---------------------------------------------------------------- Eraser 4.0 (January 24th 2000) ---------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS 1. LEGAL 1.1. Copyright 1.2. License agreement 1.3. Disclaimer 1.4. Digital signature 2. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS 2.1. Libraries 3. HOW TO INSTALL & UNINSTALL 3.1. Before installing 3.2. Installing 3.3. Help? 3.4. Uninstalling 4. DESCRIPTION 5. AUTHOR 5.1. Contacting 5.2. Web site ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. LEGAL 1.1. Copyright Eraser Copyright © 1997-2000 by Sami Tolvanen. All rights reserved. By using this software you accept all the terms and conditions of the license agreement and disclaimer below. All registered and unregistered trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective holders. 1.2. License agreement Eraser is a FREEWARE program and must be provided at no charge. Feel free to share this program with your friends, but do not give it away altered or as part of another system without permission from the author. 1.3. Disclaimer Eraser is provided on an "AS IS" basis, without warranty of any kind either express or implied, including warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. In no event will the author be liable to you for damages, direct or consequential, which may result from the use of this software. The user must assume the entire risk of using the software. 1.4. Digital signature The setup program is signed with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) (public key available at web site) for verifying the authenticity. The signature file should be included with the archive. If you did not receive a separate digital signature file with this archive, download the official version distribution at the home page (see section 5.2). ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS This version of Eraser runs on Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0 and later. 2.1. Libraries It may be necessary for you to update the following dynamic link libraries before installing Eraser. These files were not included in the archive because of their size and because they are part of Windows 98 and are included with many applications including Internet Explorer. 2.1.1. MFC42.dll and MSVCRT.dll You must have Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) Libraries (version 6.00 or later) installed in order to use Eraser. If you do not have the files installed, or get an error message (linked to a missing export...) when running the program, you can download (583K) the latest versions by following the link below. http://www.tolvanen.com/common/mfcdlls.zip Unzip the archive after downloading and see "readme.txt" for instructions on how to install. 2.1.2. COMCTL32.dll You must have version 4.72 or later version of the Windows Common Control Library in order to use the new Eraser user interface. If you are using Windows 95 or NT and have not installed Internet Explorer 4.01 or later, you must download an update. Windows 98 comes with the updated library. You can download the library update (427K) from Eraser home page. http://www.tolvanen.com/common/401comupd.exe ---------------------------------------------------------------- 3. HOW TO INSTALL & UNINSTALL 3.1. Before installing Be sure to uninstall any previous version of Eraser before installing. Also make sure you have the required libraries installed before running setup (see section 2.1). If the setup program asks you to reboot Windows after installation, you must do that before running Eraser. 3.2. Installing SETUP.EXE is a self-extracting executable containing the program files. Run SETUP.EXE to install Eraser. The setup program will extract the files and copy them to a desired location. 3.3. Help? After installing, you can open the help file (in the Eraser directory) by double-clicking the ERASER.HLP file. If the help file does not answer your question, do not hesitate to contact the author (see section 5.1). You can also get answers to some frequently asked questions and read a step-by-step installation instructions at Eraser home page (see section 5.2). 3.4. Uninstalling You can uninstall Eraser normally via Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs. You should not remove the files manually because the settings in the registry would not be removed. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 4. DESCRIPTION Eraser is an advanced security tool, which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. You can drag and drop files and folders to the on-demand eraser, use the convenient Explorer shell extension or use the integrated scheduler to program overwriting of unused disk space or, for example, browser cache files to happen regularly, at night, during your lunch break, at weekends or whenever you like. The patterns used for overwriting are based on Peter Gutmann's paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" and they are selected to effectively remove the magnetic remnants from the hard disk making it impossible to recover the data. Other methods include the one defined in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual of the US Department of Defense and overwriting with pseudo-random data up to one hundred times. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 5. AUTHOR Sami Tolvanen, the author of this software is a student in university of technology in Finland. For more information, visit his home page at http://www.iki.fi/st/. 5.1. Contacting Via Internet e-mail, eraser@tolvanen.com. 5.2. Web site You can download the latest version of Eraser and the required libraries at Eraser home page. http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/ ----------------------------------------------------------------