Sunday, September 9, 2012

cache files

My husband and I have discussed his case with several attorneys, most of whom told us they are knowledgeable about internet crime. When discussing cache files (the temporary files left on your hard drive when your browser opens a web page), one attorney pronounced it KAYSH; another pronounced it cashAY. Anyone who knows anything about computers knows the word is pronounced CASH, so the missed pronunciation coming from someone reassuring us that he knows about the internet...this did not bode well.

When you open a webpage, your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) saves a temporary file for that page. Later, when you return to that webpage, your browser will pull up the file cached on your hard drive.

If you right-click a link on a webpage, you can decide where you want to save the file so you can find it again later. This is downloading. When you click an image on a webpage, a temporary file is saved in your cache. That is the same as downloading the image. 

True, most of us ignore our cache files but in a forensics search of your computer, law enforcement does not ignore the images found in your cache.

Simply looking at images on the Internet without right-clicking and consciously downloading the image does not protect you in a search of your computer. An image found on your hard drive, whether it is in a folder you created or in the cache files you ignore, is an image found on your hard drive. 

That is enough to put you in prison. 

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