Evidence Eliminator

[Guest Les]

:'( They are or they're..sorry

 

Take care, Les:)

[Guest FLsweetguy]

Evidence Eliminator is advertised on Tylersroom as a surefire way to cleanse your computer of its history and hidden files. Has anyone bought it? does it work? does it screw up your computer in other ways?

[+ deej]

Anything that fiddles with Windows is almost guaranteed to fuck up your system.

 

Clearing history, recent files, and recent documents is so easy why would you risk it to something unkonwn?

[Guest FLsweetguy]

Thanks deej, that's what I was thinking.

[Guest Les]

Hi FLsweetguy,

 

Well I love it!

 

I visit a lot of the seemier side of the net and download a lot of stuff I wouldn't want discovered on my computer...not illegal but embarassing. Unfortunately there are a lot of people that don't realize there own computer is spying on them and keeping a record of all sites you visit and that when you delete a file that over 99% remains intact...waiting to be discovered...

I don't think I'm paranoid but that doesn't mean there not out to get you.

At least my computer won't betray me...LOL.

 

Take care, Les;)

[Guest tmbg]

I have a a question about this. If I format my hard drive and reinstall windows, will that wipe everything off my computer or will certain information still be retained?

 

Cheers! Ritchie

[+ deej]

Yes, formatting your hard drive will completely wipe everything off of it.

 

The techo-geek explanation goes like this:

 

When you delete a file, DOS is still under the hood. It simply replaces the first byte of the filename in the file allocation table with a special character indicating the file is deleted. The rest of the file remains until overwritten. (That's how undelete utilities work -- they look for that deleted character.)

 

When you format a drive, the entire drive is filled with that special character which wipes away all possibility of undelete.

[Guest bottomboykk]

Actually, a reformat can be undone with the right utility. The only way to completely get rid of everything is doing arcane "debug" commands on the drive, then repartitioning and reformatting the drive. I'm intimately familiar with this, having to do just this when I had to do this on my work computer (they thought I had an unrepairable virus before they finally decided the drive was bad and replaced it).

[Guest tmbg]

Thanks for the details.

 

Cheers! Ritchie

[Michael]

A low-level format of the drive (which is what I believe deej meant) will indeed overwrite *everything* on the drive.

 

Just doing a high level filesystem format under DOS or Windows can still leave recoverable data lying around that some programs might be able to piece together and make sense of.

 

By the way, if you do get an "evidence eliminator" program you should be very careful where you get it from. An "evidence eliminator" could also be an "evidence gatherer" :-(

 

[ I have often thought, for example, that if I were working for the FBI and trying to track down various kinds of nefarious behaviour that involved computers, I would create a fake "evidence eliminator" program and then advertise it heavily online and in the various newsgroups that I thought my target suspects might frequent ... ]

[Guest Derrick]

Tom Cruise once said in his movie the firm; "someone is the dark is always watching"......