Ben wrote:

Norton has a decent wipefile. I don't know if it exists with the current distribution, but with 4.5(which I have) it has it.

Norton's Wipeinfo is not too bad, but I have found one major problem and a few minor problems with versions 7 and 8: Major problem: The documentation says that Wipeinfo automatically disables Smartcan, the undelete utility. In fact, it doesn't do so, at least on my system. If you don't disable Smartcan manually, you can simply undelete the "wiped" files. For this reason, I no longer trust Wipeinfo to automatically disable my cache; I turn the cache off manually before using Wipeinfo. Minor problems: If you use the options to wipe file slack or unused space, Wipeinfo will not wipe the directory entries for deleted files. Using DiskEdit in hex view, you can still see that you once had a file called ?ECRET. However, using Wipeinfo to wipe a file will also wipe the directory entry. And Wipeinfo will only wipe some areas of the disk (track 0, for example), if you choose to do a "government wipe". Doing a "fast wipe" will not wipe these areas, even if you choose to wipe the entire drive. The documentation for Secure File System (SFS) has interesting information on wiping disks. Peter Gutmann says this: There is a commonly-held belief that there is a US government standard for declassifying magnetic media which involves overwriting it three times. In fact this method is for declassifying core (computer memory) rather than magnetic media. The government standard for declassifying magnetic media probably involves concentrated acid, furnaces, belt sanders, or any combination of the above. -- Yves Bellefeuille, Ottawa, Canada an448@freenet.carleton.ca (finger here for PGP key) ua294@fim.uni-erlangen.de