[Freedombox-discuss] Roadmap / Wishlists

AnotherPeasant versparis at gmail.com
Tue Apr 19 05:02:22 UTC 2011


On 04/18/2011 11:08 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
>> I know there's a
>> BASH prog called "shred" that will do some of what I have in mind, but I
>> haven't had the chance or the spare box to experiment with it.
> The short answer is that it doesn't work at all on flash drives.
> Researchers tried it, disassembled the drives, and found their
> 'erased' data sitting right there in the flash chips.  If you have
> something that you want to reliably erase, don't ever put it onto a
> flash drive (not an SSD, not an SD card, not a USB stick).  Put it on
> a real hard disk drive and don't attach that drive via USB (because USB
> doesn't offer the secure erase commands that are built-in to the drive).
>
> A real Freedom Box that serves up your photos and media to your family
> and friends, or makes your music collection accessible to you and your
> friends no matter where you are, will want a hard drive anyway.  You
> can't offload your camera's SD card into a server with no more memory
> than an SD card holds!  Or rather, you can't do that more than a few
> times before your server fills up.
>
> 	John
>
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Yes!  Thank you, John!  This is valuable info.  Seems like this would 
mean a HDD becomes a necessary part of the HW equation.  I was just 
speaking to a friend who told me about a new app for the iPhone (after 
people getting them confiscated in Egypt) called "Panic Button".  It's 
supposed to erase all your data quickly if the police are about to take 
your iPhone, but if that's all flash memory, I guess it's a false bit of 
security.  It might buy you a bit of time, but that's all...  Hmmm.   Do 
you know if the researchers tried that dissection after multiple passes, 
including random writes?  Do you remember where that study was, or have 
a link?  I'm going to see if I can find any details about "Panic 
Button".  RSVP?  Thanks!

-Another Peasant



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