cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12670977
iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes
I appreciate this thread’s nuanced discussion of how file deletion works from a technical standpoint depending on storage medium. But as a user, when I delete something, it should go away forever. I don’t care how.
I don’t care how
grabs your phone, throws it on the ground and blasts it with a shotgun
There you go! =)
Cloud’s deleted folder enters the chat.
Objective updated: shoot cloud server
Many years ago, we had a troubled employee leave work very mad. He was quite furious with his computer and went home for his revolver unbeknownst to us. He came back to work with it and unloaded all six rounds into the system. Each round went through the case and each one missed the drive/motherboard/videocard. So, the system was still working despite the abrupt extra cooling holes. This further incensed him and he went away even madder, but this time in cuffs.
Wow, how do you suck that bad at aiming?
It’s pretty easy if you don’t know where the computer’s vital organs are
You never shoot the
messengermonitor.
The computer is good at dodging without moving
It’s like how I can talk while holding my breath but only over a call
John Connor has entered the chat
I’ve been pleased with their messaging on that - “deleted items remaining trash for [some period]…“ (IIRC)
Well… if you really want to delete them…
takes blasted phone, insert remnants into small iron cup, places in inductive furnace
Hey at least I know it gets the job done
Hmm. I don’t know. Like, the actual surface involved in the storage is a lot smaller than the actual phone, and I imagine that you may-or-not destroy it with a given pellet.
I remember '80s movies – from a time when a lot of people weren’t all that personally-familiar with computers – where someone “destroying a computer” consisted of shooting its screen, which might be not that far off what would be happening. here. In fact, I bet that that probably has a TV Tropes entry.
googles
Well, they have a guy punching it, same kind of idea.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ComputerEqualsMonitor
I will destroy this machine!
Yes! Now the other side will have to spend a whole $100 to replace it!
Might be kind of the same idea, just writ small.
I’ve started seeing people, who really should know better, referring to the PC tower as the CPU. As in, “I bought a bracket that mounts to my variable height desk which can hold my CPU up off the floor and let it move with my desk”.
Bro I’m looking at a picture of a custom water cooled PC here, you should know the fucking difference between a CPU and a computer case.
Eh, that’s been a thing for a long time. Decades at least.
I think that the problem is that there isn’t really a great term to clearly refer to the “non-monitor-and-peripherals” part of the “computer”. “Case” would refer to just the case, not what’s in it. “Tower” or “desktop” is overspecific, refers to particular form factors. I have a tower, but some people have under-monitor desktops (though that’s rare today) or various times of small form factor PCs. If I say “computer”, that doesn’t really clearly exclude peripherals.
And honestly, we don’t really use the term “GPU” quite correctly either. I’ll call a whole PCI video card a “GPU”, but I suppose that strictly-speaking, that should only be talking about a specific chip on the card.
8 bit games would label the computer player as CPU as a shorthand, I honestly probably got snapped at by a nerd sometime in my teens for making the mistake and got the central processing unit lecture so I don’t really make that association but I also never heard anyone pronounce “NES” not as an acronym prior to YouTube, so, I figure different people have different experiences also.
At one time I remember people commonly referring to the case as the hard drive.
I learned everything about how to build a PC from buildapc… like 12 years ago. Nowadays it has been infested by idiots who don’t know shit but act like they do, and also think more RGB = more better.
I don’t know what happened, but I put together a PC for the first time in some years, and holy mother of God, all the components have RGB LEDs slapped on them now. I had to actively work to find parts that didn’t have RGB LEDs on them (and I still accidentally wound up with some on the motherboard). I mean, yeah, LED case fans have been a thing for a while, and there was always a contingent that put electroluminescent strips on their computers. And it kinda grew into a lot of keyboards and mice. But now it’s a large portion of CPU fans, most cases, RAM sticks have RGB LEDs, motherboards have RGB LEDs. I didn’t have trouble finding non-RGB LED NVMe storage, or non-RGB LED SATA drives, but even there, you can get them. Hell, there are RGB LED cables.
