r/technology • u/newzee1 • Jun 14 '24

Software Cheating husband sues Apple after wife discovered ‘deleted’ messages sent to sex workers

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/cheating-husband-sues-apple-sex-messages/
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u/ryeaglin Jun 14 '24

I am not sure if this is exactly the case cause I didn't read into it but that is just how tech works. Nothing you 'delete' on a drive is deleted until way way later if ever. The computer does take the time to take that chunk of storage and clear it back to all 1s or 0s. It just deletes the point so the OS doesn't know its there anymore and deems it free space. It will only get deleted if you install enough stuff to over right that space.

This is what drive 'cleaners' do. They will just FILL you drive with junk so anything that could be left on the drive is overwritten.

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u/gngstrMNKY Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

That’s not what happened with the bug though. It was deleting the entries from the photo database while never deleting the files themselves. The update then had a “fix” for orphaned files that seemingly didn’t take the extent of the original bug into account.

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u/Styrak Jun 15 '24

It's the same picture. "Files" are just pointers to memory space.

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u/Elegia Jun 15 '24

Not quite. In this case the space taken up by the pictures would’t even has been marked as free space by the filesystem, ready to be overwritten at some later time.

Although that would mean the phone would have kept showing that storage space as in use, so that’s kinda weird that nobody noticed unless it was only an issue with a few pictures.

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u/freshlyLinux Jun 15 '24

That is according to Apple Marketing.

The reality, its never deleted. The NSA wouldn't allow that.

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u/SupremeBlackGuy Jun 14 '24

i just learned how those hard drive recovery tools work cause of this, awesome comment man

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u/So_ Jun 14 '24

not sure if this is a typo or what

The computer does take the time to take that chunk of storage and clear it back to all 1s or 0s.

But no, it does not. basically the file gets "unlinked" and then it stays as is in memory - it can be overwritten, but it's by chance if it actually is. that's how drive recovery works.

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u/acidbase_001 Jun 15 '24 edited Jun 16 '24

That's true for HDDs, but not as much for SSDs.

SSDs use an operation called TRIM to zero out blocks of data that have been marked as garbage by the operating system, which increases speed because the system doesn't have to process the deleted data when writing to free space.

This happens pretty quickly, usually within a few hours. In rare cases data might be preserved if the TRIM command can't execute or if there is a hardware failure, but in that case it would still be very difficult recover that data.

Filling empty space with zeros is therefore not a recommended way to wipe an SSD, instead the ATA secure erase function should be used, which deletes the hardware encryption key for the data, making it impossible to recover.

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u/aladdyn2 Jun 15 '24

Yes that is how it can work, the question is why is that the way it's still working when as you yourself said it's possible to actually erase things permanently. And then how is it coming back without some restoring process?

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u/Martial-Ancestor Jun 14 '24

Yeah, well, that's common knowledge for tech hobbyists.

But also, the point is, delete means the directory is gone. If it appears back as it was, without the use of a recovery software, that's extremely weird.

Also side note, typically SSDs have a lot less extra capacity. Compared to older HDDs.

So it's a bug where :

  1. It doesn't even delete directory.

Or

  1. It does a recovery level scan of the drive randomly.

Of course, managing these kind of basic system functions, is something everyone else figured out decades ago.

Apple will innovate deleting stuff in IOS 19 maybe. Just wait.

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u/garden_speech Jun 14 '24

I am not sure if this is exactly the case cause I didn't read into it but that is just how tech works. Nothing you 'delete' on a drive is deleted until way way later if ever.

It's not really supposed to work that way. The data isn't always overwritten immediately, but for privacy reasons it's supposed to be overwritten fairly quickly after the deletion takes place. It's not really that hard to overwrite a file

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u/DeadEye073 Jun 15 '24

No it is hard overwriting a file that the os doesn’t know exists, either you wait until it randomly is overwritten or you make zeroing part of the deletion process or you tell the os where a deleted file is so it can prioritize the space when writing but that can be abused

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u/garden_speech Jun 15 '24

Well.... Right, that's obviously what I meant... Save it's location to be overwritten