A guide to being subversive on the internet (and getting away with it)

[Andrew Bolt]

Knoppix 3.1, looks interesting.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Boot from Disc

[ 16. June 2005, 10:38: Message edited by: Andrew Bolt ]

[apothecary]

Be patient. The next instalment will be uploaded tomorrow and you will see

Andrew B, nice reference butthe point of this guide is to be international. It should work for dissidents in China, UAE, Iran, etc.

[bloodbob]

Actually I might be wrong about the encryption it was in one of the drafts of some of the anti-terror bills It might not have made it in.

On the remarks that you can't be legally required to answer questions well thats BS. Other wise it wouldn't be an offense to not log a tax return because well your basicly being required by law to answer questions or face a penalty. Frankly I'd love to see a court rules the tax laws are unconsitutional.

Similarly situation would also being requried to declare any dangerous goods on your person when flying on a plane.

[ 15. June 2005, 06:20: Message edited by: bloodbob ]

[nabraxas]

in the UK the right to refuse to answer police questions remains, but they did some tricky shit to make it virtually an implication ov guilt.

i can't actually remember what though. it may have been that your refusal to answer questions, could now be made known to a jury--w/the implication that the accused had something to hide.

& as for recovering info from hard drives, i couldn't find the exact new scientist article i was looking for, but i did find an article which shows it's so easy even a couple ov students can do it

 

quote:

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Discarded and recycled computer drives can reveal financial and personal information even when apparently wiped clean, MIT researchers have found.

 

Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat, graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analysed 158 second hand hard drives bought over the internet between November 2000 and August 2002. They were able to recover over 6000 credit card numbers, as well as email messages and pornographic images.

 

The pair wrote a program to scour the disk drives for any trace of credit card information. They found card numbers on 42 drives of the drives they bought.

 

One drive had previously been used in an ATM cash machine and contained 2868 different numbers, as well as account and transaction information. Another drive contained a credit card number within a cached web page.

 

Privacy failure

 

Much of the information the researchers found had been "deleted" before the disks were sold. But simply deleting a file with most computer operating systems does not remove it from the hard drive, it only removes a tag pointing to the file.

 

Furthermore, even re-formatting the disk does not properly remove the contents of files.

 

"Most techniques that people use to assure information privacy fail when data storage equipment is sold onto the secondary market," the researchers write in an article to appear in the IEEE magazine Security and Privacy. "The results of even this limited initial analysis indicate that there are no standard practices in the industry [for sanitizing disks]."

 

Data remembrance

 

The study, entitled Remembrance of data passed: a study of disk sanitization practices, concludes that overwriting disks with random data, preferably more than once, should be sufficient to wipe them clean. But only 12 per cent of the drives they bought had been cleaned in this way.

 

They also note that it may be possible to recover information even when it has been overwritten with random data

. This would require the use of magnetic force microscopy to measure the subtle magnetic changes that occur during each overwrite.

 

Finally, the researchers add that cryptographic file systems would improve hard drive security by requiring authentication before revealing data. But they say this type of system is very rarely used

 

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New Scientist

[ 15. June 2005, 01:49: Message edited by: nabraxas ]

[Andrew Bolt]

Ladies and/or Gentlemen, in keeping with apothecry's wishes for comp-tech continuity, the legal comments made by myself have been placed in another thread.

[monkeyZ]

the biggest thing that i fear about the internet is the notion that nothing is ever truely lost. everything you have ever written or posted or site you visited is still out there... somewhere... probably years later it will still be able to be collected in seconds by some new class of supercomputer; processed and interpretted and traced back to you. for use by anyone for anything from 'big brother' monitoring to damn direct marketing

[Andrew Bolt]

processed and interpretted and traced back to you.

Or some pesky hacker that was dwelling on your hard drive. :D

[the Anomaly]

Just have a big magnet in your drawer, when they bust in stick the magnet to your case and the hard drive will be instantly stripped of all data.