When British software developers came up with a program that could wipe files from computer hard drives, they gave it a hard-core name: Evidence Eliminator.
It gets the point across, but can sure sound bad if a user gets hauled into court and is accused of illegally destroying documents.
That's what happened in the high-stakes trial, now in federal court in Riverside, over who owns the rights to the hugely successful Bratz line of dolls.
Toy giant Mattel Inc. sued the far smaller MGA Entertainment Inc. to get a stake of Bratz because it claims the doll's creator was in its employ when he came up with the concept.
The designer, Carter Bryant, has been accused by Mattel of using Evidence Eliminator on his laptop computer just two days before investigators were due to copy its hard drive.
Carter hasn't denied that the program was run on his computer, but he said it wasn't to destroy evidence. He said he had legitimate reasons to use the software.
Evidence Eliminator and similar programs on the market, such as Window Washer from Webroot Software Inc., perform consumer tasks other than killing content to foil investigators. For example, they can clean out temporary files created during the installation of programs. This can help make the computer run faster and more efficiently.
"They can clean up the computer detritus that builds up over time," said Gary Kessler, a network security consultant and professor who teaches forensic science.
And Evidence Eliminator, as well as other programs including some that are free, can wipe out histories of Internet searches.
The company behind Evidence Eliminator -- Robin Hood Software, based in London -- refused to do an interview. But in an e-mail message, the program's inventor, Andy Churchill -- who referred to himself as "a 10-year veteran of the Internet adult-entertainment market" -- said that if even the judge in the case "heard his own computer was to be investigated in a couple of days' time, he'd be buying Evidence Eliminator."
But it's the software's use to wipe out text files, e-mail and other content that makes Evidence Eliminator, Window Washer and other similar programs -- sometimes called wipers -- occasionally newsworthy.
The program's recent notoriety provides a reminder that normal methods of deleting content from PCs -- such as dragging it to the recycling bin on the desktop -- only get rid of the electronic directory entry that acts as the address to the file.
