[47657] in Cypherpunks
Re: Wipe Swap File
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lucky Green)
Mon Jan 22 02:40:15 1996
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 23:38:46 -0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
From: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)
At 20:27 1/21/96, jim bell wrote:
>However, I _still_ want to see brainless operating systems like MSDOS
>changed to erase (zero) allocated data buffers before and after use (and
>especially before re-use!), so that parts of vital files don't accidentally
>get written to the ends of other files.
Not only DOS suffers from this problem. The MacOS does as well. All 'wipe
unused space' utilities for the Mac fail on a typical hard drive to
overwrite several hundred kB of data. Few people seem to care that the OS
fills the unused parts of the last block of a file with whatever happens to
be in the buffer.
Not good.
-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com>
PGP encrypted mail preferred.
