So - this I realize this isnt a smart idea, please no reprimanding. but I am wondering nonetheless.
Suppose I wanted to watch a porn DVD on a company laptop. Not at work definetely. I realize looking at port websites is definetely traceable and a BAD idea. How traceable are dvds? It seems to me it would be easy to find out that media player was opened, and maybe even a DVD inserted, but digging through encrypted information to get DVD title and/or rating (even if its unrated) seems pretty difficult.
This is assuming all history functions are turned OFF on windows media player, as well as the “connect to internet” stuff that looks up things like CD covers for music.
this is way above my pay grade, and hopefully a geek can answer this appropriately, but since the DVD is removeable media that never resides on your HD, I would think the “footprint” left behind from your porno DVD would be pretty much nonexistent…
I would make sure it doesn’t show up in the recent items, or in the recently played list of your DVD player… but most DVD data files have pretty nondescript titles. Only the disc title itself (like “ASS_LICKING_SLUTS”) would be incriminating.
Yes, I think that the most that would remain would be a “Most Recently Opened Files” thing with the name and path to the file. If the name of the movie file is innocuous then you should be fine. BUT, factoring in human error, eventually you are going to slip up and play a file that doesn’t have an innocuous title and you’re going to forget to open up X number of files after you watched it to push the name off the recently opened list. From there it is just a question of how unlucky you are.
I would think that your greatest liabilities would be media management Nanny software on the computer itself or “extra features”/DVD-ROM content. Just don’t click on anything stupid or leave anything caching your recently viewed files and you should be good to go. Happy Whacking.
(I’m just going to talk about regular DVDs since I assume porn DVDs are no different. If they are different somehow, these comments may not apply.)
Not really. The DVD player has to decode the DVD in order to play it back in the first place, so by the time you see the picture, nothing’s encrypted anymore. Even if that were not the case, DVD decryption is trivially defeated even when it’s in place. Furthermore, things like DVD disc labels (which are often the movie titles) are not encrypted to begin with, and some DVDs are entirely unecrypted.
That’s a good thing to do, but it’s not a guarantee.
This really depends on the kind of monitoring/tracing you expect your company to use on your laptop. For example, if there’s monitoring software running in the background on your laptop, it could monitor every single thing you do. Literally. Internet traffic, as you know, can be recorded. Or the software might take a screenshot every X minutes whenever it sees that a DVD is playing. It might record all audio the computer produces. It might record everything the laptop sees or hears, if it has a built-in webcam or microphone. Basically, everything you type, use, or do on the laptop can be recorded and there’s little you could do to hide your actions short of wiping the hard drive, but even that’s not a guarantee. This is one extreme.
At the other extreme, perhaps your coworkers just casually use your laptop on rare occasions, and only for short webbrowsing sessions or whatnot? If that’s all you’re worried about, excessive paranoia might be unnecessary and something simple like clearing the MRUs (“Most Recently Used” documents / programs) should do the trick. There are plenty of programs out there that can do that (look for them at download.com). And if the only program you use is Windows Media Player (with the history and connectivity turned off), this may not be necessary at all.
Oh, but do turn off Autoplay for your DVD drive so you don’t get rogue programs running from the DVDs when you insert them (there’s gotta be an STD joke there somewhere…).
So it really depends on who or what you’re trying to hide your activities from and how badly they want to find the stuff. If your company is really serious about this, you should not trust that THEIR laptop will be under your control. Go buy a $30 DVD player to hook up to your TV or a $150 portable player if you really must watch them on the go – $150 isn’t worth losing your job over, is it? (Not a reprimand; just saying that the risk doesn’t make much sense.)
We get laptops back from rigs for repair occasionally. Recovering pr0n filled ‘My Documents’ directories notwithstanding, some do come in with the occasional exciting DVD title still in the drive. Oddly enough, we have yet to have someone ask for one back.
