And leaving a trail of posts expressing remorse carries no weight in court.

OC's got it right. In the future use Bitzi, so you'll get no more nasties. Now go outside and see that the cops are not coming, breathe; stay there while you consider spending more time outside. Do that often.

Not too long ago a friend of mine accidentally got some filth on his harddrive. It was a deliberately mislabeled file, changed to the name of a popular kids movie at the time. Thankfully he had the common sense to preview the file before watching it with his daughter.

So he should have checked the file with Bitzi before downloading, but apart from that, he had no way of knowing it wasn't a legit rip. Name looked like a scene release, file size was the normal 700ish MB, avi extension, the works.

Just always use Bitzi to check the file before downloading. Can save you heaps of trouble.

Not sure what all the heat is really all about here, but...

Two simple points for now.

It is NOT emphasized strongly enough - and the very title of this thread is fundamentally in error - that it is NOT Limewire or any other Gnutella Network client providing 'offensive' material.
Limewire is just one of many 'clients'.
The material is made available by individuals who happen to be using one tool/client or another. So, cease any specific references to Limewire or any other one client. Those who have posted with the conviction that there is some degree of responsibility due to any Gnutella Network client are only expressing their ignorance of the system and p2p networks in general.

And...

In the great majority of cases file recovery can be achieved very easily and at no cost...

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File Recovery - Home

Try it.
Be amazed... After so-called overwrites, defrags and 'cleanings' you will still be able to recover enormous amounts of data - either perfect clean files or partials that can be 'repaired' and certainly file names and locations.
Even the Piriform 'Secure Delete' function doesn't really wipe anything !!!

Thanks for that ususla. I visited the site and it claims to recover normally deleted items via the recycle bin. I.e. files that have been dumped from the recycle bin but not otherwise overwritten. These fellows here are claiming a video file can be recovered well enough to determine if its child pornography after being overwritten several time. The overwrite might be in the normal course of using the computer or deliberately by a program which targets that file.

I asked this fellow if his program could pull up a single letter file after it had been overwritten several times and was given a cocky answer. No pun intended there.

Most people interested enough to find out know that a file is never deleted via the recycle bn. The space is simply made available to be written over. However a "cleaning" program can target that specific file for you and overwrite it immediately with random code and do it multiple times if you desire. Its been claimed here that even when overwritten a video file, with its massive amount of data, could be restored enough to view it well enough to be used in a court of law as proof of ownership of child porn.

Like recycled steel made into a car its impossible to tell it used to be a tin can. In my humble opinion anyway.

I have recovered deleted files myself, not cp but that's beside the point. E.g a whole movie - 27-29 minutes into it. This was not deleted through the recycle bin. Probably the main reason that I was unable to recover the last two minutes, was that I didn't have a lot of free space left and Limewire was downloading for several hours before noticing the the file was gone.

Strewth !

So what ?
NOT true.
It's all just false marketing of ineffectual products.
(See numerous references, above.)

Correct.
It IS the reality.

Incorrect.
If desired, by whatever 'powers-that-be', the probability is extremely great that the metals (alloys) and plastics can be defined to the actual producing factory and batch code(s).



A moment of recent personal history...

3 weeks ago I was doing some 'cleaning lady' stuff on some of my older external HDDs... One of them was an old Seagate IDE '160GB' drive...

Said drive has been 'cleaned' with WindowWasher 5 and 6 more times than I could count... well, at least 3 times per day, every day, while it was 'active'. Also zapped with C r a pCleaner - the old name for Piriform's CCleaner of today....It had been Diskeeper defragmented 100s of times, including changing the MFT size at least 10 times...
While I had it up, I thought, "Hey, let's see what the latest version of Piriform's Recuva 'finds'..."

Magic ! I recovered, clean and complete, a 1.32GB .avi file that some fool (no names can be divulged for legal reasons - but it was ursula !!!) had deleted in error. Me happy to have it back as it was a rare one... And mega-Tas to Piriform !
Not only was the .avi fie recovered, but it was recovered from a disc that had had all of the above mentioned 'cleaning' and 'sorting' AND had been severely abused by filling it to total capacity, many times... (DOH !)

This is real.


