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Picking Up the Pieces
ravenousbugblatter writes "The New York Times online ran an article yesterday titled Picking up the pieces that talks about new technology that can recover information from shredded documents. Not only can companies scan strip-shredded paper and recover the information, they can do the same with cross-shredded paper. It comes at a price though - one company charges $8,000-$10,000 to "reconstruct" the information in a cubic foot of cross-shredded material. How's it done? The shreds are glued onto a piece of paper and then scanned. Software then looks for matches (in one case using the pattern of ink at the edges of the pieces) and suggests possible combinations to the operator that can be accepted or rejected."
Sure beats putting them back together by hand. Could have saved alot of dumpster-diving as a teen...
Shredding your financial statements is still a good idea. It keeps people from going through your trash and getting financial information. Everyone should at least get a straight line shredder and shred everything that they don't use.
thats a lotta money for a few scraps of paper!!
Ok I havn't read the story, yet but one quesion comes to mind. How do they handle double sided printing? And if they can't, more the reason to print double sided, besides saving paper.
-S
It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
A la Oswald Cobblepot: "All it takes is a little bit of tape, and a whole lot of patience."
Christopher Walken (Max Schreck, IIRC), was right; when you're done shredding the eviden... er, papers, burn them.
Thomas Galvin
I wonder how long it will be before we see the first shredders that slice the documents into squares instead of long strips.
/Tinfoil
I know I will buy one.. they are out to get me...
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
This story is asking for a:
"As the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I can say with absolute confidence that it is impossible to recover all data from shredded documents..."
troll.
...they were shelling out $8,000-$10,000 for some dude to sit in a room with a couple of cases of crazy glue and a knack for deciphering ink blots...
Crap! my secret's out.
Posting as directed.
Burn Baby Burn!
That way, I can be sure no one goes through my secrets, muha!
Ahhhh crap! I was not supposed to burn that... uhh, I don't think that service will recover my data, right...
Oh nevermind...
Please direct all bug reports to
Guess it's time to fire up the incinerators... Let's see you stitch scan after a chemical change...
This is why sensitive information should be incinerated after it has been cross-shredded.
Never put all your shreds in one waste-basket.
Self realization: I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?"
No registration required
I wonder if it can be put to work on that "Baked Bean" jigsaw puzzle that I saw a few years ago...
As an aside, does anyone know how many pieces there are in a cubic foot of multi-shredded paper? I'd imagine millions...
Burn your important bits of paper. Or if you're environmentally friendly, stick 'em in acid. Or you could flush it down the toilet after you tear 'em up. The possibilities are endless. It's easier to get rid of paper data than HDD data, anyway.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I mean, isnt shredding a type of encrypton? And isnt this reverse engineering?
I think ive mispelled every word in here.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
linku its/17shre.html?ex=1059019200&en=e94dac8f9d16f1e5& ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
or cut and paste if you don't trust links from ACs:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/17/technology/circ
'cross-shredded' means just that, I believe.
Banaaaana!
...on a really good television show that had far too short a life.
The Lone Gunmen - Those three 'nerds' from the X-Files; Frohicke, Langly, and Byers. Great guys. Great show.
There was one episode in which a rather critical clue was found in a shredded document; Langly and Frohicke were seen pressing the strips of paper between two pieces of contact paper and then scanning the sheet. A program therein sorted the strips, and matched them up. Voila, un-shredded document.
Great idea. Really.
Informatus Technologicus
But I guess thats why the government always burns sensitive papers.
Although... I remembering hearing about a set of government instructions that once said:
1) Destroy all copies of this document once you have read it.
2) But make a copy first for your records.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Incorporate this technology with the digital needle
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer to read broken records!
Why shred or acid bath your documents when you can set them on fire too? Why stop there? Set your whole office on fire and collect the insurance. Plus you've taken care of your incriminating documents... Oh I'd better stop before I give those sleazy execs more ides...
..how much they charge for putting together the pieces of my broken career? Andy Rooney
Companies had better get more thorough in destroying their documentation if their information can still be gleaned after shredding.
An evil thought occured to me. What sort of things could you glean from microsoft's trash using one of these programs. Any of the open-source crowd on here brave enough to find out? Could make for some amusing reading, those company memos.
