Those dodgy pictures on the women in lycra thread.

[Globalti]

(What happened to that thread by the way? Did we exhaust that particular seam?)

I have just had a shock - a page appeared on my computer, purporting to come from Microsoft and inviting me to root out all the "adult" content on my computer. It them went on to tell me that it had discovered something like 650 risky items, and did I want to delete them? This is strange because I have never downloaded any porn on this computer, although I have looked at most of the women in lycra pics. Some of the pics were distinctly notworksafe. If you only ever viewed them without saving them, could they be found on your computer?

I took the page to be some kind of scam and deleted it.

 

[trustysteed]

they get cached in the temporary internet file folder every time you load a page on the internet.

 

[trustysteed]

oh, and that seam would never be exhausted, you can never have too much!

 

[stephec]

oh, and that seam would never be exhausted, you can never have too much!

Here here, well said.

 

[Globalti]

So if you delete your temporary internet folders they're all gone, right?

I got my computer to search for anything with .jpeg in the name and it found about 6500 different images, some of which are my photos (boring stuff like family and weddings) and the majority, about 6000, were tiny company logos, which had come attached to emails. There's some amazing rubbish there but no dodgy lycra shots - oh apart from the one of the obviously male cyclists lined up in red lycra!

 

[Smokin Joe]

The pop-up you got from "Microsoft" was a scam, no doubt if you had followed it up you would have been invited to part with $49.99 for some software that is claimed to permenantly delete dodgy files from your hard drive.

As for deleting the temporary internet folder, nothing is ever deleted from your computer's hard drive until it has been over-written. All your sins are there waiting to haunt you should plod ever decide you have been downloading what you oughtn't.

 

[Gasman]

Save your money.IE Privacy Keeper is free!

 

[tomb1960]

What did become of that thread! It seems to have died a death! More importantly still what became of 'Lemon'?

 

[Globalti]

Sorry to harp on, but if you viewed a risky picture but didn't download it, ie save it somewhere, is it still traceable or is the web address still stored? I have never understood this point.

 

[papercorn2000]

Yep. It is stored. I am perusing your hard drive as we speak!

 

[Canrider]

In order to view it, it does have to be downloaded. It gets assigned a code filename that IE/Firefox tracks, and put in a 'temporary files' folder.

Deleting files, under DOS-based computer systems (of which Windows is one), used to, and I suspect still does, involve merely changing the first character of the filename to a certain ASCII symbol that DOS/Windows recognises as the 'this is a deleted file, don't make it available' indicator.

In order to permanently make the data in that 'deleted' file unavailable, it has to be overwritten with different data. This is possible to do, but not easy for the amateur (of which I include myself), as you have to control where the data you're using to overwrite goes. Ie, you can't just delete a file, then save another file in the same folder (in Windows) and have that new file overwrite the old file. The disk controller don't work like that.

Eesh, anyone spot any errors/omissions in that?

 

[Amanda P]

I thought that defragmenting your hard drive a couple of times would make it very hard to reconstruct deleted files.

Or is that another myth?

 

[Globalti]

I think I understand that. So having viewed a page or a picture or a video, although you might not have saved it or you might have deleted it, in theory somebody clever might be able to reopen it? They would have to be a pretty determined expert to do this, right?

Presumably this is how the Pete Townsends and others of the world come unstuck when the Police confiscate their computers?

 

[Fnaar]

What have you been up to, Rigid?

 

[Globalti]

Oh, er, nothing much.... *blushes* ....just a bit of research for a book I'm writing on women cyclists.