Why 'rm -R star' Isn't Enough

zdburke writes: "Short but interesting article in the New York Times (free reg req'd) about how difficult it is to cover your digital tracks because electronic documents are so well distributed -- on your lap top, on your workstation, on the server... Yes there are tools to thoroughly delete files on your computer, rather than just unlinking them when they're put in the trash, but it's the distributed nature of content these days that poses a special problem to the Ollie North's of the world."

Comments

Re:Mirrors

[Simon Peters]

Nothing like inhaling lead particles from your pencil shavings while you're floating around in space

Erm, don't pencils use Graphite these days?

Re:Hence, GNU shred from fileutils,standard on GNU

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey fuckface, does it make sense to you to create a program with special delete functionality, together with some obscure name, rather than add that functionality to the existing file-deletion utility?

The GNU utilities are criticized for being bloated. In that fine tradition, they have created a separate program to duplicate half of rm's functionality when adding a simple flag would have been (and is, on BSD) effective. You lose. (Which is apt, since the GNU project is populated mostly by losers.)

Good day!