Slashdot Mirror
Second Hand Hard Discs Reveal Secrets
An anonymous reader writes "BBC News has a story about MIT grads buying old hard discs from eBay and elsewhere, and finding credit card numbers, ATM transactions, porn and emails all accessible on them. Comments? What's the strangest thing readers have found, or left, on a hard drive?"
do we have to hear this story?
Now here's a story, slashdot editors read slashdot!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I found a bunch of Spice Girl stuff (3GB+) on my friends 'broken' hard drive he gave me... I was sorta afraid when I saw that, really makes me wonder about him...
How else can we explain how the editors are finding these old stories?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I found archives of old Slashdot stories and resubmitted them.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
Yikes!
/. stories...
Looks like someone must have gotten ahold of CmdrTaco's recently discarded hard drive and recovered the links to old
You'd think Taco would have at least used some sort of freespace wiping utility!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Well I bought a laptop back in the day...a p166 toshiba which to this day has enough power to word process...surf the internet, but unfortunately the battery and cdrom both died.
Now when I bought it I thought it was kinda wierd...it was in like a crayola theme and had lots of kids games on it and stuff, but the guy I got it from said it was his kids. So I am about to format it, since it was full of junk and the little 2 gig hd was filled, when all of a sudden what do i discover but a c:\private\ dir!!!
So...as any good person does I formatted without looking at it. *cough*
Turns out daddy had a gay pron fetish!
After being disgusted by this, especially since it was on his KIDS computer, I formatted and lived happily ever after.
Now, if someone was to buy the laptop from me they would find plenty of straight pron on it!!!
(and i just might leave it there as a little present)
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Just in case you missed the last one
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I'm seriously considering blocking CmdrTaco from the list of people whose stories I see. If you look back over the list of duplicates, nearly all of them are Taco's.
Psssst, Taco. A hint for ya: just because you started the site doesn't absolve you of the duty of looking at it once in a while. Say, before you click "Submit."
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
WWII is over and Soviet Russia ceased to exist ...
Come on Taco, do you ever read your own site?
Actually,
I believe the original story was in the cache files on the hard drives in question.
BaDoom!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I see duplicates. They're everywhere - they don't even know they're duplicates...
-Adam
Some MIT kid in the future is going to stumble across the Slashdot hard drives and go "God Damn they posted Duplicates alot."
Arrgh, I saw the cat pass twice... Errr, the post twice ! :-)
:-)
(Note to moderator : this is a pityful attempt at humor, to get my karma from bad to neutral, since my first 2 posts were rated -1 and ever since I can't post that will get read, and my two other posts weren't offensive, so I deserve better).
There does seem to be rather a lot of tripe posted here.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Check out the photoshop that's going on over at Fark: unlikely Slashdot articles.
why don't the editors try doing something.. like "EDITING" the site?
when there is a dup story, whack the dup. This isn't fscking rocket science.. or even bad coding.
are they afraid of committing a "Winston Smith in the Ministry of Slashdot" evil that would make whacking dups a "Bad Idea"? If there is, i'm missing it.
(/me paypals $10 to Dr. Evil and Mini Me for the overuse of quotation marks in this post, so stop bitching)
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
There have to be 20 dupes about the fact that this is a dupe. Of course, I'm guessing this has already been pointed out...
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I love it when the post dups
-dont have to read article, already did
-can karma whore just by copying the high rated posts
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Every other poster has managed to stay within the confines of this discussion, which is clearly about Duplicate stories being posted to Slashdot.
I don't think it's fair to them, or the rest of the readers, if this post doesn't get modded down to -1 Offtopic.
"Tuesday 8th of February 1997, Tony is pissing me off today, he's already taken 4 coffee breaks, sticking me with the rest of the work, note to self report to boss. Julie is looking rather sexy today, comment to her at lunch about lovely blouse."
It got spicy here and there and read like a badly written journal, still it was great to read about the daily intricate moments that one of my ex collegues had felt.
Errr Id better not tell this one.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Think of it as an opportunity for even the dimmest of slashdotters to appear funny - go grabbing the funniest comments from the original story! For example:
"Luckily for me, my Ebay'd hard drives are safe: I only sell broken ones."
