Re: [[Infowarrior] - NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug for Years]

[Doug Barton <dougb () dougbarton us>]

On 04/14/2014 05:50 PM, John Levine wrote:
> In article <534C68F4.305 () cox net> you write:
> > On 4/14/2014 9:38 AM, Matthew Black wrote:
> > > Shouldn't a decent OS scrub RAM and disk sectors before allocating
> > > them to processes, unless that process enters processor privileged
> > > mode and sets a call flag? I recall digging through disk sectors on
> > > RSTS/E to look for passwords and other interesting stuff over 30
> > > years ago.
> >
> > I have been out of the loop for quite a while but my strongly held
> > belief is that such scrubbing would be an enormous (and intolerable)
> > overhead ...
>
> It must be quite a while.  Unix systems have routinely cleared the RAM
> and disk allocated to programs since the earliest days.

When you say "clear the disk allocated to programs" what do you mean 
exactly?