the possible solutions simultaneously which would still leave the difficulty of looking at billions of solutions), your hard drive will be eternally secure.

And, before some popinjay comes along and claims that some super-secret government organization has a super computer that CAN break encrypted files, I submit that if it did exist, it wouldn't be super-secret if it were widely known. I'll only believe such when the US Government no longer classifies encryption as a weapon.

If anyone claims such, they just do not understand the math or the process behind encryption technologies in use today. Some old technologies have been breached because of the small set of possible keys (DES 56) or a flaw in the math.

Use encryption that uses vetted algorithms and public domain code. Public domain code means that there can be no hidden "backdoors" or computational flaws to make it vulnerable. Vetted algorithms have been tested by the community of peers in academia to ensure that the math is sound.

Check these out TODAY!

http://www.truecrypt.org/

and free security resources of all kinds including encryption

http://www.thefreecountry.com/

and . . .

http://www.freebyte.com/security/
http://www.freeotfe.org/

et cetera.

Get an education about computer security and the law.

I like to know the rules and beat them over the head with them!

PS: I neither participate in nor encourage any illegal activity. I DO NOT own nor share illegally obtained copyrighted materials of any kind. I believe that people should be paid for their work whether it is digging ditches or providing entertainment if they choose not to put their work into the public domain. Everybody has to eat.

PSS: I claim no copyright to this material.

Nice thought, but I saw this hard drive thing with Directv extortion campaign.
Tamper with the hard drive and the court judge makes a finding against you. You Loose. Encrypt the hard drive and you will be ordered to unencrypt it. Refuse and the judge sees that you loose.

Hard drive is treated as evidence and follows federal rules as to handling it.
They usually hand the drive over to hard drive experts who can also unerase if need be. If they cannot, the judge penalizes you for altering evidence.

The only ones I saw work was before someone was sued. Destroy the Hard drive before being sued and That is your right.

By the way, when Directv uses there equipment to turn off the programming that you paid for, this is OK. Different rules for the rich and the not so rich.

syber wrote:Hard drive is treated as evidence and follows federal rules as to handling it.
They usually hand the drive over to hard drive experts who can also unerase if need be. If they cannot, the judge penalizes you for altering evidence.

Not that I'm advocating destroying evidence, but for the purposes of purely academic discussion...

Hard drive examination and file recovery isn't magic. It works because, quite frankly, most people don't have a single clue how the hard drive and file systems work. I'm sorry if that offends anyone, but it's true.

90% of the time when you hear that an investigator has recovered erased files or recovered data from a formatted hard drive, they were able to do so because the files weren't truly erased or the drive wasn't truly formatted. As I'm sure most people know by now, when you tell Windows (or most any OS) to delete a file, it just erases the directory entry and marks the space on the drive as being available. It's the equivalent of peeling the label off a video tape and tossing it in with a bunch of blanks. It still has all the information, but it's ready to be recorded over. Similarly, when most people "format" a drive, all they do is to erase the directory and FAT, which leaves all the data still on the drive. A true format will erase all the data.

Of course you heard stories about how investigators can pull data off a drive after it's been overwritten, which leads people to believe that they need to use a program that overwrites everything 300 times to truly erase it. What people overlook is that in order to recover any bit of data after it's been overwritten requires that the hard drive be disassembled, the platters removed and placed in hugely expensive machines that can read the left-over magnetic patterns on the disk. This allows them to recover SOME data because hard drive heads don't always record in exactly the same position and there might be a space of .000000001 millimeters on the edge of a track that didn't get recorded over.

I don't know what such an analysis costs, but I know it isn't cheap. Add to that, that the RIAA isn't going to basically destroy a person's hard drive on the suspicion that they might have shared some copyrighted songs. Because to re-assemble the drive and restore it to normal operation would require that it be factory calibrated all over again. You can't just pop hard drive platters in and out like you're changing the sparkplugs on a car.

As I understand it, what they do is to give the drive to an expert who connects the drive to their computer and runs special software that makes an image of every track and sector on the drive. Here's the thing though; It still communicates with the drive using the standard drive interface and there's no magic command that can tell a drive to bring back data that's been overwritten. Hard drives are made to store one and only copy of data in each sector or "cluster" on the drive. When the drive is asked to access the data in that sector, it will only be able to access the most recent data that was written to it. Anything that was overwritten is for all intents and purposes, gone for good.

If you don't believe me, contact any data recovery service and tell them that you accidentally "zero-filled" your hard drive and you want to know how much it will cost to recover all your data. They'll tell you that it can't be done. If it were possible, don't you think such companies would be happy to take your money?

So all you have to do is delete the files and make sure that they're overwritten, right?

It's not quite that simple. File systems and operating systems are messy when it comes to file storage. They scatter evidence of even the most mundane files all over the drive. When new files are saved, it will often create a new copy of the directory, leaving the previous one intact, but unused, ready to be overwritten at a later date. When a sector on the drive is re-used, all of the data may not be overwritten if it's at the end of the file and there's less than a full sector's worth of data to write.

Windows will often store multiple references to files in the registry. Sometimes these will be the lists of most recently opened files by media players, or a list of files you downloaded recently. Even if you delete them from the registry, there are at least four backup copies of the registry that can contain references to files that have been deleted. P2P programs may leave behind directories or registry entries, etc.

In short, it IS possible to selectively erase all evidence that you've done anything wrong from your hard drive, but unless you're aware of all the various places that evidence of those deleted files might be hiding, the investigators are going to find all sorts of stuff you thought you had gotten rid of.

Safe your computer from Firewall,It is a piece of software or hardware that sits between your computer and the internet and only allows certain types of things to cross the wall. For example, a firewall may allow checking email and browsing the web, but disallow things that are commonly not as useful such as RPC or "Remote Procedure Calls". In fact, it's vulnerabilities in RPC that allowed for one of the more recent worms to propagate. If you're using a phone to dial-in to the internet, a firewall is not as important, though it doesn't hurt to have one.
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David Jones

Adviser

I have a doubt regarding encrypting the disk. Also David here has mentioned something about a firewall. I am confused myself. Is there a real answer to this question??

Help wanted!!

Hi..
The piece of software or hardware that sits between your computer and the internet and only allows certain types of things to cross the wall. For example, a firewall may allow checking email and browsing the web, but disallow things that are commonly not as useful such as RPC or Remote Procedure Calls.@@amazinglineup@@

With regards
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karkate
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I use Firewall and Anti Virus software.
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