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Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen?
An anonymous reader writes "I have just moved overseas on a 2-year working holiday visa and so I picked up a netbook for the interim, an MSI Wind U100 Plus running WinXP. I love it to bits. But as I am traveling around I am somewhat worried about theft. Most of my important stuff is in Gmail and Google Docs; however, I don't always have Net access and find it useful to gear up the offline versions for both. Ideally I would like to securely delete all the offline data from the hard drive if it were stolen. Since it is backed up in the cloud, and the netbook is so cheap I don't really care about recovery, a solution that bricks it would be fine — and indeed would give me a warm glow knowing a prospective thief would have wasted their time. But it's not good if they can extract the HD and get at the data some other way. All thief-foiling suggestions are welcome, be they software, hardware, or other."
The answer to your problem is whole disk encryption, not trying to delete the data.
Whole-Disk AES via TrueCrypt is only BARELY above the "acceptable" threshold on a Core Solo. I cringe to think what it'd be like on an Atom. A better bet would be to use a container-hosted TrueCrypt volume, and set your My Documents folder into that volume.
As others will have already said: use truecrypt. In addition, use two account: yours with a password, and another one (visible from the login shell) without password. Put a script in it that wipes the disk if anybody logs in it.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
All the more reason to use a Linux or BSD based OS.
To the average thief or receiver of stolen goods, a netbook running an alternate OS is as good as bricked.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.