"Two MIT grad students bought used drives from eBay and secondhand computer stores.
Don't I feel inferior. I've done the same with used HD's in the past and I only have a HS edumacation."
"Your old HD is safe, I can get creditcard numbers faster on kazaa."
"Was it Pete Townshend's drive?"
"How do I destroy a HD? I just wait for my warranty to run out - it becomes unreadable shortly thereafter!"
One time when I came home from work, there was a PC by the dumpster at our apartment complex. I brought it in to harvest it for parts (never can have enough screws), and i decided to boot it up first to see what it was. Low end pentium, like a 75mhz. 8megs of ram. Ran DOS and Win 3.11.
Turned out the machine used to be a Kiosk machine at a deli counter at a local grocery store. There wasnt TOO much of interest on it, but there was a huge list of peoples meat and cheese orders.
- The Allies win the war!
- Einstein Dies!
- Korea is a stalemate!
- Al Gore invents the Internet!
Trolling is a art,
in a dumpster.
A friend went back to claim them, this is what he ended up with:
2 HP Server class machines PIII 450Mhz good working condition once the cigarette ashes were removed.
1 DLT Tape backup
19 New tapes in wrapper and cleaning kit
Cables and other accessories.
The machines were used by a financial company. Everything worked and booted up. NT server loaded and ready....
We shut them down and wiped everything. Pretty scary actually, who knows what was on those machines!
Blogging because I can...
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
This story is part of a striped disk array, which is why its content looks similar, but not identical, to the other stripe, which was discovered a week ago.
1. Are you Tony? How many coffee breaks have you had today?
2. Got any nice pictures of Julie?
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
When we sorted through his equipment, not only did he have volumes of she-male pr0n, but he had been subscribed to she-male pr0n emailing lists using his company email account.
It certainly explained his freaky looking "girlfriend".
:)
The strangest most surreal thing found so far is a copy of the same story on Slashdot.org from a few days ago.
Help fight continental drift.
15:08 21 January 03
At a worldwide conference held in Atlanta, GA, leading scientists and publishers agreed on a new measurement unit to describe the common phenomenon of news stories getting published repeatedly on internet news sites.
1 Taco = 3 dpm (dupes per minute)
After a lengthy discussion we eventually agreed to name the new unit after "CmdrTaco", founder of the famous web site Slashdot. We are really happy now, this has been bothering us since the beginning of the internet. said Sag. S. Nochmal, German publisher and chairman of the convention.
"CmdrTaco" himself was unavailable for comment. He was last seen yelling "Eternal fame" and "must write automatic re-post script now."
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Hell yeah!
True story: some years back my wife was doing web design for various clients, one of whom had a graphic artist on staff, who gave her a Mac 100M Zip disk that supposedly had some nice artwork on it for my wife to put on the client's web site.
But the disk appeared to be completely empty, so my wife gave it to me to try to recover the missing files.
No problem under Linux...I recovered a full 100 megabytes of files...but they were all kinky porn!!!
We decided to let the guy off easy and didn't tell his employers what he was doing with company computers and media, but my wife was always a bit leery of working with that guy after that.
(Yes, I did of course save the more, ah, artistic images for, um, later personal, uh, research. ;-)
This kind of amusing leftovers on media is probably extremely common, but most people don't have any motivation to pry around into deleted files. As I recall, this particular disk just had a bit of file system damage that made it appear empty at first, rather than literally having deleted files, so file system repair was enough to get all of the originals back.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
And not just hard drives. Browsing around the company LAN, we find all sorts of things on peoples's shares. And once a couple of years back, my colleague and I discovered some persons of questionable parentage had gotten into one of our colocated servers and was using it as an FTP site for trading games. Our reaction was like this:
.... Is there anything good in there?"
Me: "Where did all the disk space go?"
Co-worker: "And this new account?"
Me: "Damn! I knew we should have replaced this POS(a 2 year old install)! It's been compomised!"
