BleachBit is a free and open-source disk space cleaner | Hacker News Reader

BleachBit is a free and open-source disk space cleaner

bleachbit.org

57 pointsgjvc36 comments

> Shred sensitive files, so one can ever read their contents.

Storage devices are really easy to physically destroy. I'd never rely on a software solution to ensure information is unrecoverable. There is a lot of magic happening in storage controller logic these days.

Just write over the top of the file with 0s. There have been a number of challenges people have set with standard hard drives and SSDs for an commercial company to restore a file after it has been written over with 0s and not a single company will take that, its unrecoverable. I can understand why we might think some nation states might be able to do something theoretically better but its unlikely in practice with the pace of the technology and how immensely hard it actually is.

You don't need to destroy the devices you just need to zero them once.

why not wipe the device first before physically destroy it?

How long does the software take to run?

A skilled operator with a drill can ensure information theoretical death for a solid state drive in about 5 seconds.

This is a fantastic product! It works really well for email servers

It is a great product, for sure, but why are you specifically calling out email servers? I can't think of any reason it would work better on an email server over anything else.

If you're not joking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...

I wasn't joking, no.

That's a crazy obscure reference from like 10 years ago, especially for non-Americans.

Yet the follow-on effects have been enormous, especially for non-Americans.

wat

Let's talk about JavaScript!

Now there’s a good comedic callback

(For those lucky 10000: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat)

Oh wow, I knew that you could link to page headings with the "#Heading Text" syntax in URLs.. but had no idea that you could link to any random text in a page like this.

Neat, that's super useful!

Yep! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62161819/what-exactly-is...

And, as usual:

> Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

I think almost half of the most useful questions I have found on stackoverflow since the beginning have this text.

And I wonder if the reason why the percentage isn't higher is because earlier they used to delete them as well instead of just slapping this text on it and locking them.

Good. I probably need a reminder from time to time about why I don't participate there anymore.

Still hilarious (or sad?) to me that the use of this product has been famously misinterpreted as literally bleaching or acid washing and it is "very expensive"

It looks like the maintainers have had a good bit of fun with it: https://www.bleachbit.org/cloth-or-something.

There’s also `sudo cat /dev/null > /dev/nvme0`. Or /dev/random for the paranoid. Or the microwave for those who are in a hurry.

> There’s also `sudo cat /dev/null > /dev/nvme0`

That doesn't work. The redirection occurs in the current shell which unless it's already root won't have permission to write to /dev/nvme0. At the same time, running cat as root isn't needed to access /dev/null.

You want something like `sudo sh -c 'cat /dev/null > /dev/nvme0'`. You could also use a program such as `dd` that doesn't require redirection.

Edit: as pointed out below, yes, /dev/null is also the wrong device. It returns EOF on read.

And they probably want /dev/zero, that actually produces a stream to overwrite the disk, which /dev/null doesn't.

Anyway, encrypting the drive and destroying the key would be easier.

> There’s also `sudo cat /dev/null > /dev/nvme0`

Mistakes like this are a good reason why user-friendly software like BleachBit exists

I've used this in the past and it's awesome. But man how I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the dev meetings right after Hillary Clinton said she used BleachBit

Curious timing to be on front page

Anything special a European should be aware of except the general situation in US?

There's a very large uptick in google searches in the Washington D.C. area for tools like this and how to wipe data effectively, seemingly as a way to get rid of any incriminating data before e.g. DOGE finds its way to it and makes people accountable for what the data represents.

timing is everything

Yet another political post

I thought BleachBit was a company that made cloth rags?

It's conveniently available on Ubuntu repos. I wish it supported package managers from major languages (such as pip) and docker cache as well.

If it's good enough for a Secretary of State, it's good enough for me!

How quaint! It’s hard to connect now to a time when that was enough to be a scandal.

Still a scandal. Gov officials purposefully deleting data AFTER a subpoena is criminal.

And given this is Hillary Clinton we are talking about, the lack of follow through is a major reason we even have the current right wing leadership... It's in many ways direct blow back to the abuses swept under the rug for so many years

Is it really blow back if the public demanded that all politicians be able to get away with it instead of just the Clintons?

There is definitely an argument to be made for that.

Corruption thrives in environments where there is no trust in institutions. An apathy and cynicism then chokes out all claims of being trustworthy and having integrity, leaving only forthright grifters with the last semblance of "honesty in their dishonesty". The only honest way forward that folks perceive then is for everyone to get the bag for themselves and knock down the ladder on the way up.

I think this line of argument is overly simplistic and puts too much at the feet of "but her emails", but I have zero doubt that this is how a lot of people who support Trump rationalize things.

It was a Platte River Networks employee who erased and used Bleachbit on the archived .pst files after the subpoena but had been ordered to do the deletions three months before the subpoena and failed to act until after the subpoena.

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/the-fbi-files-on-clintons-...

I can only imagine what’s going on now, what will go on before they go out, and what will be unearthed after that happens.

I sincerely hope all the data they already ordered to be deleted is preserved somewhere.

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