Perhaps this will be the push to finally get business to do more paperless work.
The promise of a paperless office has been there for some time, but not a lot of big corporations have commited themselves to the concept.
Perhaps if they see what's happening with email communications in court, and now this, a paperless office will soon be common.
It's fairly easy and cheap to install the option to "Shred File", rendering it unrecoverable, or at least very difficult & expensive to recover.
And for the hippies out there, we'll save a few trees in the process.
Ah well.. too late now, I'll have to wait another hour now...
A number of companies sell cross-shredders. They are inexpensive, too.
I figured it would be possible sooner or later. If someone wants to get data they will get it. Like the old saying "either by hook or by crook". I wonder how the company verifies who is requesting the reassembly though? Can I just walk in with a pile of scraps and 8 grand? Also, is there any garuntee as to the integrity of the finished data? How can we be absolutely sure it was reassembled correctly; in some cases it could be very hard to tell? Pretty cool stuff. I'm sure the answers to my questions are in the article, but it's just not worth registering. ;p
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs" - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
here's an idea...
Shred it... THEN BURN IT. whew. that's smart.
How long can it take someone working full-time to do the job by hand?
Four cubic feet a year would equal a teacher's salary.
Sounds like the folks in the Giant Black Marker Business stand to make a lot of money then. Ever tried to recover info from a page that's been "Blacked Out"? It's pretty mcuh impossible. It's not a good way to do things when you have 3 million pages of whatever to destroy, but surely technology will soon give us the More Giant Black Marker and privacy/corruption can continue.
Caffeine Good
Everything confidential I have that isn't kept goes out to my burn pit.. Living in the country helps.
You've heard about reconstruction of shredded documents. But now Blastco is selling the amazing, super-duper, Blendomatic(tm).
The operation of this wonderful device is so simple even my grandmother could be accidentally killed using it.
Simply dump up to 1 cubic foot of documents of be "blended" and press the button. Water is injected and the 250 hp motor started. In a few minutes a phlegm-like pulp of paper is ejected.
This mass of Top-Secret documents is now no different than a dollop of elephant snot.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Better switch to burning things ... so that 25 years from now the high-tech will be reconstructing from ash.
terpmotors.com
the output from my cross cut shredder is dumped into the barbeque pit and burned. When they can recontruct pages from carbon ash I'll start to get worried.
If it was important enough to shred it's important enough to burn
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Why on earth would you want to make a shredder that makes it easy to put the bits back together????
You know they'll have a way to go when they put back the pieces from a New York Deli reciept reading: "2 Kosher ham and cheese on Rye. manZlick"
...in the Air Force we shredded documents on a regular basis. The shredder basically turned the paper into a fine powder. We had to put the resulting powder into black bags "for fear of information being weened from unathorized viewing of the dust through the clear bags the shredded used". I always thought the computer required to piece these documents together would be enormous and would take centuries to simply match one letter from one document. The thousands of documents shredded at one time would take thousands lifetimes and by then the information would be beyond useless.
We can finnally figure out what ENRON was up to.
I strongly favor using stump grinders to shred documents (as well as furniture, bosses, and any other shreddable things floating around the office).
For this reason, I don't throw away shredded papers. I had memory holes installed in my home, a la 1984, and whenever I throw away a paper, all I do is throw it in the memory hole and a vacuum sucks it away and into a furnace that burns the paper until it nothing but dust. I mix it with dirt, soil and fertilizer, and then I spread it all over my yard. The plants love it.
I have this great idea for a new product for the cia/nsa. On the outside it looks like an ordinary shredder and it acts like a shredder. But, just before it shreds the document it scans it into its memory. Later, at the spy's convienince they can remove the memory card and view all of the secret documents that no one wanted them to see.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
All you need is a little tape, and a whole lotta patience
Someone break out the polygraph!
Sorry I can't remember the issue (late 70's?), but after the Khomeni revolution, National Geographic had a picture of Iranian students manually piecing together shredded American documents they had obtained. I thought it was funny & can remember taping the picture to the wall next to our shredder.
Thats why there are burn bags, baby! Heck, we've got a central chute in the building thats just for those.
Sheesh, you've obviously never worked at a place that disposed of copiers via sledge hammers and acid baths.
