Ban Hate Speech, Adopt an Emoji, Hail an Uber… [Tech News Digest] | Dramel Notes

Removing hate speech from the Internet, adopting your favorite emoji, hailing an Uber through Facebook, banning Star Wars spoilers from Reddit, and the Star Wars singalong to end all Star Wars singalongs.

Germany Wants to Remove Hate Speech

Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all agreed to remove hate speech from their websites within 24 hours of it being posted. This is as a result of the German government asking the tech giants to help fight against racism being directed at the Syrian refugees settling in the country.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas told Reuters:

“When the limits of free speech are trespassed, when it is about criminal expressions, sedition, incitement to carry out criminal offences that threaten people, such content has to be deleted from the net. And we agree that as a rule this should be possible within 24 hours.”

It’s important to note that this isn’t about removing all traces of nastiness from the Internet. Not only would that be an impossible task, it would also impinge on people’s right to free speech. Instead, this is about stopping people inciting violence against particular people or groups of people. The problem is there’s a fine line between stopping hate speech and stifling free speech.

Free speech isn’t, of course, the freedom to say whatever you want without consequences. If you say something hateful or controversial then people will push back and tell you you’re wrong. However, the right to express that opinion, no matter how unpopular it may be, is one we should hold onto with every fiber in our being.

Adopt Your Favorite Emoji Character

You can now adopt your favorite emoji, with the Unicode Consortium launching its new Adopt-a-Character campaign. This allows any individual or company to adopt one of the 120,000 emoji characters in existence, paying anything from $100 to $5,000 for the privilege.

This money buys you bragging rights to the character, and a link on the Unicode Consortium website. The sponsorships run for 12 months, with the Gold level ($5,000) buying you an exclusive sponsorship of a particular emoji. However, the real aim of the Adopt-a-Character campaign is to raise funds for the Unicode Consortium.

The Unicode Consortium is the non-profit organization responsible for coordinating the development of the Unicode standard, with its stated goal being to “enable people around the world to use computers in any language.” However, it’s best known for creating the emoji that are increasingly commonplace on the Web.

Facebook Hails an Uber for You

You can now hail an Uber directly from within the Facebook Messenger app. This is thanks to a new Transportation option that Facebook has added to the latest version of Messenger. Facebook has initially partnered with Uber in the United States, but the social network looks likely to add more services in more countries in the future.

The partnership means you no longer need the Uber app to use the service. Instead, as long as you’re using the latest version of Messenger, you can call an Uber from directly within Facebook’s app. You can then track the status of your ride and pay for it all without ever leaving the warm embrace of Facebook.

As a way of promoting Transportation, for a limited time only Facebook is offering free rides with Uber. This can only be claimed once, and only up to the value of $20, but anything is better than nothing.

Reddit Bans Star Wars Spoilsports

Reddit moderators on some forums are banning users who post spoilers of The Force Awakens. The mods at /r/movies are cracking down on anyone spoiling the new Star Wars movie, deleting the offending comments and banning the users responsible from the subreddit.

After posting a general warning to avoid spoiling the movie, moderator TheGreatZeigfeld stated, “We’ve banned dozens of users so far for this. I think all the mods have had it spoiled for them by now. We’ll do our best to make sure you guys don’t suffer the same fate.”

This is a tricky issue, especially in light of the story above regarding the importance of free speech. However, people aren’t spoiling Star Wars to make a point, they’re just doing it to be trollish dicks. So deleting their comments and preventing them from doing it again may be justified.

Jimmy Fallon Leads a Star Wars Medley

And finally, The Force Awakens has finally arrived, with the new Star Wars movie opening at midnight tonight. This means Tech News Digest is likely to have a lot less Star Wars stories from here on in, so we thought we would go out with a bang. Courtesy of Jimmy Fallon.

This video shows late night chat show host Fallon teaming up with The Roots and several members of the Star Wars cast to perform an a capella medley of songs from the series. It’s the perfect way to prepare for The Force Awakens, and now we urge geeks everywhere to go and see the movie.

Your Views on Today’s Tech News

Where do you stand on the issue of free speech? Which emoji would you adopt? Is Facebook growing out of control? Should Reddit be banning people for posting Star Wars spoilers? Can The Force Awakens live up to the hype?

