Yes let's all link to unknown sites by using tinyurls, while discussing security, because it's an ideal time to explore the concept or irony.

One of the links I gave relative to a sell off of our private and confidential files failed so here’s the full URL:

http://www.eadt.co.uk/content/eadt/news/story.aspx?brand=EADOnline&category=News&tBrand=EADOnline&tCategory=xDefault&itemid=IPED01%20Jan%202010%2021%3A43%3A21%3A123

UK Govt certified encryption proves to be rubbish.

With this Governments obsession collecting and storing as much of our private and confidential details it is therefore alarming to discover that UK Govt certified encryption used for protecting these Pen Drives is pretty well useless story link below.
http://tinyurl.com/yevfhqz

This surveillance and Data Collection Technology may already be being used by Counter Intelligence Services from other counties. As was alleged lately by the release of e-mails and Faxes relating to alleged falsified figures being given by officials concerning ‘Global Warming’.
http://carl-agpcuk.livejournal.com/1205.html

We read that there is a sell off of our private and confidential files read story here:
http://tinyurl.com/ylg5bu6

Is Big Brother UK selling your DNA for profit? http://carl-agpcuk.livejournal.com/3111.html

So is (so-call) ‘Big Brother’ the really Bad Guy?

Signed Carl Barron Chairman of agpcuk

Owing to the wear-levelling alogrithms. When you overwrite a block of data, it leaves the old one where it is, allocates a new one, and copies the new data to it (along with any of the old data that wasn't overwritten).

It can be done, but you'd have to overwrite the entire drive multiple times to make sure you'd cycled through all of the available flash write blocks. And there's still a tiny chance that one of the blocks might go bad just in the course of overwriting and be added to the bad blocks list with its old content intact and never overwritten, although that's pretty minimal.

Anyone caring about their privacy and security who ended up with such USB drives and doesn't understand how data recovery works deserves to send their data to China... Maybe at the Chinese factories and their Party cells they will care about the "security-conscious" people's data more.

Note to the rest: Use proper data erasing techniques and tools before even contemplating parting with your data device.

And next time consider twice about using "security" products by companies which simply advice you to "delete and send it away".

wonder whether the UK government would be better off losing any one of these Kingston drives in the mail...