Must be important.
spintronic
You won't find anything.
Everytime I post, I do a gutman method wipe.
Someone is still there.
Now either gutmann, left an entrance, or there is a flaw in his
method.
My advice to "whoever it is".
Fuck off, and suck a lollypopo.
IAAH
> I am being hacked to death, from someone on this site.
>
> You won't find anything.
>
> Everytime I post, I do a gutman method wipe.
And what is *that* supposed to accomplish?
>
> Someone is still there.
>
> Now either gutmann, left an entrance, or there is a flaw in his
> method.
>
> My advice to "whoever it is".
>
> Fuck off, and suck a lollypopo.
>
--
"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot
prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian godmay exist; so may the
gods of
Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these
hypotheses is
more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable
knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them."
- Bertrand Russell
John Harshman
to do with Sidney Greenstreet?
Stuart
A creotard and his computer are soon parted.
Stuart
Woland
> I am being hacked to death, from someone on this site.
This isn't a "site."
Bruce Stephens
Here's my best guess: he thinks he's being hacked, and hacked by someone
from talk.origins. (Most likely he uses Windows and just has one or
more bits of malware; that's not unusual, after all.)
The "gutman" or "gutmann" is, I guess, a reference to Peter Gutmann,
well known cryptographer/security guy. He wrote a paper "Secure
Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory", but that doesn't
seem likely to be relevant. I guess he wrote some other advice about
safer internet usage that spintronic's referring to, but I don't
remember reading it. (Maybe it's someone else he's referring to, I'm
just guessing it's Gutmann.)
No idea why spintronic thinks it might be anybody from talk.origin.
He's part of the entertainment, after all, so why would we want to harm
his computer, even if we had the technical ability or time?
Mitchell Coffey
Peter Gutmann is a computer scientist whose PhD thesis ca.1995
exhaustively investigated write-wiping algorithms for securely erasing
data on hard disks (and ram memory). He's known for the "Gutmann
Method," which proposed an algorithm consisting of 35 data patterns to
be written successively over the region of a hard disk to be erased.
The point of the different patterns was to over-write the region
regardless of the encoding mechanism used by the particular drive.
The assumption here was that you don't know the encoding mechanism
your drive uses, otherwise you need to use only those patterns
appropriate to your drive - thus virtually all evocations of the
Gutmann Method are clueless. This is particularly the case in that
most of the encoding mechanism assumed by Gutmann now archaic and, in
extra-particular, virtually all PC and Mac drives use an encoding that
Gutmann noted just needed over-writing with randomized data, that his
patterns were not applicable.
More recent research shows that data on the latest hard drives is so
tightly packed that over-writing a time or two with all ones then all
zeros will make things gone forever.
Anyway, what's happening here is Spin apparently thinks someone is
accessing his drive and reading data.
Mitchell Coffey
heekster
Just because you're not out to get him, it doesn't mean that he is not
paranoid.
Woland
Spin! The hacker is in your pants! Get out of your pants!
All-seeing-I
wrote:
>
> - Show quoted text -
In spinny's defense, since I began posting here I have had many
attacks. One of them was quite annoying and did some damage.(which is
against the law)
All-seeing-I
>
> - Show quoted text -
No, he is saying a virus was planted on his machine and even writing
over it with the Gutmann method of zeros or one's up to 35 times, it
still did not eliminate the problem. IIRC even the military used the
Gutmann for awhile when it wanted to erase all traces of a file and
make it unrecoverable.
Spinny is a bit out of date. The Gutmann will not remove all traces of
malware or viruses these days.
guscubed
You dolt. I challenge you to find a virus/trojan/malware that would
survive a complete hard-drive reformatting, Guttman method or not.
If you and Spinny want to ensure that you don't receive any more
malware I suggest you both completely reformat your hard-drives after
each and every post you make, it's the only way to be sure!
Chris Thompson
news:125e8d7b-8477-4169...@c3g2000yqd.googlegroups.com:
Spinny is pretending to be more computer savvy than he really is. He
bandies terms about without knowing their meaning or (lack of)
significance.
Chris
Klaus Hellnick
That is not unlikely at all, considering the kinds of sites he visits
(porn, pseudoscience, and religious fanatic). I suppose he is not very
well versed on computer security, despite his attempt to name-drop.
Fundies also tend to use and "share" hacked software, thereby spreading
viruses and worms. Most virus outbreaks where I work were caused by
people using pirated software the got from church groups and bringing
infected floppies to work. Apparently it is fine to steal as long as you
can rationalize that you might use it to spread the word of Gawd.
bpuharic
he's the fat man sitting at the table...
