2 Unrelated questions

Factual Questions
1

Question 1:

I have heard several times that the notion of romantic love was invented in the 18th century. My question is, what exactly does this mean, and what does it not mean. How does the existence of, for example, the Song of Solomon not falsify this proposition? I recognize there is a difference between eroticism and romance, but the Song of Solomon seems pretty romantic as well as erotic. It speaks of the power of love being greater than the power of death, and it depicts people desiring each other and feeling this desire to be the most important thing in their world. Aren’t these want the idea of romance is all about?
Question 2:

I got an email advertising a program which is supposed to identify and clean my computer of unwanted pornographic files. My question here is, is this a rip off? Can’t I just go find and delete them myself if I know what directories to look in? And a follow up question, if that is the case, what directories would I need to look in?

Thanks…

-Kris

2

Question 1:

I have heard this too and it is pure crap. Think of older stories like Romeo and Juliet that are very romantic for easy falsification. I have also heard that romance and “falling in love” and western inventions. Again, this pure crap. Wher is their evidence for this claim? We can sit here all day coming up with contrary evidence. That should tell you something.

Question 2:

100% scam. If the Supreme Court cannot come up with a good definition of pornography, how do you think a software utility can look at all your JPEG’s etc., make the correct call and delete them.

3

Well, it finds filenames it suspects as containing pornography, and lists them for you. You then have the option of deleting them or reviewing them to see if they need to be deleted or not. So ultimately, a human makes the call - but the program does all the work of finding the files in the first place.

I am curious as to where it expects to find these files. The ad is saying “you will be suprised” and that these files hide in obscure hidden folders in your system, put there without your knowledge by internet servers or whatever, even if you’ve never visited an actual pornographic site.

Any idea what obscure system folders it would be referring to?

-Kris

4

I doubt if they are obscure enough to evade Windows’ find file capability. Start-Menu/Find/Files or Folders/Named (*.jpg) Look in: (Local hard drives).

There. Saved you 20 bucks (or whatever). + you don’t have to run some un-provenanced piece of software on your system.

5

I am not a computer geek, but I know that after you have deleted, shit canned folders, etc. on your computer, it is still there. That is why you see on the news that the police, FBI or congress has confiscated someone’s computer. If you are afraid that you have child porno on your computer then the program might be more than worth the $20 or whatever it costs.

As to the Age of Romance, smarter men than Shagnasty and me coined the term.

6

The way it was presented by one of my history professors (many moons ago) was not that romantic love was a relatively recent invention but rather that the idea of marriage as a primarily romantic institution was.

Prior to a few centuries ago, most societies viewed marriage as primarily a political act, done to improve a families position. There were of course romantic marriages, and love, and passion, and all of those things, but the norm was to select a spouse based on dowry or connections or access to prime grazing land or something. Many societies didn’t even leave it to the persons getting married.

I have a meeting in a couple of minutes, but when I get back I will see if I can track down any cites to support what I recall of that lecture.

7

Regarding the second part of the question…

…for most people, if you need to clear out evidence of your single-handed surfing habits, you just need to clear your browser history, delete temporary internet files and clear cookies.

It’s not foolproof, in two main ways – firstly, if you’re surfing via a network connection then there may be firewall hardware and software that is monitoring or recording all activity. The software they’re selling in that email can’t do a damn thing about that.

The second ‘but’ is the one that your email is trying to capitalise on. When files are deleted, they’re not actually erased from your hard disk. All that happens is that the operating system flags the portion of space that the file once occupied as available for re-use.

If you use the PC a lot, or have only limited hard disk space, then there’s a decent chance that you’ll overwrite that portion of space with something else.

Even then, that may not be full deletion, since the file you overwrite the space with might not be as big as the one that previously occupied it. Space on the disk is broken down into fixed-size chunks to make it easier to manage, so you might overwrite a file that once occupied the whole of a chunk (or ‘cluster’) with one that doesn’t fill it. The ‘leftover’ space will not be overwritten.

There are a number of programs available that can read these fragments, whether images or text. This kind of forensic software is usually hugely expensive and used only by law enforcement authorities and fraud investigators. I have two of the main forensic programs – Vogon and EnCase on my work laptop, although my experience with using them on fraud investigations has been limited to introductory training only.

So-called ‘evidence eliminator’ software (one of the brand leaders is named that) purports to use various techniques to prevent forensic software from working properly. I don’t know the details, but I believe they do things like defragment your hard disk repeatedly, which causes the operating system to re-order and re-index the files more efficiently. This necessarily involves files being moved and rewritten, destroying old ‘deleted’ files. If you were really worried, you could try defragmenting your drive yourself repeatedly without special software, but it’s no guarantee and it can take a long time.

Unless you think someone has reason to scan your PC for something very dodgy (child porn, fraud evidence) then I wouldn’t worry too much. Nobody will be running forensic software on your PC unless they have good reason to. Besides, I wouldn’t trust software in a junk mail to do anything good at all – there are plenty more reputable sources.

I hope (a) that that helps and (b) that that was accurate. Sailor, anyone, confirm this?

8

As to your first question,
I seem to remember from college that romantic love as a concept began with the Troubadours and Trouveres in France in the 12th century. They wrote poetry and performed it to simple music/drums, mostly about unrequieted love.

If it wasn’t the beginning, at least it is older than the 18th century.

9

So far we’ve considered the West; when does one first find (if they do) romantic love in the East? I can’t easily draw up in my mind recollections of such.

As regards to question #2, a new machine every few years is one easy answer.

10

For the porn finder you could probably just use the unerase or volume recover function of Norton Utilities to see what files might still be hanging around. And a good utilities software program is way more useful than porn finder. Unless you really need to find yourself some porn.

11

Kris, in the future please start two threads when you have two unrelated questions. I don’t object to one poster starting 2 or 3 threads in one day (20 or 30 is a different matter). Asking the questions separately and giving each thread a descriptive title will boost your chances of getting a good answer to each question.

bibliophage
moderator GQ