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Author Topic: Hidden personal info in Windows  (Read 6593 times)

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Offline macto

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Re: Hidden personal info in Windows
« on: May 09, 2004, 03:05:00 PM »
Aside from the age old privacy issue (cookies, referer data, etc.), I am unaware of any problems with Mozilla.  Does that mean there aren't any?  Of course not.

There is a lot of animosity towards Microsoft and their products.  There is also a lot more genuine scrutiny and hysterial media attention because of the wide spread use of Windows.  All ot this means two things: people are more likely to look for problems and more people are going to talk about those problems.

Now I'm sure you can claim that an unknown vulnerability is not a vulnerability because nobody is able to exploit it.  On the other hand, I would suggest it is just as much of a problem — particularly for businesses and governments who may be targetted for proprietary information.  Fortunately, most of us aren't considered to be all that important so no one will invest that sort of time/money/expertise into exploting the problem, but it still leave an opportunity for the vulberabilities to be discovered and later communicated.
 

Offline macto

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Re: Hidden personal info in Windows
« Reply #1 on: May 09, 2004, 04:32:01 PM »
The only secure way to dispose of your hard drive is the do an eight way random write, followed by melting down the entire drive with at least a dozen other units of the same model from an unrelated sources.

Or you can write zeros and give away the hard drive.  Unless you have very valuable information relating to national security or highly competitive products, no one is going to attempt to recover the data.  The potential return is simply too low.  Besides, unless you know the characteristics of the drive very well, it would be impossible to read anything into the hysteresis of magnetic domains.  Keep in mind that drive manufacturers would try to reduce hysteresis in order to improve the reliability of data storage.  If it is even possible in the first place.