Memories of a Media Card 266
twistedmoney99 writes "Anyone who has upgraded their digital camera probably has a few older, incompatible media cards lying around — so why not post them on Ebay? Well, if you do, be sure to properly wipe them because the digital voyeurs are watching. Seth Fogie at InformIT.com purchased a bunch of used cards from Ebay and found recoverable data on most of them. Using the freely available PhotoRec application, he was able to extract pictures, movies, and more from apparently formatted cards. The picture is clear — wipe anything that can store digital data before getting rid of it."
Re:speaking of wiping data (Score:2, Informative)
Re:speaking of wiping data (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ [heidi.ie]
Memory effect (Score:5, Informative)
1. Delete everything on the card.
2. Fill the card with something not private (maybe a text file that just repeats the same character).
3. Delete everything on the card.
4. If you're paranoid do 2 and 3 again.
If you don't have a computer handy, you can accomplish step 2 by taking photos of a blank sheet of paper or a lenscap or something of that sort.
dd /dev/random (Score:4, Informative)
Re:dd /dev/random (Score:4, Informative)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mem_card_node bs=256k
If you want to be extra-friendly to the card's buyer, write a new partition table to the card after wiping it and format it for FAT32.
Schwab
Re:speaking of wiping data (Score:5, Informative)
Better (and more convenient) than dd'ing from /dev/urandom is wipe(1). It will, at your option, overwrite the disk using 34 different byte patterns, 8 of which are random.
Its man page is also the only one I know of that uses the phrases "rising totalitarianism", "Department of Homeland Security", and "THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS THING TO DO".
unnecessary (Score:3, Informative)
Re:speaking of wiping data (Score:3, Informative)
{sigh} This has been discussed before. The DoD's standards for highly classified computers amounts to a very large hole-punch and an incinerator. The "standards" you refer to amount to the wiping they do on receptionist and non-classified computers.
Re:I don't even bother to erase mine. (Score:5, Informative)
(Just kidding!)
He'd need a zoom lens if he were very tall - or if otherwise his dick or parts of it were very distant from the camera.
If it were small, he'd want a macro lens.
Re:cipher.exe is overkill for flash memory (Score:2, Informative)
The DOD already answered this question.
Whenever there's any doubt, DOD standards are the way to go.
Re:speaking of wiping data (Score:3, Informative)
Re:speaking of wiping data (Score:4, Informative)
In a nutshell, for hard drives, "If commercially-available SPM's are considered too expensive, it is possible to build a reasonably capable SPM for about US$1400, using a PC as a controller". So it is in the reach of the hobbyist to recover up to around the last 20 items recorded on any magnetic media (easier for floppies, harder as drives become denser). On solid state memory, I believe an electron microscope is needed for analysis. Still, data that has been in one location in RAM for more than five minutes is in theory recoverable.
Re:Memory effect (Score:5, Informative)
The NSA today (and other people) can use Magentic Force Microscopy to extract enough detail to reconstruct what used to be on the drive. With only one or two overwrites, a sensitive oscilloscope could suffice.
Here's one paper from ten years ago that talks more about the recovery technique.
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/procee
From the paper:
"In conventional terms, when a one is written to disk the media records a one, and when a zero is written the media records a zero. However the actual effect is closer to obtaining a 0.95 when a zero is overwritten with a one, and a 1.05 when a one is overwritten with a one. Normal disk circuitry is set up so that both these values are read as ones, but using specialised circuitry it is possible to work out what previous "layers" contained. The recovery of at least one or two layers of overwritten data isn't too hard to perform by reading the signal from the analog head electronics with a high-quality digital sampling oscilloscope, downloading the sampled waveform to a PC, and analysing it in software to recover the previously recorded signal. What the software does is generate an "ideal" read signal and subtract it from what was actually read, leaving as the difference the remnant of the previous signal."
Re:I don't even bother to erase mine. (Score:1, Informative)
In other words: zoom => you can change the focal length within a certain range. Telephoto => narrower field of view => bringing distant objects closer. A lot of zoom lenses are telephotos, but not all; similarly, a lot of telephotos are zooms, but not all. (Drool
Re:speaking of wiping data (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method [wikipedia.org]
ncrypt (Score:2, Informative)