Ideal Bite

Remember when you downloaded the Kim Kardashian and Ray J sex video onto your laptop just to see what all the fuss was about, watched about 20 seconds of it, then dumped it into your Recycle Bin? Turns out that even after you empty your Bin, the file probably still exists somewhere on your hard drive.

When you "delete" a file, your computer doesn't actually delete the data at that point. It just marks the location on your drive, then later overwrites it - the keyword being "later." If you have a big hard drive, it could be years. It's called data remanence, and just as Google is saving the entire Internet on hard drives somewhere (even after you take the pages down), it's, uh, reassuring to know that everything you ever do on your computer is probably traceable.

-Toshio...off to take a hammer to my hard drive...

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