Mod point free since 2001
Excellent! Since shredding isn't secure anymore, when are we going to get personal paper INCINERATORS. Put paper in... press button... KAZAAM, 4 foot flames shoot out of the bin.
Try all new "Fire(tm)". Fire cleans and disinfects, all in one easy step! Documents can be rendered completely secure as well!
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
After the Islamic revolution and the takeover of the us embassy, there was a massive collection of shreaded documents ( not cross shreaded) left in the embassy. They took the time to reconsitute all of them... By Hand!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Goverment found a pretty easy way to avoid any such possiblity. Cross shread your sensetive paperwork, add water, mash it back into paper pulp, and shread again.
Something like that, I can't remember the exact forumla for paper destruction..
Just remember having to feed the shreading machine what looked like raw paper.
Wonder if they could makes heads or tails from something like that?
This is why I take my shredded paper, and use it for tinder to start fires in my fireplace or firepit in the backyard.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
A printer/shredder that blankets the page(both sides) with toner before shredding. Scan that!
... Arthur Andersen accountants and Enron executives were reported to have pooped their pants upon hearing this.
... this means, for me at least, anyone who attempts to put my shredded documents back together will lose more than they'll be able to gain from me.
Which is the name of the game in cryptography, too -- it's pointless to attempt to decrypt a communication the content of which is less valuable than what you'll spend building a machine to decode it.
Of course, if I were a terrorist, I'd burn my documents after shredding them. No way to reconstruct that. Yet.
...it makes everything taste like chicken.
And if somebody wants to rummage through my feces to find my bank account or trade secrets, they can have it.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
Papers that have been burned are usually readable, as long as the ashes aren't totall crumbled into particles. The burnt ink will have a different shade of grey than the burnt paper. It takes work, but you can reconstruct paperwork quite well from burnt papers. In many cases even easier than shredded paper, as the fragments are larger.
If burnt until the ashes turns white again, it's even easier -- then the text will often stand out in black on white again, and be directly readable by a human eye.
What I think would be a good solution would be a shredder with a built-in printer -- it will print random text over the sheet before shredding it, to make the text unreadable even if reassembled.
If anyone hasn't patented it, it's too late now - I hereby declare the idea public domain and knowledge.
Regards,
--
*Art
You would think that once you shredded paper it was gone for good, but no, they invent cross shredding, and still no. If you'd burn all this cross-shredded paper, then you'd damage the economy to no end, not that we're not doing that already.
I just imagine that a lot of people have a lot of stuff to hide, and this being dictated by the companies that want to hide this information. The poor individuals that have to work in these situations, and are forced to abide to certain protocols just to keep their chairs...
The stuff that happens behind closed doors!
QD
..use irregular sized pieces of paper to begin with, and always put at least two different sized pieces through the shredder at once.
Watch the program get seriously screwed as it tries to put your 9x10 and 8x8 pieces of paper together into a coupld 8.5 x 11s.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
1. The Iranians, after the US had fled their embassy years ago and forgot to burn the shredded papers, pieced together those documents *by hand*. Maybe the US ambassador wasn't expecting this to happen...
2. Someone should sell this to the German authorities who are trying to piece together the records shredded by the Stasi, the East German secret police. The story I heard on the radio - adapted in the book "Stasiland" - had about 30 people doing the job of assembling the files. The figure I think I heard mentioned was 300 years to finish the job. The thing is, there are people living who wouldn't mind knowing the "facts" contained in those files.
h.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
That link does not go to yahoo tech news it goes to goatse.cx -- bad bad bad
Make sure it's burnt thoroughly then stir the ashes and flush em.
That should work.
For harddisks, I hear thermite, some pots and a big bucket of sand works - the bucket of sand is to stop the molten stuff from going through the drive, the bucket and the floor.
This is one reason I generally recommend to clients (security consulting) that they shred *everything* they throw away. At $8,000-10,000 a cubic foot, the more cubic feet the attacker has to go through to find the important bit of information, the more it costs them. Shredded grocery lists and printouts from CitySearch start to confuse the issue, especially when your bags are well mixed.
