Well, today I called the national center for missing and exploited children and asked them for advice. All they said was to file a report with them, either anonymously or with my information. I felt a little less than satisfied with their response so I called my local police station and they told me to call back tomorrow when a detective who works specifically in these matters is in. What I told the NCFMAEC and what I'll tell the detective on the phone tomorrow is what I am most afraid of was that if that file was part of some sting operation like in that article, I doubt they'd believe me and would just throw me into a general category.

Great answer!!

Skribz 396.
What are you trying to do martyr yourself,talk about overreaction! you have been given all the advice that you need to clean up your mistake,and to be at peace.
If you continue pushing this,then I believe that you must have underlying issues,or motives that need resolving.
N2

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''Kindness is the hardest thing to give away,it keeps coming back''

@AW: Please forget about defragging. Now.

Ever heard about disk forensics? They cut open your disk in a clean room and check the bits one at a time, and they can recover drives run over by cars for anything between 400€ and a few thousand Euro.

The only way to be halfway sure that unencrypted data can't be recovered is to use some data burning tools (they overwrite the data with random bits _multiple times_), and even that isn't safe, because harddisks optimize a bit too eagerly these times and might just point the data burn tools to different bits even though they say that they write to the same ones.

The way to be mostly safe is to create an encrypted partition/section on your drive and save the data into it.

If you then want to delete it, you just have to delete and overwrite the encrypted partition, because encrypted files can't be recovered from remaining shreds, while for unencrypted files small shreds suffice to show which fiels where there.

Be vary of incomplete files, though. They must go into the encrypted partition, too.

And make sure you read up on the encryption algorythm you use. If it encrypts in smaller parts, then you must make sure that every part is getting shredded.

And while I'm at it: You shouldn't download copyright infringing files in the first place. And even less in unencrypted networks. They just need to bust the one you downloaded _from_ to get enough evidence against you.

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People

Much more important than accidentally downloading a few dodgy files is having your identity and credit card details stolen and used for criminal activities.

I came across this story today on the BBC website whereby this man had his life almost destroyed because an online site that he used to buy goods from was not as secure as it should have been.

Falsely Branded A Paedophile

Therefore, those of you out there that are worrying yourselves into heart attacks and/or mental breakdowns should consider how secure is your computer and, above all, how secure are the online stores you use.



(Back for this post only) UK Bob

Sorry that I saw this only now: The police can and will come straight to your door.

Why should they try to download from you, when they can just retrace your IP address to you and grab your computer?

Your computer holds far better evidence of your downloads than any of their searches could show.

The only reasons why they shouldn't do this, are because the police people involved might think you a small fish just like their own children, downloading some music off the net and still buying CDs of their favourite artists.

And because they don't have unlimited resources, and have far better ways to spend their time than trying to catch music pirates. For example catching murderers, drug dealers and similar.

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that one slipped by me...

NO...

reformatting does not write data to every sector, rather sets up a filesystem that the OS is able to see and sets all areas of the disc as being writable (i.e. as if there is no data whatsoever on the HDD, which for a reformat there's still plenty of organized 0's and 1's)...like the ancient, 4GB limited fat32, and the modern NTFS formats....

using the previously linked to Darin's Boot and Nuke program will overwrite the whole disc so that one can start over again cleanly...as cleanly as using a shiny fresh out of the box HDD...said drive might not last as long as a brand spanking new one (though with recent rumblings in the tech community this is very arguable), but it will be as clean as one!

and this information should really be applied anytime a user needs a new, clean start....'things' can reside on a HDD forever if not actively overwritten, and even then if its a real nasty bugger it will just move out of the way, as it were, as the writing heads approach it!

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
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Yeah, there are parts of the files that are left on the HD, and therefore are recoverable. That's like file recovery progs work. Only if you use a shredder, you are shure about having no traces left on you HD (If you use a good one).

I did some research about "9 year old porn" limewire does not contain this but has some files named it.. it is trying to get peoples attention which is sick and wrong... a file is stuck on my computer now lolz... anyway ive deleted all the rest.. which were nothing. I think that police need to look into this wrong pornography !

hmm...I doubt it. I still think any computer can be traced if worse came to worse so still be careful but highly doubt the police will even consider it. It happens!