Let us know your thoughts on the Tech News of the day by posting to the comments section below. Because a healthy discussion is always welcome.

Tech News Digest is a daily column paring the technology news of the day down into bite-sized chunks that are easy to read and perfect for sharing.

Image Credits: B Rosen via Flickr

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How to “Clean” a Flash Drive, SD Card, or Internal Drive to Fix Partition and Capacity Problems | Dramel Notes

If your USB flash drive, SD card, or another drive isn’t working quite right, “cleaning” the drive and removing its partitions is one possible solution. This can fix problems with a drive that can’t be formatted or one that shows the wrong capacity.

This trick will also delete partitions that can’t be deleted with normal tools, like the graphical Disk Management disk-partitioning tool built into Windows. This process will completely erase the partition table from a disk, allowing you to set it back up again.

Warning: This process will completely wipe the entire disk you select, so be sure you back up any important files first. You should also be very careful to specify the correct disk, or you could accidentally wipe the wrong disk.

Launch a Command Prompt as Administrator

First, you’ll need to launch a Command Prompt window as administrator. On Windows 10 or 8.1, you can simply right-click the Start button (or press Windows Key + X) and select “Command Prompt (Admin)”.

On Windows 7, you’ll need to locate the “Command Prompt” shortcut in the Start menu — you can just search for “Command Prompt” in the Start menu. Right-click the Command Prompt shortcut and select “Run as Administrator.”

Use diskpart to Clean a Disk

We’ll be using the diskpart command to do this. Before continuing, be sure you’ve connected the USB flash drive, SD card, or whatever other drive you want to clean to your computer.

To launch the diskpart tool, type the following command into the Command Prompt window and press Enter:

diskpart

Have diskpart list the disks connected to the computer by typing the following command and pressing Enter:

list disk

Examine the output of the command to identify the number of the disk you want to clean. Be very careful here! If you select the wrong disk number, you’ll clean the wrong disk and you could lose important data.

In the screenshot below, we can see that “Disk 0” is 238 GB in size and “Disk 1” is 14 GB in size. We know that our particular USB drive is 14 GB in size. This tells us that Disk 1 is the USB drive connected to the computer, and Disk 0 is the computer’s internal system drive.

Once you know the disk number you want to select, type the following command, replacing # with the number of the disk you identified above.

Warning: Be very careful you specify the correct disk number! Enter the wrong disk number and you’ll end up blowing away everything on the wrong disk.

select disk #

The diskpart command has now selected the disk you specified. Any actions you perform will now be performed on the selected disk. To completely wipe the selected disk’s partition table, type the following command and press Enter.

Warning: This will erase all data on the selected disk! Be sure you have backups of the important data before continuing!

clean

You’ll see a “diskpart succeeded in cleaning the disk” if everything worked properly. You’re now done. Close the Command Prompt window to continue.

Partition and Format the Disk

You should now be able to initialize, partition, and format the disk like you normally would, using the graphical Disk Management tool built into Windows. You could also use the diskpart command to do this, but it’s probably easier to use the graphical interface.

To launch Disk Management on Windows 10 or 8.1, right-click the Start button and select “Disk Management”. On Windows 7, press Windows Key + R, type “diskmgmt.msc” into the Run dialog that appears, and press Enter.

You’ll see the disk now has no partitions. Right-click the unallocated space and select “New Simple Volume” to create a partition on the disk and format it with your desired file system. By default, Windows will create a single partition that spans the entire drive.

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If this method didn’t work — for example, if you successfully cleaned the drive but it didn’t appear to be functioning normally when you try to partition it, or if diskpart can’t see the disk or clean it properly — it’s possible the drive is simply physically damaged and is no longer working properly. But “cleaning” the drive with diskpart is a solution that can bring drives that would seem broken to most people back to life.

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Why You Can’t “Securely Delete” a File, and What to Do Instead | Dramel Notes

Some utilities have a “secure delete” option that promises to securely erase a file from your hard drive, removing all traces of it. Older versions of Mac OS X have a “Secure Empty Trash” option that tries to do something similar. Apple removed this feature recently because it just doesn’t work reliably on modern drives.