I can only assume that a large portion of the people building PCs these days are doing it to have them physically blinged up.
Like, nothing wrong with wanting to do that, but I couldn’t believe the tiny proportion that wasn’t doing that.
I actually like having lights on the keyboard. Mostly because I can find rarely used keys in the dark.
The only way my box is blinged up is with tastefully beige-brown fans. I actually felt slightly betrayed by Noctua when they started making black fans.
You know what? They’re technically correct. There’s historically plenty of computer systems which came in multiple different cases, sometimes that’s still the case but the most obvious examples are historical, where you would get something like the CPU (yes) in one case and then a huge-ass card reader in another case and drum memory in yet another. Those drums were used as RAM. Each case was standing on the floor, at least chest-high.
Simply integrating various peripherals into the CPU doesn’t make the CPU any less of the CPU. Even ignoring the case thing and just looking at the CPU package (or even die): Modern CPUs contain a lot of things that would’ve been external to it, or even in a different case, in the past. You’ll hear the term “SoC”, system on a chip, thrown around but that’s misleading most CPUs nowadays are SoCs: You have your CPU cores, yes, but you also have a memory controller, you have storage interfaces and general IO (PCIe is a storage interface), as well as a GPU. It’s been a long time since mainboards came with northbridges. Newer CPUs may have enough memory on package to reasonably run without external memory (and not just “use the cache as ram during early boot” kind of stuff).
Easy peasy
Lemon squeezey
But as a user, when I delete something, it should go away forever.
Years of working tech support in my past tells me that this is a lie. “OMG restore this!”
I think tech would be a better place if it did actually go away when you deleted things. If something’s not explicitly backed up people really should have no hope of bringing it back.
The OS should never let that happen. It always should abstract the partition into a filesystem.
It’s to prevent you from accidentally deleting a photo you would never want to delete. If you want to make sure it’s deleted, you just go into the Photos app and delete it from the Recently Deleted folder. I prefer this approach, as I have accidentally deleted a photo that I did not mean to, and luckily it was still there. Use cases are different though, so.
That still doesn’t fully erase the data though. It just tells the computer that that space on the drive is available to be overwritten, but the 1s and 0s are still recoverable
Right, right. I understand that. I was just explaining why the option is good for people like me. I don’t take nudes, and I don’t receive nudes, so I don’t mind if the data is still there or not. I’m just glad the photo of me and my friend was still there when I noticed it was missing from my album after a recent meme deletion spree. lol
Imo there should be options for standard deletion and total deletion. Standard is faster, puts less wear on the drive, and keeps the files potentially recoverable, whole total would make it totally unrecoverable at the expense of taking slightly longer and putting a bit more wear on the drive
That is what thermite is for.
The second drive bay is the right size for a handy block of data erasing c4
No one will ever read my Zuck / Bezos fanfic.
Lol. I actually used to know a guy that claimed he used to have computer setup with a small thing to thermite on his hard drive and had set it up so if there were too many wrong passwords it would set the igniter off for the thermite. I don’t know if you really, did but he definitely had the technical skills to do that. He was one of those extreme early adopters of BSD and Linux who never used GUI. Oh and he was batshit crazy, legitimately I can see him thinking that was a good idea.
Nothing sinister, we just don’t delete what we say we delete. Instead we keep it in your profile to feed the algorithms and set the “deleted” flag to make you think it’s gone.
I mean, to be completely fair, that’s how data storage works.
We cannot really just make data disappear, so we let it get overwritten instead
But clearly the data is not overwritten and this was intentional. How do I know? Because that would amount to a massive amount of data, if it was de to a bug in Apple software or underlying filesystems, it would be detected in monitoring systems “Hey, we’re using 10x the data we should be, maybe we should look into it”.