Bob Casanova
in talk.origins, posted by John Harshman
<jhar...@pacbell.net>:
>spintronic wrote:
>> I am being hacked to death, from someone on this site.
>>
>> You won't find anything.
>>
>> Everytime I post, I do a gutman method wipe.
>>
>> Someone is still there.
>>
>> Now either gutmann, left an entrance, or there is a flaw in his
>> method.
>>
>> My advice to "whoever it is".
>>
>> Fuck off, and suck a lollypopo.
>>
>Can anyone explain what spinny is talking about?
You're kidding, right?
> Does it have anything
>to do with Sidney Greenstreet?
AFAIK Sidney Greenstreet never sold drugs, so that would
probably be a "no".
--
Bob C.
"Evidence confirming an observation is
evidence that the observation is wrong."
- McNameless
Bob Casanova
appeared in talk.origins, posted by Mitchell Coffey
<m.co...@starpower.net>:
So the burning question is, who here is that much of a
masochist?
Mike Dworetsky
What makes you think it was someone here? As opposed to a virus or trojan
picked up from a website or download? There are a lot of those around, and
no antivirus shield is perfect.
--
Mike Dworetsky
(Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)
Devils Advocaat
As I understand the Gutmann Method, it is used to securely delete
files on a hard drive and is unlikely to protect you against hackers.
May I suggest you invest in more appropriate security measures such as
a good firewall application.
Ye Old One
You should have kept taking the meds.
> One of them was quite annoying and did some damage.(which is
>against the law)
Sure you did.
--
Bob.
The truth is like ice water, it shocks you when it hits you, but no
one's ever died from it. Do yourself a favour and try it sometime.
Bruce Stephens
[...]
> Spinny is a bit out of date. The Gutmann will not remove all traces of
> malware or viruses these days.
That depends. In a sense it's true: Using some kind of "military
strength" wiping technique on odd files won't remove malware. But
that's always been true: this kind of wiping has always been irrelevant
for dealing with viruses.
OTOH, wiping your whole disk (and all other possible sources) and then
reinstalling from known good CDs will remove viruses, but it'll also
remove all your data (photos, music, etc.) so nobody wants to do that.
But that doesn't require "Gutmann" wiping, and never has done. And if
you're reinstalling Windows you then need to reinstall the various
service packs and things, and in that period (while you're updating) you
can be reinfected.
So (as usual) I think spintronic (and you) are confused. Gutmann was
talking about what can be retrieved by forensic analysis of hard disks
and other media after the data has allegedly been deleted. That's not
relevant to Windows viruses or other malware. (It's slightly relevant
for trojans that want to send your bank account detail to Russia in that
such malware might be able to recover ordinarily deleted files, but I'm
not sure any malware actually tries that, and there's no indication that
spintronic's talking about that.)
Gutmann's results are (I suspect) no longer relevant to current hard
disks, either. The data's *much* more densely packed.
J.J. O'Shea
(in article
<2c174cb6-c745-4d83...@j14g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>):
I doubt that. I doubt that very much.
> One of them was quite annoying and did some damage.(which is
> against the law)
Is that a fact? So what did you do about it? Did you, for example, file a
report with the relevant authorities?
Didn't think so.
--
email to oshea dot j dot j at gmail dot com.
All-seeing-I
wrote:
You suspect wrong. Of course one could erase an entire hard drive
using gutmann.
But that would be rather foolish and would take days if not months to
erase today's modern hard drives (that are up to terabytes in size),
block by block, thirty five times with 1's, 0's, or both.
And BTW, there are still many small portable utilities that can be
found that use gutmann to completely erase a single file or multiple
files on a hard drive so that there is no recovering any useable data.
Which is all gutmann was ever really good for; or even intended for.
Mitchell Coffey
He says nothing about viruses, but your's is certainly one possible
interpretation of Spin's point, and as good as mine. Note that Spin
gives absolutely no evidence that the origination of the supposed
attack is associated with T.O. Let me add that since Spin's post is
incoherent, as most have his recent ones been in particular, there is
no reason to take his assertions in this thread at face value. Surely
you aren't going to claim that Spin's recent posts making bizarre
investment claims suggested a man in touch with reality?
You misunderstand Gutmann's work; I refer you to his more recent work
and that of other experts.
Mitchell Coffey
heekster
you want to be safe?
get an old 3.5 inch floppy drive, hook it up to your pc, stick your
head in the floppy drive and type "a:\format" in the DOS window.
Repeat as necessary.
Mitchell Coffey
This is the URL to the latest version of Gutmann's paper, from his
website:
Regarding what you claim in this post, the following is from a not-
particularly-recent epilogue he has appended to his original paper.
