Secure Remove Files & Directories from Mac OS X with the Command Line
Need to securely delete a file, group of files, or an entire directory, insuring that it’s quite literally never recoverable by any known possible means? You can do this easily from the command line with the help of an incredibly powerful tool called srm. srm, as you may have guessed, stands for ‘secure removal’, and is a secure version of the commonly used ‘rm’ command that exists in virtually every flavor of unix, Mac OS X included. Be advised this utility is not for everyone and certainly not for novice users, srm should be considered an advanced tool, and it’s best used by those who are comfortable with the command line and understand the data repercussions of secure delete functions.
How secure is srm? Well, the default for secure remove is the incredibly secure 35-pass method which uses the “35-pass Gutmann algorithm”, that basically means that first the data is removed, then written over 35 times using randomly generated patterns, making recovery quite literally impossible. For some comparison on how secure that is, srm also has a “medium” option setting which uses 7-pass security, and 7-pass meets the US Department of Defense standard for securely erasing data… thus, theoretically at least, the 35 pass method is 7 times more secure than what the US DoD accepts as their standard for secure data removal. We’re not going to focus on the medium option though, we’re going to use srm as it was intended to be used, with full 35-pass data removal.
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Though most of us are accustomed to the default QWERTY keyboard layout, iOS does provide options to toggle between QWERTY, AZERTY, and QWERTZ. The latter two options are generally used in Europe, but you can enable them on any iPad or iPhone regardless of which region you’re in, the only requirement is that a Latin alphabet keyboard is the default. These new software layouts work whether the keyboard is docked or in the 
Mac OS X includes an excellent command line network utility called “nettop” that allows users to monitor all network activity, traffic, and routes from a Mac to the outside world, both through local (LAN) and wide area (WAN) connections. If you’re unfamiliar with networking tools like this, you can think of nettop as a network centric task manager, displaying active networking connections, sockets and routes, their respective names and process id, the state of the connection and whether the connection is established, waiting, or listening, and information about individual process data transfer. It’s a bit like the standard ‘top’ and ‘htop’ commands which show process and resource information, but rather than showing CPU and RAM usage, it will show live network transfer information like packets sent and received, packet size, and total data transferred.
Have you ever noticed how some apps will have information pulled from your iOS Contacts list, like peoples names, numbers, and contact information? Or, contrarily, how some apps should have access to your address book, but don’t, and are then feature limited? Though this happens by choice, it’s fairly easy to overlook these settings during initial setup of many apps, or to forget which of the “Allow” or “Don’t Allow” setting you chose. Fortunately, this is very easy to see, and change in either direction.
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, thus allowing direct printing over wi-fi from any iOS device. They are by far the easiest to use and print to, but if you have an older printer or one that isn’t AirPrint compatible then we’ll also show you how to turn any standard printer into a wireless one by using a free solution available to both Mac OS X and Windows.
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