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?"
This was posted before here.
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."
I've come across quite a few older drives in machines that hadn't been cleaned out. One was an ancient Mac II which used to be used as a webserver, but was removed from that job in 1995, and had sat in a basement getting rustier and rustier. It was given to me in horrific condition, and the motherboard/PSU was toast, almost like it was washed through with saltwater. The HD looked a little better, and on firing it up in another machine, it clattered noisily, but still read most of the drive - on there was the website, last accessed 8 years ago. I copied that all off and archived it just because it was cool.
:).
:).
Oddly, the website nowadays isn't all that different
Another belonged to a rather fascinating lady who seemed to use her computer from 1994 when it was new, until 2002 when I came across it from an ebay sale. All of her writing (some published, some not), drafts, her academic work, and her photography was on there. She did quite a few nudes and not only had published work, but every photo taken in between used to create those images. Slightly giggleworthy, but really just rather tasteful nude photos.
One other I was given, a compaq 486, belonged to an organiser of some of the behind the scenes work for the Sydney Olympics - it had names, addresses and phone numbers of dozens of celebrities, politicians, and anyone involved in the marketing pre-games, along with correspondence to those people. A fun read but kind of boring - I didn't keep the addresses either.
The biggest coincidence I came across was ordering a computer from ebay, from a town about 800km from me. it came to me with a HD full of various word documents - what a surprise to find it had originally been used as a wordprocessing machine in the same building I work in, and several years before. It came home
Nothing amazingly exciting, just a few curious little moments.
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.
Knowing this could cause legal trouble, I quickly got on the phone and called the hospital. They said that they thought the system was clean, and that I should destroy any data on the drive. I then called my lawyer. After a small consulting fee (about $60) he informed me that I shouldn't have anything to worry about, so long as I did as the hospital asked, and destroyed all copies of the records. And I did, and that was the first time I ever felt good about losing data!
(Posting anonymously, in case any other slashdotters get any funny ideas... :)
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
Back in the late 90's, when I was still doing PC service work for folks, I had a pretty wild experience in terms of recovery. I ran into this cab driver at CompUSA who was in the process of picking up a whole bunch of power cords and other basic accessories. We got to talking, and he said he was new to computers, and had just gotten a whole bunch of hardware from the local swap meet.
We talked a while longer, and he ended up agreeing to pay my hourly rate to look the machines over, clean them up, and wipe the drives so he could use 'em. What he had was a full-tower Pentium 166 (big stuff back then), and a smaller external drive that had a security key lock on it.
So, I vacuum the system's guts (had a ton of dust-bunnies in there), reseat the memory, and fire it up. It boots into Win95. First thing I notice is a TON of very high-end graphics-manipulation and publishing software installed, including packages like Adobe PageMaker, a full version of Acrobat, PhotoShop, etc. There was also the (then) current version of Visual Basic and Visual C (both Enterprise-class editions).
This set off some alarm bells in my head. The combined software on that system was worth at least as much as the hardware. I started digging a bit deeper. I found a couple of Word documents (yes, the system had a full version of MS Office and MS Exchange on it as well) with the name of a graphics-and-advertising company barely 30 miles away.
I called said company, and got hold of the admin assistant for the programmer who's name was all over the system. Turns out that the entirety of what that cabbie had delivered to me had all been stolen in a burglary the same day it showed up at the swap meet!
You can probably guess the rest. The cabbie, once he learned what was going on, and not wanting any trouble with the King County Sheriffs, agreed to just leave the equipment with me in return for anonymity. The system, as it turned out, belonged to one of their senior developer/programmers who, along with their system, had lost about seven years worth of intense work.
The company involved was so delighted to get everything back intact (yep, every byte of that work was recovered) that they not only paid me for my time involved in cleaning the stuff up, but they also gave me a $50.00 certificate for one of the best restaurants in town. My wife and I had a nice dinner with that one.
The moral of the story: Pay VERY close attention to what may be left on any hard drive or system you get, and follow your instincts if you're the least bit suspicious! You could end up saving someone a ton of grief and lost hours.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies