Re: Emacs in a Corporate Environment

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>
> Cc: Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st>,  Yuan Cao <yuancao85@gmail.com>,
>  help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org,  John Yates <john@yates-sheets.org>
> Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2023 16:36:37 +0200
> 
> > I guess some internet beast swallowed the rest of your letter, but
> > I second the message that OP should /not/ be embarrassed.  Silly jokes
> > aside, the question is a valid one.  In fact, there is one area I am
> > a bit afraid of wrt Emacs & security, and if I may hijack the thread (a
> > bit), let me ask this: if I edit remote files via TRAMP, can I be sure
> > not even partial copy of data from the server ends up on my local drive,
> > e.g. in /tmp?
> 
> You can be sure that a copy of your remote data end up in your local
> drive in /tmp. Tramp is busy to clenaup after the operations, but there
> is no guarantee that it will cover everything. And if somebody calls
> `file-local-copy' of a remote file, this ends up in your /tmp by
> intention of the caller.

Actually, you don't even need file-local-copy in the picture.  Every
modern OS has a swap file, which is used as the "backing store" for
the VM allocations.  So once you have any text in memory, chances are
its copy will end up on disk, and these chances go up as time goes by
and the probability of the memory holding the text to be swapped out
increases.

The rule is: anything you have in memory can very well end up being
somewhere on your local disk.