• lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I don’t care how

      grabs your phone, throws it on the ground and blasts it with a shotgun

      There you go! =)

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 months ago

            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.

            • tal@lemmy.today
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              2 months ago

              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.

              • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works
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                2 months ago

                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.

            • DoctorButts@kbin.melroy.org
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              2 months ago

              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.

              • tal@lemmy.today
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                2 months ago

                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.

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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      2 months ago

      If every time an OS had to delete something it had to fill the space with zeros or garbage data multiple times just to make extra sure it’s gone, we’d all be trashing our flash chips very fast, and performance would be heavily degraded. There really isn’t a way around this.

      The solution to keep private files private is to put them into an encrypted container of some sort where you control the keys.

      • 5too@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Step away from hardware constraints for a moment, and consider the OS:

        If the OS says a file is deleted, under no circumstances should the OS be able to recover it. Sure, certain tools may exist to pull it back; but it should be unavailable to the OS after that. And yet, apparently a software update was enough to recover these files. Thus, the concerns about data safety in an environment where the OS cannot be trusted to remove data when it says it has been removed.

        • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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          2 months ago

          So let’s stop calling it “deleted” then, and call it what it is. “Forgetting”.

          I’m not sure what you actually want the OS to do about it other than as I said, fill it with random data.

          • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 months ago

            I think this is just semantics at this point, but to me there is a difference between “deleted” and “erased”. I see deleted as the typical “moved to trash” or rm action, with erased being overwritten bits, or like microwaving a drive.

            Edit - If i remember correctly deleting something in most OS’s/File Systems just deletes the pointer to that file on disk. The data just hangs out until new data is written to that sector. The solution, other than the one you mentioned about encrypting stored data and destroying the key when you want the data “deleted”, would be to only ever store data in volatile memory. That would make for a horrendous user experience though.

            • Hildegarde@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              You can delete files by overwriting the data. On Linux its shred -zu [file]. Its slow but good to do if you are deleting sensitive data.

              Its good its not the standard delete function.

      • Kairos@lemmy.today
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        2 months ago

        Well, the storage device should handle that then. And modern NVMEs do. Self-encrypted drives are used to hide deleted information from an attacker that desolders the storage chips.

        Edit: there are NVMEs that dont use self encryption, BUT they should still recognize a deleted sector.

    • tiredofsametab@kbin.run
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      2 months ago

      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!”

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

    • Kairos@lemmy.today
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      2 months ago

      The OS should never let that happen. It always should abstract the partition into a filesystem.