Secure Empty Trash

The Memory Hole

The Memory Hole

Ingsoc
Hello.
I am sorry if this has been brought up before (or if this should be painfully obvious).

I remember hearing about how you could change the amount of times you could overwrite files using "Secure Empty Trash". Indeed, I believe I remember seeing pictures from a beta that showed the different selections you could make for Secure Deletion. Did they take this out (instead keeping the amount of overwrites at a set number) or is it somewhere and I am just not looking hard enough?

Thank you, and again I apologize if this has been brought up already. Also, I apologize if this post is incoherent or vague.
 
Secure empty trash actually overwrites the file with ones and zeros (as opposed to a regular deletion which basically hides the file, puts it aside until some other file can overwrite it). The purpose of Secure Delete is so someone cannot just go back into your hard drive later and recover sensitive information such as credit card numbers or passwords (although, if they had the resources, devotion, and time, they can still recover the information they are looking for).

Here is a good explanation (which I slightly edited for context reasons) I found on the web for those who do not understand my rambling:

"Think of the files on your computer as a box of cassette tapes. On one of those tapes, you have yourself singing "Happy Birthday". When you delete a file using the trash can, it's just like you took that cassette, took off the label and put it back in the box. Sooner or later, you might record something else on that cassette, but in the meantime, anyone with access to that box of cassettes could find that unlabelled tape and play it. When you securely delete a file using Secure Empty Trash, it's like you took that cassette and recorded something over top of you singing "Happy Birthday", multiple times. No one could listen to you singing "Happy Birthday" now, even if they wanted to."
 
I remember the options in the developer beta... but you're right, the options have gone (unless, like you I haven't looked hard enough).

I think I read an article (maybe macosxhints.com) about how you could do it from the command line.
 
Take a look at - man rm
an
man srm
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From MacOSXHints;

So everyone knows that you can now use the \"securely empty trash\" feature. What if you want to remove a file but not use the Trash? The new feature in Panther is the command/usr/bin/srm. There are two other options that secure empty trash doesn't use:
-m, --medium
overwrite the file with 7 US DoD compliant passes (0xF6, 0x00,
0xFF, random, 0x00, 0xFF, random)

-z, --zero
after overwriting, zero blocks used by file

So, srm -mz [filename] will do a DoD compliant erase and zero the data.

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OK, so how can I make my dock trash just do a srm by default? Or, would it be wiser to make a drag-n-drop item on the desktop somewhere to do this?
 
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