[Tutor] Shredding files and searching the tutor archives

[Magnus Lycka]

At 14:18 2003-01-13 -0500, andy surany wrote:
>http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Browse/Threaded/python-Tutor
>
>Upper right secion of the page is a search capability.

But does it work? Since I answered the shredder question
a month ago, I thought I'd whine a bit to Joshua Miller
about not doing his homework before bothering the list.
But searching for "shredder", I got no hits, even though
the word is used both in Joshuas email now and in the thread
about "Working with memory with Python" around December
6 to 8. But what is this? It was Joshua that asked then
as well. Did you shred that from your memory??? ;)

By the way, I saw that I made a spelling mistake then:

 > I think you can safely shred a dick if you just grind
 > it into small enough pieces...

Ouch... That should have been disk, not dick. Sorry...

I also wrote:

>Rule 1. Keep your secrets away from computers.
>
>Rule 2. If you can't follow Rule 1, make sure your
>computer is not networked, and that it's physically
>secure.

Obviously, a lot of people break this rule and put
secrets on networked computers. But then physical
protection is certainly an important aspect of the
security, together with a lot of other stuff which
is off topic here.

>Rule 3. There is no Rule 3. ;)

Actually, there is a Rule 3:

If you really need to have secrets on your disk, use
strong encryption.

But unless you encrypt the entire disk (all disks?)
this is also unsafe. As I wrote a month ago, there
might be parts of your data in swap partitions or
temporary files, left there by the OS or by software
that you used to work with these secret files. And are
you certain that there are no trojans or spyware on
your computer?



-- 
Magnus Lycka, Thinkware AB
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