Travis wrote: > Actually, there are techniques to get *very deleted* (as in > overwrited thousands of times) data off a disk using scanning > electron microscopes. Simply deleting files won't help you (you > essentially have to melt down or blow up your hard drive to be > safe).
Fully melting it down should work, but just in case some political dissident out there is listening, blowing up hard drives will *not* erase them. To someone with a good lab and lots of patience, an explosion scatters a lot, but fully destroys very little. <Fantasy digression mode> I'd like to see a Freenet installation that fits on a floppy disk. The disk itself would appear to have no files, or only a few innocuous files when looked at with a standard directory command. Starting the program would involve calling up the old DOS debugger or something, to get the right area of the diskette loaded as a program. Even then, you'd need a key (or at least a password) to decrypt the rest and get it going. Once running, the program(s) would run on disk space that the OS thinks is not in use. We'd have to be resilient about handling data segments that suddenly get corrupted, but at least it would have the advantage of always using all of the available disk space without conflicting with other programs. :-) The hard drive space used by Freenet would be encrypted, since it will typically be left in place until the next time the floppy starts up the node again. We'll include a multi-pass erase program, however, just in case. Going even farther, a full-blown "dissident mode" would have to utilize a lot of steganography. Fortunately, the Freenet core protocol is designed for multiple transmission media like packet radio and such. That should help out the stega folk quite a bit. Still, Freenet was designed as a datastore, not a messaging system, and it seems that dissident activity would be more geared towards urgent news and messages. Also, it wasn't designed with extremely low bitrates in mind, which is all that will be available in most such situations -- especially after the steganography considerations take their toll. </Fantasy digression mode> <Reality check mode> Freenet 0.3 is not tough enough for political dissidents to use in an environment where they will face execution if caught. I'd very much like to see a version down the road (a variant, perhaps) that tries as best it can to address that particular application realm. In the meantime, however, perhaps we should include a prominent disclaimer in the next release, warning people that 0.3 cannot handle that kind of environment. Yes, it's already in the docs somewhere, but it wouldn't hurt to make it more prominent. Desparate people can sometimes see hope where there is none. </Reality check mode> --Will (who does not speak for his employers, as always) willdye at willdye.com _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
