dirty likes his porn but now needs a good washing

dirty will be leaving thailand soon and his laptop has visited a lot of porn sites.
dirty never intentionally looks at underage stuff nor does he save pictures
but he is paranoid because even when he does not wear a raincoat
customs guys tend to tAKE ONE LOOK AT HIm and hear thailand and give his laptop a thorough search. have asked him how old some of the "models" are
dirty does not know how to remove stuff from his computer so he brings it to a shop to do it for him but he understands that that does ot neccesarily remove all traces.

dirty does not like police authority people etc and does not fancy going to jail or being publically branded .

what can dirty tell the shop to make sure they delete enough so that he will not get into trouble?

thanks

Similar Threads:

• Hang out the washing...

[Aunty]

You need to buy and run this programme (especially the internet trace destructor) often.

http://www.steganos.com/en/products/sss ... tdsss2006/

The only way to remove tracks is to remove and replace your hard drive.

Get a watch with storage - USB port. they never check those ;-)

[Bob]

For those that don't know....shouldn't be many....deleting a file the usual way and even then emptying your recycle bin only
effectively removes the easy link you have to the file (i.e., there's nothing for you to click on to find the information, photo, or whatever). Those deletions just send the digital information (e.g., a photo) to the free space on your harddrive and there are many programs that can retrieve/find the photo (including programs that some customs agents have).
Shredding and wiping programs simply replace all the zeros and ones (how digital information is stored) with random zeroes and ones and, because most harddrives are rather big these days, it usually takes a long time. There are some standards of security, the old standard DOD (Department of Defense) standard is that you do this wiping/shredding 9 times in repetition. If you have 40 gigs of free space on your computer, that might take 6-18 hours to do depending on the speed of your computer.
I have no idea if a repetition of 9 wipes/shreds actually makes the information irretreivable to a police agency looking for what you have on your harddrive (there are programs they have that look specifically for photos). The only 100% safe thing is not
to have ever had illegal photos on your harddrive.
There are many free (shareware) wiping/shredding programs on the net.
As to covering other tracks (wiping out history, urls, cookies, etc.), I'm not so sure that there's a big worry there as, while that might stir the interest of a cop seeing what sites you've visited, that information on a harddrive is probably not illegal (but, if they see that, the safe bet is they are going to be very thorough with the rest of their search).
This same information is true of all digital media - including all of the media you use for digital cameras. If you took and then erased an improper photo, it's still on the digital media and can be found fairly easily (when I've screwed up one of my compact flash or smart media cards or I have mistakenly erased a photo on one of those, I can normally recover about 80-90% of what's been lost with a media recovery program I got somewhere on the net). I don't get too paranoid about it, though, as I've never had anything on my media that could get me in trouble (of course, I'm presuming the photos in the Sawatdee album are not illegal as I'm sure there's a few of them hiding in my free space).

further question - am i being paranoid?

as i said i like porn and tend to quickly click on popups and links that come off including for twinks when i am in that mood.

i never knowingly look for underage, but i also do not have the birth cirtificates of the thousands of guys that i have looked at.

police do tend to take an interest in me.

should i junk the computer? IF SO, IS REPLACING THE HARD DRIVE ENOUGH?


i really appreciated the great answers, i was afraid that i would be hit by responders.

DOM

[Dodger]

Dirty...

You may consider just leaving your laptop at home and using an Internet service. They're cheap, always within walking distance, and you don't have to lug the thing around with you.

You may also consider leaving that compulsion you have for surfing sex sites at home when you come on holiday. Enjoy getting the real thing for a change...it's much easier on the eyes.

mai pen rai

[Smiles]

Dirty, you might want to check out this thread on the GayThailand Message Board: http://www.gaythailand.com/forums/index ... wtopic=205
Some interesting posts on the same subject.

Cheers ...

boy george i have been honest with you. I do not get singled out cuz i am gay i do not come across that way.
i get singled out for my personality.

is it enough to replace the hard drive?

boy george i have been honest with you. I do not get singled out cuz i am gay i do not come across that way.
i get singled out for my personality.

is it enough to replace the hard drive?

Talking to boygeorge is like talking to your left shoe - a waste of time.