wuffah
@wuffah@lemmy.world
- Comment on President Donald Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems 9 hours ago:
This man is literally insane.
- Comment on The size of Portugal compared to Spain 3 days ago:
They are completely different colors, however. 🤔
- Comment on restraint 3 days ago:
What’s the money even worth without my tater time? :(
- Comment on for personal lore development 5 days ago:
The sex will get you attention, not so much the pregnancy.
- Comment on Why ‘deleted’ doesn’t mean gone: How police recovered Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell footage 2 weeks ago:
Magnetic platter drives still have the highest storage density per dollar and so they are still heavily in use. Theoretically, overwritten data can be recovered from them by analyzing the magnetic fields directly from the platter. However, this is extremely time and money intensive and requires specialized equipment and expertise. Overwriting a partition multiple times severely complicates this process just by performing multiple overwrites.
Realistically, overwriting once with random data is enough, especially if the drive is to be physically destroyed. You can also use a powerful magnet (top end neodymium in direct contact) to scramble the delicate magnetic fields that encode the data on the platter, but at that point you may as well shred the drive anyways.
SSDs are a fundamentally different storage paradigm that make this kind of recovery essentially impossible. Due to the limitations of NAND memory, data can be written to blocks inaccessible except at the hardware level. To make SSDs secure, modern drives usually implement processes (TRIM) that erase blocks marked for deletion. Or, all data written to the drive is encrypted by onboard hardware (SED), and “erasing” the drive simply deletes the encryption key.
- Comment on Why ‘deleted’ doesn’t mean gone: How police recovered Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell footage 2 weeks ago:
From the article:
Nest cameras, by contrast, can send clips to Google’s servers even without a paid subscription. Google offers a small amount of free cloud storage — older models store clips up to five minutes long for three hours; the latest models store 10-second clips for six hours. That means some footage is uploaded and stored, at least temporarily, whether you pay or not.
According to Nick Barreiro, chief forensic analyst with Principle Forensics, deleting footage from the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean it’s immediately gone. “When you delete something from a server, it doesn’t get overwritten immediately — the file system is just told to ignore this data, and this space is now available to be used. But if no new data is written over it, it’s still going to be there, even though you can’t see it.”
This is more or less how local storage works as well. The creator of BleachBit, file cleaning tool made famous for being present on Hillary Clinton’s email servers, has some great insights in their documentation about the methods for destroying data on hard drives. As it turns out, data “deletion” is just a series of operations on your hard disk like any other, and retrieval depends on the methods used - de-indexing, metadata and file structure removal, and overwriting to name a few.
Once, I accidentally formatted the wrong drive in Windows and it ended up being my 20TB platter (oops). I was able to recover 99% of the files on the drive with some free recovery software just because I disconnected and stopped using the drive immediately. The only files lost were large ones partially overwritten by the new blank file system created when I formatted the drive. Windows had only deleted the file system indexing the drive, and all of the file data and metadata was intact, waiting to be randomly overwritten. I had to string together four cheap failing 4TB SATA drives I bought used on Amazon, but it worked.
The point is, if I could do this as an amateur, and storage technology operating on the same principals is in use at enterprise scale, what are the lengths that the likes of the FBI and Google are willing to go to recover old data that has been “deleted”? I’m frankly surprised that Google does not overwrite their discarded data, and it’s probably for reasons like this, beyond the additional processing time it would take. Given their vast resources and storage capacity, it could be some time before “deleted” data is at least partially overwritten, if ever.
If you ever have data that you absolutely need destroyed, overwrite the entire drive with random data more than once, then physically shred the drive completely. And never connect your devices to a cloud storage service. It’s the only way to be sure.
- Comment on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month 2 weeks ago:
Discord is not needed. Quit. Kill them.
- Comment on This is the worst case yet. 2 weeks ago:
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P O T A T O - Comment on Hose Clamp Security Gate Chain... 2 weeks ago:
“Parking: $80 daily maximum”
- Comment on Form over function 3 weeks ago:
Make sure to sand them first with a rough grit or the paint won’t stick. You can also add sugar to your gas tank to make your sick piston paint job super sweet.
- Comment on Your teenager AND your husband 3 weeks ago:
That would be ramen Alfredo, so you’re not quite a soup anarchist, but that’s probably for the best.
