Filched PowerBook Photos Spark Sex Scandal, Trial

Nicole Martinelli ()

Filched PowerBook Photos Spark Sex Scandal, Trial

Canadian-born, Hong-Kong based actor and singer Edison Chen is in court against a computer technician after explicit nude photos of him and several starlets were posted on the Internet.

Chen says some 1,300 sex pics, including about a dozen celebrities, were illegally copied from a custom pink PowerBook that he brought in for repairs in 2006.

He’s testifying in a criminal case against Sze Ho-chun, a computer technician charged with obtaining access to Chen’s computer for dishonest gain.

Chen believed he had erased the files by putting them into the trash before the machine was handed over for repairs.

“I did not know about encrypted data or securing the trash. In my opinion, when you deleted a file and put it in the trash bin, it was deleted,” he said, adding that he later found out that files deleted from the trash could be recovered in some cases.  Chen went on voluntary hiatus career after the scandal broke in early 2008, media reports that it halted careers of several of the women involved.

No matter if you have nude starlets or bad poetry or bank info on your Mac, this is about as nightmare as it gets.

To clean out an old MacBook to give to a friend recently, I tried out permanent eraser and (until the Internet proves me wrong) it seemed to do the trick…

DON'T MISS
Admin Tip – Make Sure to Empty the Trash

Aside from remembering to take out the trash after binning it, what’s your preferred method of erasing data?

Via Globe & Mail, Guardian, AFP

8 comments »

About the author

nicole_martinelli

Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

If you're doing something new/cool that's Apple related, email her about it.

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  • KentM
  • http://www.junkskull.blogspot.com Danny Policarpo

    Ive been using permanent eraser for about a year now and like you said until the internet proves me wrong it does the trick for me nicely, the fact it seems to take forever to delete even the smallest of files, seems to me its doing a good job behind the scenes of permanently getting rid of what you want :]

  • http://explodingplastiq.wordpress.com Jesse

    Ouch!

    When I sold my PowerBook I just did a erase drive with a zero-bit pass with disk utility.. Which should be fine in most cases (maybe when the buyer brings the thing to a dedicated data retrieving facility, they can get the data back)..
    It’s a nice option in Disk Utility. It goes over the whole drive and puts a ’0′ everywhere.. You can also do it 7 or 35 times.. But since it takes a decent amount of time, those are maybe only advisable if you are really paranoid..

  • badedukation

    “I did not know about encrypted data or securing the trash. In my opinion, when you deleted a file and put it in the trash bin, it was deleted,”

    Sucks to be you. And everyone else like you. i.e. 99% of computer users.

  • http://blogs.opennms.org Tarus

    One of the pet peeves I have with Apple Care is that if your hard drive dies and needs to get replaced, they won’t give you the failed drive back.

    Filevault FTW.

  • Finsen

    We use the shred command in grub (Linux) to completely erase our hard drives. This is the only method we know of by far that is reliable. But of course, it is hard to prevent someone if he/she is really looking for stuff on the hard drive.

  • http://ilovesymposia.wordpress.com Juan Nunez-Iglesias

    In addition to erasing your data, you should encrypt it by putting it in an encrypted disk image. You can create one with disk utility. Then, when you open it, it’ll ask for a password, and then appear as an external hard disk. There’s no way to know the contents of the disk without knowing your password. Pick a secure password, and you’re golden!

    This is how I keep all my tax info etc. And now with Time Machine, it’s a lot more convenient than FileVault, which encrypts your entire home folder, but prevents Time Machine from working while you are logged in.

  • Mark

    I find that a low-yield tactical nuclear missile fired into the CD slot tends to do the trick.