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A court here has found a person guilty of possessing porn even though no pictures were dowloaded. The judge ruled, " An image did not have to be conciously saved to be in an idividuals possession"
My question therefore is how is it done? How easy is it to find what was viewed without actually downloading/saving??
Thank you.
For openers, unless you delete the history file of the web sites that you have accessed (viewed), anyone can get on your PC and see what you have been up to...
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Hmmm. Just deleting is sufficient? I was under the impression a special erasure type of programme was the only safe way to clear stuff like history, cookies etc.
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Hi Ripper,
Yes, just deleting does NOT permanantly remove items on a drive.
For example a program like "Lost & Found" or OnTrack's "EasyRecovery" can recover information from a drive that was formated!
I recently recovered data from 3 drives using these methods. One drive had been FDISK'd and reformatted....
Norton Utilities used to have a component called Wipe Disk. I personally have not used it, but it was supposed to wipe and rewrite data over and over to sectors, supposidly making it impossible to recover.
You may find some info checking Sysmantec's site, or type Wipe Disk in a search engine, such as Google.
I'm sure there are many utils that perform this task besides Norton, but the info may give some education on the function and your peace of mind.
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From a legal standpoint I always have difficulty with the word "downloaded".
Just suppose you browse a perfectly innocent site and a porn ad pops up, then as far as your history and temporary internet files are concerned it has presumably been downloaded - unintentionally. Similary all sorts of things might arrive if you have (unwisely) not installed a firewall.
I can see why the person was guilty of possession but if (and only if) it was innocent, as I've just described, then I can't see that the person can be guilty of anything else.
Derek
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"Yes, just deleting does NOT permanantly remove items on a drive."
True, but deleting and defragging (which moves [writes] other data into the deleted space), and running anything that writes onto the disk will rather soon (if not immediately) pretty effectively cover the deleted data. Not always 100%, but usually enough to render it benign (only minute scraps left).
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"What country/state are you (not living so well) in?"
Better stay off of the net to remain legal.
Also, on a more simplistic side; Go to IE Tools, Internet Options, Advanced and under the Security section place a check next to the box that states "Empty temporary internet files folder when browser is closed" so at least it won't appear that something was downloaded at a quick glance in that folder.
Bryan
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Thanks for the replies.
Be interested in your further comments.
Below is the newspaper item in full.
As you see, our country is New Zealand and the offender is described as a school principal.http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/waikatotimes/0,2106,2709322a6412,00.html
IMHO, the guy should never teach again. Ever!
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First off, child porn is filth.
Only a sicko could enjoy seeing it.
If you view a picture, a miniature version is stored in your 'Temporary Internet Files Folder'. If this is not deleted, you ARE in possession of that image because it was created when the computer was in your control. If the TIF folder was emptied, the images would no-longer be easily visible, but could be recovered.A charge of procurement or soliciting the procurement of illegal images may have been less of a grey area. The actual evidence, could consist of these recovered images and the also stored web addresses in the cookies.
Even if these cookies were to be deleted, and written over, the addresses are still stored in index.dat files. These index files can't normally be cleaned.
If you took out your hard drive, and melted it down to a blob of scrap metal, I expect your surf history would still be recorded on your ISP's server.
If you want to view your own surf history, even after you think you have deleted this history.... you can get the free program SPIDER from.....
http://www.fsm.nl/ward/
It works great.One last point, child pervert, the gas chamber would be too kind!
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spiderbite.exe does not work properly with Win ME. Delindex.bat works great though.
I've never tried with DOS. I will play around with my spare PC and see what I can do in DOS.Most people don't know the index file exists.
The point was to show there is no hiding.
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