Another reason is that it simply makes the decision of what and when to shred that much easier. If it is being thrown away, it goes through the shredder. Really sensitive documents should be burned after being shredded. Shredding first protects them a bit while waiting to be burned.
BTW, these are not clients trying to hide bad accounting practices from the gov't; industrial espionage can be a serious problem in some sectors (e.g. pharma), proposals and bids can be a target in any sector, many companies now need to worry about HIPAA privacy requirements, and, of course, any security related information must be carefully protected.
Eric Vought
evought@pobox.com
Puzzle solving pattern matching software, what a suprise.
This is a non issue anyway, shredded paper isn't the weakest link. Phoneing in your credit card number on a cordless phone, insecure merchant computers, the waiter walking away with your CC, unscrupulous employees at any office that handles your information.
All these methods are much easier and much less trouble then dumpster diving.
Myself I shred because then _I_ know the paper is garbage, and not accidentally fallen in. I shred all scrap paper, to hide it a bit. They're better off stealing my mail before I shred it.
I used to be a building inspector and many of the documents I wrote were "secretive" (i.e. only certain people could see what I had written)
;-)
Well one day there was a dispute between a building owner and myself over the environmental issues his site had.
The owner had me followed (without my knowledge) and found an old copy of the report I was in the peocess of writing (shredded and in the trash.)
They took the trash and sent it to a re-construction firm for analysis.
The reconstruction firm sent him a bill for about 20 Large and a 20 page document.
Of course the joke was on him when the only thing my report had contained was "Boy is this site fucked." Which was repeated for 20 pages
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
The idea is make it harder than it's worth to get the information. Having said that, it is very difficult to estimate how hard something is.
----
For this extremely paranoid reason, I cross shred everything.
Making sure to mix in lots of chaff. Then I add a bit of water, so it's good and mushy.
Makes it hard to reconstruct.
-- Spankmeister General
Last year, we succumbed to all the advice and bought a paper shredder. And following one suggested algorithm, we shred "anything with numbers on it." (ID numbers, that is).
I can't believe how much time I now spend on this. I don't think I fully realized how much paper crap I had been throwing out (credit card statements, bank statements, brokerage statement...). Now it has to go through the shredder. And the shreds expand in bulk enormously.
It seems as if just fifty pages will fill the little wastebasket. Then I have to dig them out and stuff them into a garbage bag, and in the process a dozen shreds fall on the floor, and then I have to pick THOSE up one by one, and one or two fall flat and are really HARD to pickup.
It's not a LITTLE inconvenience. It's a significant irritation.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
That's why Commerce Bank shreds AND burns their trash.
-ted
If people print double sided this technique is useless!
And you help save the world!
From the article: "Other projects, like Mr. Brassil's at Hewlett-Packard, focus on designing a shredder that leaves telltale traces on the documents it destroys, allowing them to be pinpointed later."
Am I missing something here, but who would buy a shredder that defeats its own purpose?
If you wash your shredded paper to pulp, then reconstruction is not possible. This has been done for a long time in one oil company : shred then wash using a special machine. Huge amounts of paper was shredded this way.
I learned alot today
When I worked in litigation, it was very common to burn documents even though we had paper shredders.
In those days, you could smoke in offices, etc., so it just didn't seem all that strange to see one of the lawyers burning a piece of paper in a wastebasket. The reprographics department had an incinerator for big disposal jobs. And a heavy duty drill press instead of a hole punch, but that's another story.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Yes, but if they took your "Docu-dust®" and put a million bags of it in a room with a million monkeys and a million Uhu glue sticks...
You know what?
The CIA did something similar to the Xerox machines leased to the Soviet embassy in the 60's. So I wouldn't put it past them. I'm sure it's technically possible.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Look at the end of the URL.
I take the bag of shreddings over to the cat's
litter box, clean out the box dumping all the
nasty bits into the bag, then close the bag and
give it a good shake or two.
See subject. Douche.
Or you could flush it down the toilet after you tear 'em up.
I tried to do this with a teacher's note when I was in 4th grade or so. The ripped up little pieces floated happily around and never flushed.
The same thing holds true for paper towels that you've used to catch some, um, sticky messes. After a bout of porn watching on my roomates' computer, I decided to simply flush the residual evidence down the toilet. Well, you guessed it, the damn thing wouldn't go down. Then I had to explain to my roomate why on earth I tried to flush a folded-up paper towel down the toilet. Eventually I had to fish it out of there -- ugh!
