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?"
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]
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."
Wrong! I stumbled across one of Taco's old drives on Ebay. Slashdot wasn't bookmarked or in the cache. Explains a lot.
Check out the photoshop that's going on over at Fark: unlikely Slashdot articles.
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.
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.
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
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.
If you look back over the list of duplicates, nearly all of them are Taco's.
Now remember, gang, he's a newlywed...He is in that magical time between "I'm a geek and never have a date." and marriage being old hat (or just old). The boy's (possibly for the first time since the site started) got something other than slashdot on his mind...
--Storm