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?"
Please! If a story is a dupe, so what? Here's a thought. Don't read it. Don't even comment. Don't even "just say no". (OK, so that was several thoughts ;-)
Get outside, breathe the fresh air, and quit trying to come up with clever quotes that express your angst over a duplicate/semi-duplicate story.</RANT>
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Again a story that has been posted a little while ago. I won't rant about reading your own website or getting decent editors... not this time.
:)
But I wouldn't be surprised if one of the factors for the attention BBC gives to this project is the fact that is has been on Slashdot.
Nice circle
Sheesh, you'd think the 'nerds' would pay attention to the details. But then, you are not really nerds. Are you?
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
I don't understand how this gets moderated as 'funny'... Anyway, the fact that it reaches +5 means that moderators agree with it. Now if only the message gets thru to the editors :-(
Seriously taco & co : if once in a while someone posts trolls about dupes, you can mod them down and ignore them. But if 1 out of 5 posts gets a +5 remark, I think it really is time to consider actions.
At least say sumtin about it. Right now, the editor attitude "hu, can't hear ya" is seriously giving the impression that they don't give a flying fuck about it.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Too bad there isn't a mechanism to meta-moderate slashdot stories for duplicates. That way you could filter out anything ranging from -1 (I don't care if it is a retread) to 5 (this has to be a beyond-all-doubt repost before I don't see it).
My
Limekiller
Secure Harddisk Eraser is a Linux floppy that overwrites the HD several times with different patterns. Just boot from the floppy, wait 60 seconds and the harddisk will start to erase.
The homepage
Oh yes, I've posted on this before, but that doesn't seem to matter...
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
The average IQ seems to be taking a plunge at /. and its Almost getting to be a waste of time reading replys.
This IS NOT a repeat of the other story
THIS ONE ask readers what THEY have found on old drives, not what the MIT gang found.
Duh.......
Maybe his wife was into it.
A roommate of mine once worked at the Berkeley admissions office. Once, he showed up with a stack of ~15 floppies that he said were placed in the trash bin and were completely clean and usable when he tried them. Noticing a cryptic sticker with some numbers and the letters "ETS" on it, I got him to let me take a look at them. Took a raw disk dump. Hmm. Looks like ascii-ish data, as if from a flat database file, unencrypted. And hey, here're names... addresses... social security numbers... and a few more odd 4-digit numbers. about 30 minutes later, having figured out where the fields are, it dawns upon me that i had come upon the ETS test records (SAT I/SAT II) for the '97-'98 incoming applicant class at berkeley (some of the '96-'97 data too). Scarily enough, this also included DOB, SSN, addr, phone number, etc. Apparently the people in charge of processing the data did a quickformat or something and threw the disks right out thinking they're clean.
The data has since been destroyed for good, but not until after I spent weeks drooling about the hypothetical possibilities that this could've yielded =)
// zyqqh
I think time has arrived for techices to tell the general public and the companies they work for to wipe their drives before disposing or giving them away. People should be told to encrypt sensitive info and wipe drives. Heck, it should even come w/ the computer manuals IMO with the necessary software.
I think it just goes to show how much people depend on their computers for too many things. Only a matter of 10 years ago, people had financial information, documents, addresses and contacts and any other personal information under lock and key in a filing cabintet.
As long as someone doesn't snoop through their garbage bags, someone would probably not want to go to the local garbage dump to get personal information. Now many simply give old, working hard drives to charitable organizations or friends w/o even reformatting them. In the age of identity theft, I think its safe to say that most in the general public shred paper documents before disposal.