Trash, Delete, Shred

[Michael S. Mikowski]

On Saturday 28 June 2003 17:58, Dawit A. wrote:

<snip>
> > Also, in "real life" we would always shred all of paperwork when we
> > emptied the trash.  I would personally find this a very useful option.
>
> Not everybody does this and the idea of shreding in the real world is
> completely different than that of the digital one. See the current debate
> about the existing "Shred" feature in konqueror.  Sherding can be done with
> some degree of reliability in the real world whereas such action cannot be
>   guaranteed for magnetic storage medium.  The only reliable way to
> completely destroy information from a hard drive is to dismantle it and
> burn the platters IIRC.
</snip>

Yes, that's true from what I understand.  But security is always a matter of 
degrees.    Physical shredding isn't fool proof either -- I remember old 
pictures of shredded documents the KGB painstakingly reconstructed from CIA 
trash.  The point, however, is to make it more expensive to recover the data.  
Does electronic shredding do this?

Cheers,

Mike