Deep Inside My Thoughts

I’ve always been, for lack of a better word, paranoid.

I’m the guy who wipes his hard drive and files he deletes. I’ve used the same program for a few years now, called Eraser. This freeware program is probably one of the best out there for what I do. I like to keep my personal data safe. Even when you ‘delete’ a file from Windows, it isn’t deleted. Rather a flag is created on that bit of data, and it’s not shown in Explorer. However, all the data is still on your disk, you just can’t see it. That’s how recovery program work, they find the data that is tagged and just replace it.

If you gave your PC with bank account numbers, credit card, social security numbers away to someone without cleaning it, the 3rd party can take that data. Rather, I use Eraser rather religously to delete files. This is done by overwriting every piece of data of a file with random 0’s and 1’s. It’s very near impossible to recover data that is overwritten a few times. For example, the Department of Defense overwrites Classified data at least 7 times before it is considered safe. I overwrite mine 10 times. I use random data for a few passes, but also a few hand generated passes too. I delete both files and unused hard drive space like this. It would be hard to recover any data overwritten in this fashion.

Another thing I’m looking into is a biometric fingerprint scanner for my computer. Lexar makes a usb device called the JumpDrive TouchGuard. I’ve been looking into this, mostly for the ‘geek’ factor. I mean, come on, wouldn’t it be cool to swipe a fingerprint and be logged on? For the most part, of what I read, I understand its mostly securre. But just remember, you can always go into safe mode and bypass most software like this. That is the one achilies heel. The software is not very intergrated into Windows, so it won’t load during safe mode. But still, your average computer user, and perhaps your average laptop theif won’t realize that.

Since the thing is a jump drive, it should be able to work on my desktop and my laptop. So I should be able to control access to each. Plus, your normal person who steals laptops will be pissed when he realizes its just a useless piece of junk without my fingerprint. I can’t wait til I have enough money to get a jumpdrive like this. I’m excited at the prospect of having a biometric toy to play with.

One can hope. I need news toys to play with.