Xref: utzoo comp.org.eff.talk:2310 alt.privacy:524 alt.censorship:2164 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!helios!bloom-beacon!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!spool.mu.edu!think.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sample.eng.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven.umd.edu!uvaarpa!rucs!ruacad!leng From: leng@ruacad.ac.runet.edu (Lud Eng) Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,alt.privacy,alt.censorship Subject: Re: Prodigy charged with invading users' privacy Summary: stage.dat theories Keywords: stage.dat, prodigy Message-ID: <1991May3.071620.14140@ruacad.ac.runet.edu> Date: 3 May 91 07:16:20 GMT References: <1991May1.051734.24594@pcserver2.naitc.com> <1991May1.215612.2978@ruacad.ac.runet.edu> Organization: Radford University Lines: 18 In article francis@zaphod.uchicago.edu writes: >>>This should provide rather conclusive proof one way or the other. >> As someone else pointed out, this is not conclusive. Due to the way >>the Prodigy software works, it may well be trying to buffer to the hard >>drive even if it's not installed there. If there is indeed a bug in it, >Read the post you're following up to. He said to zero the unallocated >areas; that means there shouldn't be any place for them to claim that >has actual data in it. I did read the post... He just said to zero the unused areas, but leave the hard drive (and all info) accessable. My point was that Prodigy may go ahead and use the hard drive for scratch space if it's available, so zeroing the floppy may not do much. I'm not saying it's particularly likely (or even makes sense offhand to me) that they could accidently read non-prodigy related files off the hard drive and get them mixed into their temp file, but it can't be ruled out as a bug just because it's unlikely. :)