Or a company trying to make sure info is removed securely to stop criminals stealing sensitive employee information. Or actually quite a few very genuine and legal reasons to be worried.
I was speaking of the private individual and home PCs.
Ask any law enforcement technologist if you're right. You're not.
No matter the length...nor the technical jargon used in the lengthy quote i know it can be done...and has been done for all of computing time...
To think otherwise is foolish.
"I see you your quoted passage from a Doctoral thesis and I counter with a opinion!"
Look, here's the thing, you know what I originally set out to do? debunk Rob's claims. I was quite certain that it was possible. You know what I found? That. You know what I learned?
I was wrong. I'm not about to pretend I understand everything noted in that quotation, much less the rest of the paper. (I dug through my history and got the link to the full PDF, it can be viewed
here. Yes it one of those goofy weird google urls. Can't seem to get the clean URL for it though. Either way, regardless of how much I do or do not understand it, it was created from years of research and investigation and testing; to claim that it's fallacious simply because you want it to be while providing no actual counter-argument besides what is logically the same as saying "nuh uh!" is face-palm worthy. I was even going to qualify my previous post with "the DoD/etc might have access to technology that isn't available to consumers" and, well, no doubt they do. But the fact is that regardless of how advanced their data recovery might be, it can't possibly do the impossible, which is precisely what the paper proves, by way of statistical data, testing, and scientific analysis. it cannot be discarded without refuting all three. An opinion doesn't do that, regardless of whether it happens to be followed with a suggestion to "consult a law enforcement technologist", as if it is somehow
our responsibility to provide the backing of evidence that your opinions so strongly imply exists but seem to keep drawing a 404.
I'm convinced purely by the fact that searching for information on Hard Drives being securely deleted with minimal effort brings up things like white papers and theses on the subject, while searching for the opposite only seems to bring hits to "Bob the repairpersons" web page where he rattles on about a subject that he clearly knows nothing about, how people need to wipe their drive XX times before it becomes reasonably unrecoverable (XX varies, but is always a figure they just pulled out of thin air) or forum topics like this one where people, armed with little more than a strongly held opinion, counter a white-paper written by experts in the subject that analyses data, statistics, and scientific information to come to a conclusion.