Note in particular the second paragraph. There is much more recent
research by other experts that more than confirms his conclusions:
"Epilogue
"In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated
the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of
voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a
technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they
advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it
will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In
fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive
since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-
used) encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-
old MFM methods (if you don't understand that statement, re-read the
paper). If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you
only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to
perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes
of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good
scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected".
This was true in 1996, and is still true now.
"Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-
increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction
in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the
medium, it's unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent
drive except perhaps a single level via basic error-cancelling
techniques. In particular the drives in use at the time that this
paper was originally written have mostly fallen out of use, so the
methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-density
technology don't apply any more. Conversely, with modern high-density
drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive data on a drive and can't
erase it with 100% certainty, the chances of an adversary being able
to find the erased traces of that 10KB in 80GB of other erased traces
are close to zero.
"Another point that a number of readers seem to have missed is that
this paper doesn't present a data-recovery solution but a data-
deletion solution. In other words it points out in its problem
statement that there is a potential risk, and then the body of the
paper explores the means of mitigating that risk."
Note that in my post earlier in this thread I wrongly stated that the
Gutmann paper in question constituted his PhD thesis. It did not.
Mitchell Coffey
Dick C.
news:2c174cb6-c745-4d83...@j14g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:
> In spinny's defense, since I began posting here I have had many
> attacks. One of them was quite annoying and did some damage.(which is
> against the law)
Once, several years ago, I was running a firewall and recording all
the times and ip's of various machines attempting to contact my pc.
After a couple of days I realized that what might have seemed like
attempted intrusions were really either the server talking to my
machine, or somebody randomly pinging machines. What I have seen,
however, is malware, advertising, and viruses coming from the internet.
Mostly from file sharing or free software sites.
Easy thing to do, get a decent antivirus and firewall. Scan any program
you download, and be careful in what you do.
I notice that you go to a lot of differet sites looking for random
anti science information. I suspect that is the source of all your
problems.
I spend a lot of time on the internet, and the only time I have had
a virus was when one of my kids brought a floppy disk from an
infected pc. This was back in the days of windows 3.0.
Decent security and being aware of what you are doing prevents almost
all programs.
--
Dick #1349
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety."
~Benjamin Franklin
Home Page: dickcr.iwarp.com
email: dic...@gmail.com
Desertphile
<spint...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am being hacked to death, from someone on this site.
http://books.google.com/books?id=USVeX_LuEFAC
--
http://desertphile.org
Desertphile's Desert Soliloquy. WARNING: view with plenty of water
"Why aren't resurrections from the dead noteworthy?" -- Jim Rutz
Bruce Stephens
[...]
> You suspect wrong. Of course one could erase an entire hard drive
> using gutmann.
>
> But that would be rather foolish and would take days if not months to
> erase today's modern hard drives (that are up to terabytes in size),
> block by block, thirty five times with 1's, 0's, or both.
>
> And BTW, there are still many small portable utilities that can be
> found that use gutmann to completely erase a single file or multiple
> files on a hard drive so that there is no recovering any useable data.
So what relevance does that have to malware? If you suspect your
machine has a virus, say, how would using such a utility help?
I contend that (except in some odd combination of circumstances) it
wouldn't. Your best bet is to use an up to date antivirus program. If
(hypothetically, because I suspect no antivirus program will do this)
the only information it gives is which files might contain the virus
then simply deleting the files is sufficient---overwriting them 37 times
isn't going to add anything.
> Which is all gutmann was ever really good for; or even intended for.
Quite probably. Which makes it irrelevant (almost always) for dealing
with malware, as I said.
Desertphile
<ap...@email.com> wrote:
> In spinny's defense, since I began posting here I have had many
> attacks. One of them was quite annoying and did some damage.(which is
> against the law)
Yes: I did that. Sue me.
Desertphile
Medication would also help.
All-Seeing-I
>
> - Show quoted text -
Most gutmann applets allow various settings. (IIRC) 2, 4, 6. 12, bla
bla up to 35 passes depending on your needs and individual
configuration.
So what?
My point has always been that the gutman will not remove all traces of
a virus by itself. Unless of course you know all of the files involved
and their locations in which the virus has deposited them. Which is
somewhat difficult to know these days because hackers have become
quite good at what they do. Plus that could take quite a lot of time
even should you know which files and locations.
However. If one wishes to simply remove a single file and make it
unrecoverable, such as a secret family recipe or a letter to your
mistress, then the gutman is the way to go. The amount of passes that
you want made are set for the particular configuration of the machine
or the individuals level of paranoia. Which ever comes first.
