How to Delete the Evidence in Six Easy Steps
I remember when I used to live at home… whenever my parents went away on vacation I would spend a lot of time browsing porn sites. I’d stay up until 2am browsing for some good pics (I couldn’t download video because I was too paranoid that I wouldn’t be able to completely delete it from the family computer!). At the end of the week, knowing my parents were coming home soon, I would wipe everything clean using the follwing (memorized) checklist:
[If you do download/watch videos, remember to make sure that the name or URL doesn’t show up in the history of the software you used to view it. If using Windows Media Player, for example, try randomly opening 10 non-pornographic files in order to remove the porn from the “Recently Played/Viewed” list that shows up when you click on “File”.]
Well, I guess not everyone knows how to clean their computers efficiently:
On average, 70% of re-sold hard-drives and memory cards contain pornographic material according to research carried out on 1,000 hard-drives over the course of a year by Disklabs Data Recovery and Computer Forensics.
Wow… that’s some percentage. Perhaps more people should memorize my checklist, especially if they plan to re-sell of donate their computers. Then again, at least donating a pornography-ridden computer to high schools would help students learn the birds and the bees (especially since there are so many States offering abstinence-only education programs!).
Save the planet; recycle porn!
September 16th, 2005 at 7:09 pm
LOL, talk about old hat…try all this with a wife who knows all these tricks. The only way life is livable is with firefox and quicktime. I am adding you link tonite, sorry about the delay. Everytime I fix something, something else goes haywire. I can get posts now, but I don’t know who wrote them, and I can’t see their site. The scrolling images at the top of my site have been fixed, and now they need fixing again. I give up…for today.
September 17th, 2005 at 11:07 am
Thanks for the tips! I was a little nervous, you know how I like to surf the porn!
September 18th, 2005 at 11:28 am
Kitka, thanks for posting this reminder. I constantly remind people about this, but they forget. I’ll have to link to this. Also, merci beaucoup for linking to me. a bientot.
September 21st, 2005 at 4:08 pm
I think I will just continue using window washer and adaware, people still try and remove all that stuff manually?
December 1st, 2005 at 12:38 am
That’s not going to be enough to clean up your pc should you stumble on a CP site or have a thing for lolitas. Windows leaves traces everywhere, ini files, dat files, even in your registry.
December 1st, 2005 at 9:41 am
That’s great, Lee… then do you have any suggestions?
December 1st, 2005 at 8:21 pm
You could read this page. http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1827 Reformatting is always an option, make a clean backup. The kiddie porn sites are getting out of control, really getting brave. I stumble into them on a weekly basis now - and I crawled one by accident while doing a picaloader session (It’s a program that crawls the web for images just like goggle does). That means KP was placed on my hard drive - damn.
I don’t ever remember seeing one till a few months ago. I think the rise of the one man TGP (the beerfarts, and ciscoboards type of blog) has led to this. But don’t touch my porn blogs
December 1st, 2005 at 10:27 pm
Lee- Thanks for the suggestion, but reformatting your computer is not an option for most people. I didn’t write this post in order to teach people how to delete kiddie porn to escape authorities, I wrote it to teach the average Joe how to keep the computer relatively clear to make it seem like they didn’t just access porn on their parents’ computer…
I’ve never even seen any kiddie porn and I’m glad I haven’t… especially after seeing the Butterfly Effect…
December 2nd, 2005 at 3:57 am
Right yoiu are my little cutie. I find myself quite fond of you already. There are other reasons people try to keep their hard drives clean (Taxes, Divorce, Guilt, fears of Criminal investigations. The PC has become an integral part of our lives but yet we don’t really understand some basics of how it works and what it does with our information, like the amateur thief who uses his cell-phone to call his fence. Or the guy, who in a moment of weakness, clicks a link he knows he shouldn’t without using proxies. The other side isn’t playing fair - you are not a person to them, just a star in their arrest crown.
I wonder if anyone thinks about the implications of destroying a life and imprisoning a man for looking at a picture. What could be more un-American then that. In the history of our screwed up world I don’t believe any civilization has ever imprisoned someone for looking at a picture.
April 9th, 2006 at 9:16 am
Great article. I am just sad I dont know how to reply properly, though, since I want to show my appreciation like many other.