From: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 96 23:33:26 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Wipe Swap File
Message-ID: <v02120d00ad28ece6b721@[192.0.2.1]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 20:27 1/21/96, jim bell wrote:

>However, I _still_ want to see brainless operating systems like MSDOS
>changed to erase (zero) allocated  data buffers before and after use (and
>especially before re-use!), so that parts of vital files don't accidentally
>get written to the ends of other files.

Not only DOS suffers from this problem. The MacOS does as well. All 'wipe
unused space' utilities for the Mac fail on a typical hard drive to
overwrite several hundred kB of data. Few people seem to care that the OS
fills the unused parts of the last block of a file with whatever happens to
be in the buffer.

Not good.


-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com>
   PGP encrypted mail preferred.