Be smart: use Kleenex instead for those types of situations. Paper towels are sturdier but harder to get rid of!
P.S.: I realize this is off-topic but I figured that this is handy (no pun intended) information for slashdotters!
Great job! It takes a skillful poster to accomplish such a task. We value your efforts and hope to see more of you soon!
All the best!
I work in a place that handles sensitive documents from time to time.
We only shred stuff because it makes it burn faster and more completley. Everything is incinerated, without exception.
Beep beep.
I like shredding. It's satisfying!
Just as most security schemes could be cracked given enough time and resources, the same could be said of algorithms for shredding documents (though you could hardly call strip-shredding an "algorithm"). The pressure surely is on for vendors to look harder at reliable and cost-effective ways to systematically and permanently destroy sensitive documents.
Because there is a scene in which Will Smith's character gives the token computer nerd a handful of shredded paper, and tells him to find out what's on it. He does, explaining that the software scans the pieces, andrearranges them to dsplay the image.
This would have to be the first time I can think of in which Hollywood beat slashdot to explaining a real new technology.
Karma: Can there be a void?
.. -. - . .-. .-. --- -...
Some places (like where I live, for example) don't have separate recycling containers. You throw all you aluminum, glass, etc in the garbage, and the waste company pays people to sort through it. I KNOW that I have people picking through my trash every week. The next town over uses prison labor for this task, so they know that they have convicted criminals looking through their trash every week.
I'll let them grab somebody else's info, and keep on shredding mine.
I'm in the NJ National Guard and the shredder we use puts out shreddings that I don't think could be put back together using this system. When the paper gets shredded it gets curled up on the eges, but since the slices are so small the curled edges overlap and make small rolled up strings. In the curling process the ink on the surface of the paper gets so worn out that flattening them and gluing to another piece of paper would not make the document readable.
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
An offtopic comment about how he can't troll this article gets modded as... wait for it... A TROLL!!! Perfect. Just perfect.
Does this mean that Oliver North in trouble? What about Enron?
MacGayver could do it a decade ago...
There is absolutely nothing to get worried about here. The only people with the time and the money to actually use this kind of screwball technology is the government. Oh, and the RIAA. And the MPAA. And maybe even the BSA. And let's not forget SCO.
Alright, I'm worried.
I would think that a computer program used to "decypher" shredded papers would have an increasingly more difficult time as the shredded pieces became smaller and smaller. Any thoughts on paper that's been completely shredded into near dust?
...and wipe your rear with your documents before trashing them. Anyone who goes through them papers deserves everything they get. Keeps the 'coons away too.
Seriously, I bet I could get a list of CC numbers by handing an unscrupulous waiter a $50 bill. There are bigger fears than the garbage for Joe Consumer.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
i suspect paper shredded in these machines could not be reassembled quite so easily:
http://hsmofamerica.com/level_VI.php
Just a thought, why not get a paper recycling kit and recycle the paper once it's shredded? You can dye it and put some nice scents and stuff and use it for that written correspondance I have heard of but never personally experienced. Seriously though, a friend used to do this and the results were quite nice.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I've always been a fan of the concept of spatial and temporal displacement of shreds from a shredded document. The process is simple. You shred, then you divide the shredded documents into ten sections. Take ever third section and form three groups until you run out of the original ten sections. Take one group and dispose of it somewhere (preferably miles away from where you normally dispose of garbage) else to get rid of it. Throw one group away with the normal trash. And save the last one for disposal a few weeks or months from when the other groups were disposed of. This displaces segments of the document in time and space. Someone would have to be VERY interested in your docs to retrieve them. Works for me.
Doesn't that consitute circumvention of a security device? Does that not mean that the DCMA would apply, seriously.
1. When your shredding paper your applying a security device(the paper shedder) to the document (paper). Much like if you used a special frag program to fragment a file across your harddrive then store the fat somewhere else, except the paper shredder doesn't keep a key on how to reconstruct the document.
But you could easiely setup a system that printed say a b across the page and down one line fromt he previous, that way each and every strip could be identified with its order in that document, but only you would know that its the letter b. It's possible therefore a legitment legal scenerio that could be argued in court.
2. By scanning the document and reconstructing it your circumventing this security measure, by using computers and a scanner your enacting the dcma. So everyone that worried about how this will effect your shredded security, just take this up with a lawyer and bring down the DMCA hammer on these guys.
This message was brought to you in part by dmca supporters like you.
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The DMCA is used by over 2 million people country wide every day, are you being left behind while others apply the dmca to their legal disputes?
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If you can't fix it ask the 3 year old down the street.
Back in 1979, Iranian Students took the Tehran US Embassy staff hostage for something like 18 months. The staff had had time to shred everything they considered worth shredding.
The Students had the time and energy to 'unshred' the whole lot and reconstitute the original documents. It took them months, but they managed it.
No idea if they found out anything interesting that way.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Sir, you may very well be the epitome of laziness.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
Later today the shredder industry association of America announced it would make the transition from DES (DEstructive Standard) shredding to the more secure 3DES (Tree DEstructive Standard) shredding.
so I get nice curly strips of paper rather than boring straight ones...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
one of those bags of 1 million shredded US dollars (they used to be sold as souvenirs)?
????
PROFIT!
C|N>K
For ultimate security simply shred pages of the printed goatse picture with your other documents. Nobody slowly peicing together you documents would want to stare at that horrible image for that long.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
the new improved shredder will have a pattern printer in the input feeder... the pattern will be of a fractal (one color) or geographic repetitive pattern of such scale as to match ideally the size of the shredded pieces. therefore, the resulting shredded mess is transformed into a glob of confusing edge conditions...
this idea is property of my brain. you may not profit from the implementation without my prior written consent
IP lawyers take note. Open sourcerers please use this IP liberally.1: Use a high-quality cross-cut shredder.
2: Use as fire starter for barbecues and fireplaces, mulch for plants, to soak up oil when working on car, etc.
3: ???
4: PROFIT!
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
Langly and Frohicke were seen pressing the strips of paper between two pieces of contact paper and then scanning the sheet. A program therein sorted the strips, and matched them up. Voila, un-shredded document.
For those who have done University-level computer science work... I'd estimate the difficulty of this as roughly a two-week, maybe three-week homework project for a decent Computer Vision graduate-level class. (With appropriately well-defined problem; the technical details of image formatting and such would consume some time but any dot-com web schmoe can handle that.)
In other words, with the proper techniques this is downright trivial work.
Just a tidbit of information to help you decide what you think about this news.
The US govt spooks, not only shred their papers, but they then burn the shreds then mix the ashes with water in a high-speed industrial blender until it is a well-blended slurry. Is that paranoid or what?
I used to shred, but it was way time consuming, especially when the little pos shredder motor would overhead and stop. While it did an 'ok' job at shredding, I suppose if you were really determined you could reconstruct. Hence, I now keep a burn box, and every so often just toss it in the fire place.
take a dump on it as well, and they get a DNA stamp on who shredded it.
It would make for a very boring movie:
Computer: Scanning complete. Attempting to reconstruct document.
Computer: "SETEC ASTRONOMY". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue
Operator: N
Computer: "MY SOCRATES NOTE". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue
Operator: N
Computer: "COOTYS RAT SEMEN". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue
Operator: N
Computer: "TOO MANY SECRETS". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue
Operator: Okay Mother, I think we've got it.
Uh....naah. It just doesn't do it for me.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I want THAT job!
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
1) Create documents full of random gibberish, thereby assuming copyright on personal creations. 2) Shred documents. 3) When reconstructed, sue individuals under the DMCA for circumventing my "copy-protection" scheme.
The caveat being that you have to use good composting procedures to get them to decompose quickly. I only add shreddings to a compost batch that's already started, and I add a little water to compensate for the dryness of the added material. Now my dirty little secrets are really are "dirt-y" little secrets.
Instead of looking at what's printed on the shreds, they should just scan the edges of each shred with a microscope. The orientation of the fibers at the edge would form a signature which could be matched to other shreds like a fingerprint. It would require higher res scanning, but I bet it would give almost perfect results.
