Re: Destroying Data (Re: Remailer Policies)

[peter honeyman <honey@citi.umich.edu>]

> Make sure you don't think 'rm -rf /remailer-logs' actually destroys data.
> It merely de-allocates the i-nodes.  You need to know which physical
> device the filesystem is on, (let's call id /hdxxx) and then do
> 'cat /dev/null > /dev/hdxxx' which overwrites with zeroes all data
> on that partition.  

not quite.  you need something like

  dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/xxx bs=verybig conv=sync

this will zero out every block on the disk.  but this is overkill --
why not just apply this technique to the individual logs, zeroing
out their data blocks?

	peter

ps:  is it certain that zeroing out the data blocks thoroughly destroys
the data?  i've heard that a "shadow" of some sort may remain.