Yesterday I was taking the recycling out, walking with my mom as she left to go out for dinner with a friend.

At the recycling bins was a bag of computer goods. My mom said to be carefull because you never know if an item is hot etc. I take a load of hard drives inside, most don't work, but there are a few 1GB's that are working good.

Then I plug in this one drive, and it's got no labels, nothing.

The volume label says "HP_PAVILION" which was a dead give away that this used to be in a HP. So I looked at the size and it was a 10GB! Wow! That was a nice catch of the day. :)

I looked in the drive and noticed alot of files, I am a little nosy, but I noticed alot of personal files and very sensitive information. I found some documents belonging to Mr. "A". So I used the directory assistace to verify that his phone number had not changed. So I called him up and was talking with his daughter, gave her the information on what I found etc., and she said she would get back to me.

Her mom phones around 10:30PM and we talk for about 20 minutes as I explain everything to her. She finall realizes it's not her husband's machine but a close friend of thiers who helped her husband with various work on the computer. So she asks permission to call hima nd give him my number.

He calls me around 11:30PM and we talk for a bit and I find out the truth:

No, the drive wasn't stolen per say, they had paid for it, the machines and a whole bunch of other stuff for who knows how long to be DESTROYED. As far as he was concerned, these machines no longer existed on God's green earth, they were finale, the end.

So, needless to say he wasn't happy about the fact that this drive and who knows what else was still around.

Anyways, I got the opinion he is willing to offer me a job in some form, and I have as a courtesy wiped the drive for him via a 7 Pass US D.O.D. 5200.28-STD, and we will arrange for him to pick the drive up in a while.

So, you really got to know who you trust nowadays!!!!

I'll destroy stuff myself, get a good 20 dollars sledge hammer from Home Depot, problem solved.

(Don't worry they are PC's) :P

Thats what I did to the other disks I had that were no good. Removed thier seals, cut thier data ribbons and made sure i took some chips of the controller board and smuzzled the pins.

:P

Then again, Seagate was always into high quality. Plus, it was a 20MB drive and 5.25" so I doubt a spec of dust would have any serious effect on it compared to today's drives which one spec means millions of bytes lost.

:)

quote:

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Nothing beats removing the seal from the disks. Oops! a spec of dust got in.

Thats what I did to the other disks I had that were no good. Removed thier seals, cut thier data ribbons and made sure i took some chips of the controller board and smuzzled the pins.

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--
who | grep -i blonde | date
cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger
mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount
sleep

Of course, if the previous user had used a program like PGP to overwrite the data instead of removing the drive sled, none of this would be a problem.

AnubisTTP, Tank Commander, Bolo Division
68k Macintosh Liberation Army
Macs Liberated:22

Secondly. When you remove the drive from the computer, its a good idea to remove the sled, and install the empty sled in the computer exactly as you would if you were mounting a drive.

The Lightning Stalker

Performa 631CD, 7.5.5
LC III Mail Server
Q610
Q650

6400/180 40/1.6G/512k L2/enet/video-in/TV
7600/120 '604/233, 80/1.2G & 4G, 9.2.2 (Main Mac)

quote:

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I find out the truth:

No, the drive wasn't stolen per say, they had paid for it, the machines and a whole bunch of other stuff for who knows how long to be DESTROYED. As far as he was concerned, these machines no longer existed on God's green earth, they were finale, the end.

So, needless to say he wasn't happy about the fact that this drive and who knows what else was still around.

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by Day: Mild-Mannered Engineer and Trapeze(tm) Artist
by Night: Colonel of Truth, Justice, and the Macintosh Way
Reserve Officer in 68kMLA Cantankerous Coot Contingent

As for the fire bit, if I have a bon fire with some friend, I'll bring the drives along. Or I can advertise a geek's campfire experience where we have fun trashing hardware. :P

The sad thing is this sort of thing is probably more common than people think. To top it off, there are still a number of machines that are most likely out there. Granted as he said the data was 2 years old so it is doubtfull that any of it are in any serious way going to cause them trouble if it ended up public, but the thought is the hard part.

He mentioned that there could be a job for me, since they could use people that are going to handle info properly and not just "dump" it as he said where I was. I have a webpage bookmarked from the US Goverment where they outline procedures for any Goverment machine to be cleaned before being sent away, iether for sale or as donation. There is a program for Windows called BC Wipe, which I used to wipe the drive clean. It's a 7-Pass wipe that will make it impossible to get anything out of it.

It's easier on the macs because drive setup and other utils will just let you zero all data, and if you need a more secure option, fill the drive with data and repeat. But, it's interesting how the goverment is satisfied with Mac OS's simple "low level format" and "zero all data" options, but on the pc they require more advanced methods, one attribute to PC's complexity.

G4From128k

But I could take it to a steel factory like in Terminator 2 and say "Hasta La Vista, Baby!"

Then it's be history. The kid's expression was priceless: "We got skynet by the balls now don't we?"

I wish someone would hurry up and find how to do this with Microsoft. It's thier blantant ignorance that leads to this insecurity. They tell people to have fun then they take all the fun away with warnings and jibberish. Too complex.

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Christophillis- Portable Squadren Commander
68k Macintosh Liberation Army
Total 68k Macs Liberated: 6.02x10^23
Or just 6

-The Balance Of Judgement

Personally, i dunno if i'd be game enough to even look up Intel's Backside cache......

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