I don't think it's a secret what's in these "Protected A" documents. The only thing Canada has to write about is how pissed off they are at America and an expose on whether the Curling Championships were rigged.
I don't think he's talking abou buld, but time spent. And I agree with him.
If you let it gor for a few weeks, you can spend 30 minutes to an hour shredding paper. While that may seem like a trivial amount of time, remember, YOU"RE SHREDDING PAPER. You might as well be picking up grains of sand with a tweezer.
It's mind-numbingly boring and takes forever if not done regularly.
Great, thanks, but where do the copies come out?
If the current technique requires the printed side of the shreds to be identified, and the reverse then glued to a flat surface, perhaps something as simple as double-sided printing might hamper efforts.
;-)
And just imagine the warm fuzzy feeling when you think of all those trees you've saved too
>This tendancy towards living in fear scares me.
In that case you're screwed.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Any piece that's not marked with ink will be discarded, and any piece w/ ink will only show up on one side (unless the document's double-sided). But given that the document is double-sided, how much more difficult does the process become?
-jc
What I think would be a good solution would be a shredder with a built-in printer -- it will print random text over the sheet before shredding it, to make the text unreadable even if reassembled.
If anyone hasn't patented it, it's too late now - I hereby declare the idea public domain and knowledge.
Well you never specified double or single-sided printing, or whether it should print horizontal or landscape (and whether that depends on the original text direction).
And what if it just prints random scribbles instead of text? Or shapes?
Even if you declare your idea public domain and unpatentable, unless you cover every variation like this, I'm sure someone will find a way to modify your idea just enough to make it novel enough to get by the patent office. It seems that's not hard to do these days.
Give it to the gerbils. Problem solved.
The Hard drives are really hard on the shreaders though...
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
Dip the paper in ink. Dry. Shred. It's like that puzzle that has one solid shape and one solid color and thousands of pieces.
I wait a week and send 15 pounds of docs, printed spam and snail mail ads through a tree chipper which is then lit on fire a rolled on the hill to a fast flowing river.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Now there's a way to prolong his significant irritation.
The percentage of people taken advantage of because of financial records in the trash is probably pretty damn small.
Enron
Someone get that stuff and put it back together. They shredded it for a reason. The FBI allowed them to continue shredding for months. For a reason. That reason is in those papers.
If Lay could be implicated, it would be totally worth it. Definately worth more than $40 Million investigating a blowjob.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I wonder what the charges are for a shredded paper that had printing on both sides of the paper.
The lesson in all of this?
Either burn everything, or never write anything down.
The problem lies in the shredding process itself, I think.
A shredder which shreds in a symmetrical way, but is misaligned with the content of the page will create "locking patterns" much like a puzzle piece. This is what the technology seems to key on.
The solution to this "problem" would be one of the following:
Personally, I think office garbage, especially the shredded type,should be mixed with cafeteria garbage. Nothing breaks down and messes up printouts like coffee and fruit juices. ;) Plus it makes it very difficult to scan reliably.
People will build new technology to deal with this firm's process. In which case, the firm will need to adapt or go out of business...
Winged Power Photography
i would like to see them recover burnt documents. put all of the ashes together and give me the original. then you can impress me.
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
The goverment has known and use this fact for over 20 years. The real shredders turn the paper into a very fine powder. If you want references go back to gulf war I. There was the report of a fire on the ship, well that was the shredding room. Turns out when you have an airborn powder a single spark will cause an explosion. (cross refrence grain elevators)
Have fun,
Having actually successfully pieced together a few shredded sheets out of a waste basket, I've generally gotten into the habit of tearing every piece of paper I throw into the trash can several times. This includes bank statements, receipts, chinese restaurant menus, and "Have you seen me?" lost child mailings.
Like several others have stated, it also helps to throw it in the same bag as household trash. Sifting through last week's worth of take-out and used tissues for hours trying to find all the appropriate scraps of the same document is much more of a deterent than one bag of paper. In this sense paper shredders actually increase the likelihood of someone attempting to reconstruct your documents - first, because they know the documents are probably important. Second, because most bags under paper shredders are exclusively used for paper and are thus fairly "clean".
Have you seen my stapler?