- Comment on Your teenager AND your husband 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments 3 weeks ago:
Inversely, it’s also amazing what a lack thereof cannot achieve, for instance, redacting publicized documents.
- Comment on LLM's poisoned with sleeper agent backdoors is the latest fun security threat to worry about 3 weeks ago:
My personal theory is that it lends credibility to the idea that a “rogue AI” will destroy humanity instead of the billionaire broligarchs that wield it to control and surveil the masses.
- Comment on Banana 4 weeks ago:
Apparently they leave the bananas unpeeled in banana-land.
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 4 weeks ago:
Not natively that I know of, but Telegram for iOS has the option when looking at someone’s profile. However, the Windows client does not.
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 4 weeks ago:
iOS lets you create secret chats, but as far as I know other platforms have eliminated that functionality at the request of governments.
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 4 weeks ago:
Assume the same for Telegram and pretty much any chat platform that controls your private keys.
- Comment on Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube and other content sharing platforms will block New users in the UK starting next week(February 2) 4 weeks ago:
Sexuality is a human right, and controlling sexuality is an authoritarian tactic to manufacture compliance.
- Comment on Mandola effect 5 weeks ago:
Yes it is!
- Comment on Microsoft Gave FBI Keys to Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Flaw 5 weeks ago:
That’s a great question, and it is because it enables a chain of cryptographic controls that enable verification, tamper resistance, and secrecy while selling Bitlocker as computer security. It is technically secure, except that MS has your recovery keys and can give them to whoever they want.
This way, they can mathematically verify:
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Who you are and the exact unique machine you use (verification from a unique machine ID associated with your encryption keys and Windows account data)
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Know that the data has not been altered in transit (tamper resistance hash of your data)
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No one else knows except them (secret encryption keys only Microsoft controls, not you, Microsoft)
Imagine what you could do with this power for every Windows machine on the planet.
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- Comment on Microsoft Gave FBI Keys to Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Flaw 5 weeks ago:
It’s not a security flaw, it’s by design. Microsoft has been building this surveillance apparatus for years, and seeking government access to your computer and data with your tax dollars is a lucrative alignment of state and corporate power.
It goes like this:
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Force online Microsoft account creation.
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Require TPM compliance to run Windows.
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Encrypt the user’s data under the guise of “security”. (Encryption is safe and secure right?)
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Link your identity, payment information, data, online activity, and encryption keys to your hardware ID.
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Record everything you do and use that data to train an AI model with onboard tensor hardware.
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Exfiltrate the entire model, or just query it remotely for “online services.” Or, in this case, just have MS give you the fucking recovery keys. lol
All done “securely” with tamper resistance and mathematical verifiability that whatever is on your device is yours, and that you took that action with limited plausible deniability.
If you think you’ve got nothing to hide, think again about the current activities of ICE, law enforcement investigations based on reproductive health data, the pornography suppression movement, age verification, and the data harvesting of dissenting speech. What’s legal today can quickly become “illegal” tomorrow. The constitution is just a piece of paper in a fancy climate controlled box.
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- Comment on Microsoft gave FBI a set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops: Reports | TechCrunch 5 weeks ago:
Even if you don’t care that MS and the federal government can decrypt your data, when Bitlocker is enabled your MS account becomes cryptographically linked to your identity and machine, making it a powerful tool for surveillance, identification, and DRM.
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 5 weeks ago:
SELL SELL SELL!
- Comment on Lawks 5 weeks ago:
Why is an algorithm successfully modifying the behavior of people to pre-censor sexual language?
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Everything seems to eventually link back to class war.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Fantastic alternative insight, thank you.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
We went from mass surveillance to hardware confiscation real quick.
These companies are so large that they don’t need the consumer market anymore. The consumer is now the competition. They can essentially purchase the entire planet’s output of computing hardware years in advance to force us out of the market and lease it back to us at inflated rates. All while using all that tensor compute to make everyone’s life a living digital surveillance hell.
Forget Internet freedom, computational liberty is now at risk. Who needs all that expensive legal and technological architecture to steal your data, report on you to the government, and enforce DRM when you can only use rented and approved corporate cloud hardware?
We need to elevate the prosecution of anti-trust to religious inquisition, and burn these companies at the stake. They’re using AI to literally enslave humanity, and it’s working.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
- Comment on Hey Don, youre a real class act. 1 month ago:
That’s just how Donald Trump’s face is.