The problem with “secure delete” and “secure empty trash” is that it provides a false sense of security. Rather than relying on these sorts of bandaid file-deletion solutions, you should rely on full-disk encryption. On a fully encrypted disk, both deleted and undeleted files are protected.

Why “Secure Delete” Options Were Created

Traditionally, deleting a file from a mechanical hard drive didn’t actually delete that file’s contents. The operating system would mark the file as deleted, and the data would eventually be overwritten. But that file’s data was still sitting on the hard drive, and file-recovery tools could scan a hard disk for deleted files and recover them. This is still possible on USB flash drives and SD cards, too.

If you have sensitive data — for example, business documents, financial information, or your tax returns — you might worry about someone recovering them from a hard drive or removable storage device.

How Secure File Deletion Tools Work

“Secure delete” utilities attempt to solve this problem by not just deleting a file, but overwriting the data with either zeros or random data. This should, the theory goes, make it impossible for someone to recover the deleted file.

This is sort of like wiping a drive. But, when you wipe a drive, the enter drive is overwritten with junk data. When you securely delete a file, the tool attempts to overwrite only that file’s current location with junk data.

Tools like this are available all over the place. The popular CCleaner utility contains a “secure delete” option. Microsoft offers an “sdelete” command for download as part of the SysInternals suite of utilities. Older versions of Mac OS X offered “Secure Empty Trash”, and Mac OS X still offers an included “srm” command for securely deleting files.

Why They Don’t Work Reliably

The first problem with these tools is that they’ll only attempt to overwrite the file in its current location. The operating system may have made backup copies of this file in a number of different places. You may “securely delete” a financial document, but older versions of it may still be stored on disk as part of your operating system’s previous versions feature or other caches.

But, let’s say you can solve that problem. It’s possible. Unfortunately, there’s a bigger problem with modern drives.

With modern solid-state drives, the drive’s firmware scatters a file’s data across the drive. Deleting a file will result in a “TRIM” command being sent, and the SSD may eventually remove the data during garbage collection. A secure delete tool can tell an SSD to overwrite a file with junk data, but the SSD controls where that junk data is written to. The file will appear to be deleted, but its data may still be lurking around somewhere on the drive. Secure delete tools just don’t work reliably with solid-state drives. (The conventional wisdom is that, with TRIM enabled, the SSD will automatically delete its data when you delete the file. This isn’t necessarily true, and it’s more complicated than that.)

Even modern mechanical drives aren’t guaranteed to work properly with secure file deletion tools thanks to file-caching technology. Drives try to be “smart”, and there’s not always a way to ensure all bits of a file were overwritten instead of being scattered over the drive.

You shouldn’t try to “securely delete” a file. If you have sensitive data you want to protect, there’s no guarantee it will be erased and made unrecoverable.

What to Do Instead

Rather than using secure-file-deletion tools, you should just enable file-drive encryption. Windows 10 has Device Encryption enabled on many new PCs, and Professional versions of Windows also offer BitLocker. Mac OS X offers FileVault encryption, Linux offers similar encryption tools, and Chrome OS is encrypted by default.

When you use full-drive encryption, you don’t have to worry about someone getting access to your drive and scanning it for deleted files. They won’t have the encryption key, so even the bits of deleted files will be incomprehensible to them. Even if bits of the deleted files are left on the drive, they’ll be encrypted and just look like random nonsense unless someone has the encryption key.

Even if you have an unencrypted drive that contains sensitive files you want to get rid of, and you’re about to dispose of the drive, you’re better off wiping the entire drive rather than attempting to wipe just the sensitive files. If it’s very sensitive, you’re better off destroying the drive entirely.

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As long as you use encryption, your files should be protected. Assuming your computer is powered down and the attacker doesn’t know your encryption key, they won’t be able to access your files — including the deleted ones. If you have sensitive data, just encrypt your drive and delete files normally rather than attempting to rely on secure-deletion tools. They might work in some cases, but can often offer a false sense of security. Secure file deletion just doesn’t work reliably with modern hard drives.

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