The mistake was in the flag code that was supposed to fool us.
no when I say “overwritten” I mean that the area is set as deleted in the filesystem and the next time something writes to that area the data that was there before is disregarded.
and the next time something writes to that area the data that was there before is disregarded.
A single overwrite might not be enough to defeat physical forensics because shadows of the old data persist in how the new data is stored. Also when it comes to SSDs you might be waiting a long time for the data to get overwritten as the drive will wear-level its erm sectors (what are those things called with SSDs?).
They are called cells IIRC
So are you saying that they suffered from a filesystem bug that caused deletion failure? I’d imagine they use standard filesystems on their backend, I haven’t heard about any bugs like this.
If you ask me, what’s more likely, that a company known for shitty behavior lies about deleting files so they can continue to use that information to profit, – OR – that they are experiencing a filesystem bug on their backend, I’ll choose the former.
no I don’t believe a damn word of what apple’s gonna say on this, I just wanted to get the message out there that generally file deletion works by allowing data to be overwritten, so if the images are local this could very well just be that either it’s showing data that hasn’t been overwritten yet or it accidentally brought things out of the “recently deleted” depending on how long ago it was deleted.
Undeleting nudes
That’s iPhone
Seriously: I don’t think the cost benefit is there to intentionally make a maneuver like this. Any crap they pull needs to have a perfectly proper explanation, with our agreement to a specific term buried somewhere in their policies. Can only imagine how much money they blew throwing these billboards up all over the San Francisco Bay area. We have to buy Apple over Google for ostensible privacy gains, and Apple has to lock us in to their walled gardens to make up for their comparatively smaller ad/data business.
This post assumes Apple is aethical (that’s like amoral but for ethics right?) but still a self-interested economic actor. They can’t let short-term greed get in the way of long-term greed!
Seriously: I don’t think the cost benefit is there to intentionally make a maneuver like this.
You might be right
They can’t let short-term greed get in the way of long-term greed!
lol
deleted by creator
the shred command in Linux tries to do this, but it may not work if the hardware moves rewritten data blocks around to mitigate wear.
shreddoesn’t even necessarily work at the OS level. If you use something likeext3and I assumeext4, normally when you overwrite data in a file, you’re not overwriting data even at the logical level in the block device. Journalling entails that you commit data to somewhere else on the disk, then update the metadata atomically to reference the new data.It was more-practical in an era of older filesystems.
Proper deletion should include writing all ones or all zeroes to the block but y’all be lazy as fuck.
Only necessary on the ol spinning rust, with SSDs not only is it completely unnecessary, but it also burns extra writes.
Spinny’s store data magnetically on the platter with 1s and 0s, SSDs store data on the NAND as a held charge. If there’s a charge in the block it’s a 1 if there’s no charge it’s a 0.
With spinny’s, a file gets marked as “deleted” but the residual magnetic 1s and 0s will remain on the platter until eventually overwritten
With SSDs a file gets marked “deleted” and within no more than a few minutes TRIM comes along and ensures the charge on the NAND is released for that data, there’s no residuals to worry about like with spinny’s and is in fact necessary to ensure decent lifespans.
Wow, the SSD can hold the charges perfectly while unplugged for ages? Amazing.
In a post apocalyptic world where I am in charge of building a storage drive and I’m given all the instructions and fabs, the world is going without storage.
Wow, the SSD can hold the charges perfectly while unplugged for ages? Amazing.
Yup. Before flash memory, devices like video game cartridges which had game saves actually needed a battery to power the memory holding the saves.
I want a spinny as a pet now. Sounds cute.
But wouldn’t TRIM be the deleting he is requesting? Removing the charges would be setting all the bits in that block to the same value.
That just makes no sense to do, modern storage is write limited. As long as you used encryption the old bits mean nothing to anyone but you.
SSDs are. Big storage is not using SSDs.
I’m not an expert, but wouldn’t proper deletion be writing random ones and zeroes to the block? Multiple times?
