Every week I listen to Security Now a podcast hosted by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. The other week I found out that most File Shredding programs don’t actually delete the files in the correct manner. A file isn’t deleted until its place on disk has been allocated to another file. This is the reason there are so many file recovery programs available. So what are we suppose to do if we want to delete a file and be sure it can never be recovered again? We download SDelete from Sysinternals and put it to work. SDelete is a command line utility and personally I don’t like having to type in a long command just to delete a file. So I wrote up a nice little batch program. You can either drag and drop one file, or one folder and it will delete the item using SDelete. All you have to do is download the batch file to the same directory as SDelete.exe and your good to go. Also the batch file tells SDelete to do five passes, just to make sure your item isn’t coming back.

Download SDelete.exe http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/SDelete.zip
Download delete.bat http://throwthemind.com/tools/delete.bat

In the last few days I have shown you how to encrypt and decrypt any file, and securely delete any file (unencrypted ones) all running off a USB Dive without Administrator access on a Windows machine. I hope you get use out of this, I know I do.

Thanks
Nathan

The other day I picked up a new 2gb USB Drive. I like to keep storage with me, as well as programs like Portable Putty, Firefox, Filezilla, VLC, 7Zip and KeePass. All of which can be downloaded free at PortableApps.com Keeping all these programs only takes up around 150MB, which isn’t bad when you have 1.9GB to play with. Now lets talk about encryption. Using a Mac or Linux a lot like I do, you find OpenSSL is awesome. You can easily encrypt and decrypt files quickly.  I recently got to looking around and found an .exe of OpenSSL. So I started playing. When I was done I had OpenSSL working off a USB Drive, and a batch file that either encrypts or decrypts based on the file extension. Oh and the batch file is run by dropping a file onto it. Here is what I did.

1. Download Win32 OpenSSL v0.9.8g Light and install.
2. Copy C:\OpenSSL\bin to your USB Drive.
3. Rename the bin directory to openssl.
4. Copy libssl32.dll, libeay32.dll, msvcr71.dll, ssleay32.dll from C:\WINDOWS\system32 to your new openssl directory.
5. Double click on openssl.exe in your openssl directory. If it works you should get a command prompt showing OpenSSL>
6. Download this file to the root of your USB Drive. encrypt-and-decrypt.bat
7. Now you have drag and drop encryption and decryption using aes-256.

The batch file will encrypt any file but will not encrypt a directory. If you want to encrypt a directory you can use 7zip to zip up the directory, then encrypt the .zip Also the batch file will only decrypt files ending in .enc Test it out and you will see what I mean. If you have any questions just leave a comment.

Thanks
Nathan

ps. If you want separated encrypt and decrypt files you can download these. encrypt.bat decrypt.bat

This weekend I bought a copy of Bioshock.  A Microsoft only game.  This was fine as I thought all I would have to do is install Boot Camp.  When I got home I fired up the MacBook Pro and went to installing boot camp.  After burning the driver disc I was stuck waiting the the drive to be partitioned.  I went to grab a sandwich and came back to find that the partition had failed.  OSX said it couldn’t move some file and I would have to reformat the drive before I could partition it.  Looks like this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought I said, and went to get out my external hard drive and peruse a reformat.  After booting the OSX install disc I went to Disk Utility and made an image of my drive.  Then booted back into my system and mounted the image just to verify that all my data was there.  All the data was copied, so I reformatted the internal drive.  All well and good so far.  After the format I went to restore the drive from the image I had created, but to my surprise I was unable to do so.  After spending a few hours online trying to figure out how to restore the image Apple.com left me with two options.
One: install OSX on another external drive and boot from that, then restore the internal drive.
Two: boot my Mac into disk mode and connect it to another Mac and restore from the image.

Neither of these options where going to work for me, so I decided I would just mount the image and copy everything to the internal drive.  After that was finished I rebooted to find a black error screen.  This wasn’t what I had hoped for.  By this time my sandwich is long gone and its getting really late, so I say screw it I will just reinstall the OS and spend the next week getting things back to normal.  Off I go on another long operation when I find an option that will copy my old system to a folder and reuse my User folder.  About and hour later I was sitting at the Log In screen for my user account and everything was pretty much back to normal.   Unfortunately I was out of time and didn’t get a chance to try Boot Camp again.  But I would assume it will work.

What I Learned.
1.  I am going to need to find a better way to back up.
2. Through all the madness I somehow gained 5-10GB of extra data.
3.  Games are not always worth it.

The other day I was called an Apple fan boy. If you would have told me a few years ago that I would be the owner of a Mac. I wouldn’t have believed you. See I didn’t know much about computers say 5 years ago. Nor did I care to. But it is a different story now. I will admit the reason I got a MacBook Pro was because I could still use Windows. But really after only about 2 weeks I don’t miss Windows. I never really had any problems with Windows, I just thought maybe I should broaden my scope of computers beyond Windows, and very little Linux. To sum up the reason foe getting a MacBook Pro was not to be a Apple fan boy, but really to learn a different operation system, and since OSX is based on BSD Linux, I can learn more commands and great Linux things also. But I don’t guess its really what i think that makes me a fan boy it is what everyone else thinks. So whatever I guess.

I really think there is some great stuff in here today. Hope everyone else enjoys.

• Car of the future.
• PSP hacking, a new era.
• I wonder what the reaction time is on something like this?
• Songbird with universal binaries…can we say Yay!!
• Crack Windows WGA Validation thingy
• Super Mario Bros. 2.5D!
• Don’t you just got to love the quiet Librarian that stands up for “OUR RIGHTS”
• This sounds like it would be funny? 55mph on a highway
• What no ads are you stupid?

Edit:Looks like I mess up on a post and people started bitching..lol The date was wrong, I started this post last night, and the calender said it was the 27th..or well