Limewire: Man DL's "GGW", Gets CP, May get 20Follow

Is that true? I was taught back in law class that you need to have the "criminal mind" for a crime to occur. Downloading CP on purpose is intent; getting it when you think you're getting legal **** would not be. Granted the class didn't focus on CP...

Plus the GGW **** was not technically legal since he was downloading it from Livewire. I highly doubt Joe Francis in all his douchebaggery would be okay with not milking his products for all their worth dollar wise. How would he pay for his own lawyers to help get him off from harassment charges and other delightful misdeeds?

Child **** or copyright infringement? Golly, those two are clearly worthy of the same scorn.

Good idea in theory and it would certainly keep people from recovering data under normal circumstances but forensic equipment would still be able to recover most if not all of the data for several years off of an HDD formatted under such conditions due to the inaccuracy and inherent error of position the R/W heads on the platters. The devices they use can pick up the small magnetic variations around the edges of the individual bits and piece together the data even after several full random formats.

So one should make a 1 GB wordpad document of nothing but straight lines and save it until the HDD is full instead of deleting things?

This is not a serious question and contains a tone of facetiousness.

Or just buy a new hard drive every year?

I forget what the organization's actual name is, but it's part of the American pornography stuff. They had a website dedicated to safe internet pornography, and on it there was a list of things to avoid (certain terms) and what to do if you accidentally stumbled upon illegal material.

It basically said exactly the opposite of what the FBI comment said. That you should erase everything and never visit that area again. But it also said that accidentally stumbling upon websites with that material was not likely to cause issues. Hell, someone could make a website called freebeernhotwings and fill it will illegal crap, and you could visit it and have all that stuff on your computer...


Edit:
And Pensive, just for sh*ts and giggles, I created 34GB worth of word documents. It took about 45 minutes... Windows would only allow the word document to be 16MB in size, after that it wouldn't let me copy paste anymore.

Edited, Dec 7th 2009 7:02pm by TirithRR

Just for the record I wasn't saying I agreed with the concept, I just don't trust law enforcement of any variety. It seems like to most of them, if you're guilty of one minor crime that makes you more likely to be guilty of more severe crimes.

I'm not as up on the low level specifics of NTFS, but I don't think that's the case. Files generally contain creation times, modification times, and access times. That data is typically deleted when the reference to the file in the parent directory is erased. I suppose that may be recovered if there hasn't been sufficient file activity in that directory to force a rehash of the directory table, but this still wont tell you when the file itself was deleted. You may be able to extrapolate a time range in which the file was probably deleted, but that's about it. This may be sufficient, or it may not...


As to cleaning the hard drive. It's quite possible to zero out a hard drive and make it impossible to recover anything from it. It's done all the time when there's potentially sensitive data on a disk and you're doing something like selling back a piece of hardware with the attached system (happens all the time). I usually prefer to just buy another blank disk and put it in there, but occasionally we do zero out disks. You don't use format or fdisk. You actually write zeros to each data block of the disk, typically using something like the 'dd' utility in unix.

Of course, this only really works if you want to erase the entire contents of a disk. The typical home user isn't going to do this ever, much less "often".

I'm with Locke on this one. There are so many sites out there with free "Relatively safe" viewing that I don't see the reason to download something. If I really like it I save the site. After a while the same thing over and over gets boring and ineffective anyway.

Nope, but it sure gets people to vote for it.