Co-worker: "Here's where it went. They've got an FTP site up for trading games. It's taking up 30 gigs!"
Me: "Bastards!
Co-worker: "Actually.... yes..."
Me: "OK. Shut that account out, let's prepare to redo the system. And maybe we should archive that. You know, for evidence...."
> Apperantly, the previous owner was your average college drunkard and basically rapped this girl.
.
Gimmee a beat, Irwin . .
Hey, woman, I'm talkin to you,
If you don't gimme any lovin', then we're thru!
So I drink a lot of beer, so I drink a lot of whiskey,
You got no cause to be cold when I'm feelin' frisky --
So I'm standing here right outside yo' door,
And I'll keep poppin' these rhymes at cha, even though I'm a bore.
Fuck you, you no talent assclown! Butterscotch rules! Vanilla sucks! Where did you go to school, SEARS? Anyone who would say that about butterscotch clearly has Oedipal issues, do you kiss you mother with that mouth? Probably, french kiss. French VANILLA, that is!!!!
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
At least it wasn't an article submitted like:
:p
According to this article posted on slashdot, HP released some.......
I'd like to see if something like that can slip through the filters
1000 songs in MP3 format. After deleting the ones that I didn't like, there were still nearly 950 of them.
:)
I can't help picturing you walking into a video dating service, watching 10 tapes, and after rejecting the ones you don't like you announce you'd like to date 9 and a half of them
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
We didn't bother with wiping the drives.
After the end of a project or if a drive went bad, the drive platter was physically removed from the hd, smashed and then finally burned!
( Ob. M.P. quote : "burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp" )
Better than what they used to do: destroy the ENTIRE PC too!
dupe filtering system
Oh wonderful (groan). The next day you'd have several thousand baffled people trying to figure out why the hell the front page is completely blank.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
1000 songs in MP3 format. After deleting the ones that I didn't like, there were still nearly 950 of them.
You said:
I can't help picturing you walking into a video dating service, watching 10 tapes, and after rejecting the ones you don't like you announce you'd like to date 9 and a half of them
Heh! :) I did say that I had over 1000...
I have no tag line
I do hope you were joking, because I just laughed my head off, when I read it.
Just in case you weren't joking, I'll reiterate the lesson that you (should have) learned here:
My social debt being paid, this gives me flashbacks to the days of BSD 4.0 (we're talking the original BSD -- not the freeBSD, openBSD, etc). It was back at a time when a color text terminal might have been a show-stopper at Comdex. Color not being available, the BSD people decided to set up ls(1) so that, when printing to a terminal, it would run in '-F' mode -- indicating directories with a trailing /, executables with a '*' and unprintable characters with a '?'.
This was also in the early days of rogue (precursor to hack). accidently hitting the 's'ave function read-filename routine was the one part of rogue where hitting 'esc' wouldn't back you out. If you hit 'esc' 'enter', it would save your rogue session with a name of 'esc'. For wierd anti-cheat reasons, the save file was also executable.
Well one day this new grad student walks by and asks me for some help. lots of his files were missing and, whenever he explained his predicament to any knowledgable user/sysadmin type, they would literally ROTFL.
After I solemnly promised not to laugh, he explained that rogue had created this wierd file and he'd wanted to delete it. Next thing he knows, he gets a bunch of error messages and all his files are gone. Since it appeard on his screen as '*?" (escape key as name, and executable), he'd typed in
After the few seconds of silence that it took to hold down my composure, I explained to him that- *? was evaluated by the shell as a wildcard for any file with at least one character in it's name
- (this was not long after star wars) There was a unix-universe StarWars spoof making the rounds of usenet (nee netnews)
.. In 'DecWars', Darth Vadic was building his deadly, filesystem crunching 'arem star' (pronounced 'rm *'). This poor sod, had managed to unwittingly managed to live Vadic's dream and unleashed the full power of "the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star". -- albeit on his own file system.
The only consolation I could give him was that he'd brightened up many sysadin's days, and he hadn't used the '-r' (rebel base?) option, so his subdirectories were safe.OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Like the one ring. It must be destroyed in the mountain that created it.