I suspect that spinny did not actually do a gutmann but instead did a
low level format. He used the term "gutmann" to illistrate that he
formatted his HD.
It obviously did not solve his problem.
Often times problems such as his are not actually caused by a virus
but are either hardware or cable problems. Then configuration problems
should be considered and then virus problems last.
Actual boot viruses these days are rare because of such modern anti
virus programs that do boot scans.
Spinny's claim was someone from TO hacked him. Which does not sound
unreasonable although I doubt it.
All-Seeing-I
> > using gutmann.
>
> > But that would be rather foolish and would take days if not months to
> > erase today's modern hard drives (that are up to terabytes in size),
> > block by block, thirty five times with 1's, 0's, or both.
>
> > And BTW, there are still many small portable utilities that can be
> > found that use gutmann to completely erase a single file or multiple
> > files on a hard drive so that there is no recovering any useable data.
>
> machine has a virus, say, how would using such a utility help?
It would not.
Unless you knew all of the virus files and their locations.
Even then, it would not be the best choice to remove a virus.
>
> I contend that (except in some odd combination of circumstances) it
> wouldn't. Your best bet is to use an up to date antivirus program. If
> (hypothetically, because I suspect no antivirus program will do this)
> the only information it gives is which files might contain the virus
> then simply deleting the files is sufficient---overwriting them 37 times
> isn't going to add anything.
>
> > Which is all gutmann was ever really good for; or even intended for.
>
Ye Old One
The point, moron, is that with modern drives it doesn't work that way.
In fact, with a modern drive experts can retrieve things even after 35
passes because modern drives do not use stepper motors.
>
>So what?
>
>My point has always been that the gutman will not remove all traces of
>a virus by itself. Unless of course you know all of the files involved
>and their locations in which the virus has deposited them.
You would be daft to use such a routine to get rid of a virus/trojan.
But, then again, we know how daft you are.
> Which is
>somewhat difficult to know these days because hackers have become
>quite good at what they do. Plus that could take quite a lot of time
>even should you know which files and locations.
So we now add computer virus removal to the never ending list of
things you are totally clueless about.
>
>However. If one wishes to simply remove a single file and make it
>unrecoverable, such as a secret family recipe or a letter to your
>mistress, then the gutman is the way to go.
No it is not.
>The amount of passes that
>you want made are set for the particular configuration of the machine
>or the individuals level of paranoia. Which ever comes first.
>
>I suspect that spinny did not actually do a gutmann but instead did a
>low level format. He used the term "gutmann" to illistrate that he
>formatted his HD.
I doubt he would even know how to do a low level format.
>
>It obviously did not solve his problem.
He IS the problem.
>
>Often times problems such as his are not actually caused by a virus
>but are either hardware or cable problems. Then configuration problems
>should be considered and then virus problems last.
Ignorant computer illiterate moron.
>
>Actual boot viruses these days are rare because of such modern anti
>virus programs that do boot scans.
Oh dear. You really are that stupid.
>
>Spinny's claim was someone from TO hacked him. Which does not sound
>unreasonable although I doubt it.
It is totally unreasonable.
--
Bob.
People may not always remember exactly what you said, but they will
always remember just how bright you made them feel.
Devils Advocaat
> On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:05:11 -0800 (PST), spintronic
>
> > I am being hacked to death, from someone on this site.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=USVeX_LuEFAC
Looks like it may be worth reading. :)
>
> --http://desertphile.org
Bruce Stephens
> On Nov 25, 12:35 pm, Bruce Stephens <bruce
> +use...@cenderis.demon.co.uk> wrote:
[...]
>> So what relevance does that have to malware? If you suspect your
>> machine has a virus, say, how would using such a utility help?
>
> It would not.
> Unless you knew all of the virus files and their locations.
And if the virus isn't anywhere else (boot sector, etc.), and if (by
some chance) removing all those files won't make your system completely
unusable.
But in that case you just need to delete the files. You don't need to
overwrite them 48 times, and doing so is (AFAIK) of no value.
> Even then, it would not be the best choice to remove a virus.
AFAIK it's irrelevant. Do you have any reason to believe it's of any
value at all---for example some reputable source of advice about dealing
with malware that recommends utilities like this?
[...]
Mitchell Coffey
If you want to know what Gutmann's actual findings, I gave you a link
to his update of his original paper. I also quoted for you a highly
relevant portion of that paper. You might at least read that.
Googling on Gutmann's name brings up plenty of more resent research by
other scientists on the relevant topics. Much isn't particularly
technical.
Mitchell Coffey