Forget any ideas about Recycle Bin being the 'culprit' and accept the reality that no matter what you do, no matter what marketing cons you fall for, the stuff is still there and EASILY recoverable.

Now, about some of the comments that have been made regarding the intentions behind some of the 'warning' posts here about the impossibility of actually deleting data...

I cannot speak for the others, except perhaps for Peerless, but my intentions (and I am certain the motives are the same for Peerless) have NOT been to frighten people... ONLY to educate them regarding the hard-a$$ real-world reality of 'deleting'.
And, to attempt to help people avoid wasting money and considerable amounts of time attempting the impossible, i.e. 'secure deletions'.

Last, AGAIN, I must repeat that Limewire or Phex or BearShare or Frostwire or Shareaza or Gnucleus or any of the Torrent apps have absolutely nothing to do with the content distributed by the users of said 'clients'.

If it wouldn't cause what I am sure would be a sh¡tstorm with the admin here, I would edit the title of this thread right now. Don't misunderstand... I am practically the president pro tempore of the anti-Limewire brigade, so I am not 'protecting' anyone.

The problem with 'child porn' is not anything to do with p2p networks...
The problem is simple...

!. There is a client base that buys the stuff.

2. (And secondary to 1.) There are the producers of such stuff supplying the existing market. The existing market is not new. It is ancient.
(Ain't no market without buyers, eh ? Late night mass, anyone ?)


Of course, 10 year old brides (practically bred for the sole purpose of financial gain as 'wives') in the so-called biggest 'democracy' in the world does not constitute child porn, right ?
So India is ok, hmmm ?

Hypocrisy abounds.

Even in the environs of good old SNA !

as a note...I freely admit to wanting to instill a bit of fear....hopefully it will make the person be a bit more careful in the future...

in the big picture Urs has understood my motivations correctly...and she definitely has a grip on the reality of the world, both present and past....not many people have taken the time to have paid attention to the real history of mankind...

__________________


So Long and Thanks for All the Files
_____________________________________________

Beware of the big 3 insurance companies in Texas! Read your policies carefully (maybe you'll need a lawyer) Allstate, Farmers & State Farm are overextended and their 'coverage' is worthless...a true waste of your money Read This

Only one thing to add:
When I tell a program to write to a specific sector on a disk, I cannot know anymore that the disk will really write there.

I can only know that it will write the data somewhere.

We tried that in an informatics class: Write data to the outer rim and to the inner rim of the disk. The outer rim should have different access values than the inner rim, for physical reasons (the disk spins).

Our results didn't show that effect. Rather they showed us that modern hard disks optimize the data layout internally, so even when some tool completely erases any trace which could be found by software, you can't know if there aren't parts which remain in a sector the disk began to see as unfit.

Another example: If my disk gets a "dead bit", I won
t see anything of it, if I didn't have some data on it.
If it's empty, the disk will just silently remap the logic bit to some otehr hardware bit, and no software tool will be able to access it.

Long story short: Additionally to recovery programs, a physical check of your disk can uncover stuff which wasn't even reachable by software anymore.

__________________

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Words fail me in expressing how very, very disappointed I am that no one, especially OCca, picked up on the above !!!

Perhaps it is because said SNA is the international prefix for good old
John Wayne International Airport (Love the 'International' bit !)

Nah !!! That can't be the reason.

Must be because any community that is so disturbed as to name an airport after a d00d that was ashamed of his real name is also, rightly so, perhaps ashamed of itself !?

I mean, who wants to park their illicit-gotten-gains G7 at
Marion Michael Morrison 'International' Airport ???


er, It's also kinda hard to believe in some ugly right-wing psycho named Marion,eh ?...

Even if he was fabricated into being Saint John of Dumfukistan.



Which brings me to the closer of this delightful post in this totally useless and grossly misnamed thread...

OCca, there's a lot of the californica in you and the majority of your posts make it obvious that you are one of the untold millions of sit-in-zens of The People's Imperialistic Kleptocracy Of Dumfukistan who have learned to write before they can read.

Kiss Kiss

OK

I changed the title of this thread.

It was always inappropriate and grossly unfair to Limewire.

This should have been done long ago.