Do a Google search on paper shredders that meet NSA/CSS Specification 02-01. Any shredder that meets specs for TS/SCI information by the US DoD will be expensive, but 10,000 times better than any shredder you can pick up at Office Depot. A quick googling shows the prices ranging anywhere from USD 1,000 and up depending on size, speed, and number of sheets that can be processed at once.
Burning the documents is "complete" destruction; and, if you use the resulting heat to warm the building, is environmentally friendly = )
I'm sure someone could make a mint if they could design a boiler that had an automatic feed, where you dump the documents into a hopper and it automatically shredded them (for combustion efficiency) and feeds the shreds to the fire. It could be dual fuel (gas, oil, whatever) to keep it going between pages.
I didn't really get that either, what are they trying to pinpoint, the document that had been shredded, or which shreder did the shredding? Id'ing the shredder from the shreds could be very usefull to professional spooks. Or I could see it being useful for a company or law enforcement trying to show person's misconduct by proving his shredder shredded evidence.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Well, of course I can! Ba-da-bing! Thanks, you've been a great audience.
Only the military community could come up with an acronym like that.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Shred the paper, cross shredding preferably. Mix all paper threads and some water in a blender, blend on puree for an adequate amount of time. Dump resulting liquid down toilet.
For extra security use randomly selected toilets.
It's called a fireplace.
Actually, we don't use it for that purpose very often, but when we do it's been found to be quite effective. Just don't use it for items that might produce noxious and/or flue-clogging fumes when burned; such as credit cards.
For my old credit cards, I manually shred them with scissors. I'm careful to cut through the number, name, expiration date, etc. I then distribute the pieces into different garbage cans about the house. Some, such as the infrequently used laundry and bathroom cans, won't send their contents to the curb for weeks after the most frequently used can (in the kitchen).
Even if some thief was determined enough to reassemble my card, he would be quite disappointed to find that there is often no more than $2000 of available credit on it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The whole point, is to destroy data to the level of your needs (i.e. risk). Obviously, if you are the NSA or a medical records place you need good shredding, but the whole point (of my linear shredder) is to make it more work for someone to get my data, than it is the neighbor's data. Then the dumpster diving bums will skip me. (You could could regularly start a gasoline fire in your dumpster I suppose, but the cops tend to frown on that activity.)
So I shred and add to the dumpster, with confidence that someone else's stuff is a lot easier to get to than mine.
I should have got a cross cut simply because it fits more pages per canister of waste, the ribbons do not fall and compact nicely like the little chips do.
There are "dusters" which pull the paper apart into dust-like fuzz instead of cleanly cutting them, those gotta be pretty close to being like burning + stirring, as the letters would be disassembled as well as the words and phrases.
I am not really looking for a perfect system, just to do an easy and simple way of reducing of the many ways data can leak out.
[Complaining that shredders are usless because the waitress can get the number is silly, that's like saying you won't patch IIS because someone could always walk by the machine and reboot it with a floppy disk in the drive. Chances are you'll get probes via the web server more often than someone tries to reboot the box while standing there... It's all about risk reduction, do a little bit where the return is best until you reach your ideal risk/work level.]
So shredding is good, just not good enough.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
One more reason to compost...take those shredded piles, and dump 'em in your compost pile to let thermophilic bacteria feast away on it. Turn those credit card offers into tomatoes!
You do practice hugelkultur too, right? I thought so - you can add the shredded paper to the rotting logs.
It would be much cheaper to pay workers from sweat shops to piece it back together. Sure it might take a little bit longer, but for ten grand you can afford to higher a lot of kids for a long time. Or even better, have monkeys to do the job for free : )
We wrote a book called, The Washington Connection and the resulting scandal was called Koreagate.
I've scanned the shreds-related photos from "The Washington Connection" for Slashdot users. The link to a thumbnail page of those photos is at: lewisperdue.com/book-covers/washington-conection.s html
The processing power for our operation came from open-source wetware running on carbs and adrenaline supplemented by adequate doses of ethanol. We experienced frequent meatware crashes as the result of overloaded I/O handlers.
$8000 per cubic foot doesn't seem too bad, is it supposed to be square foot?
This may be a stupid question, but why do you shred junk mail?
Since I'd generally have to take it out of the envelope to shred it, I've generally just tossed it.
Just curious.
I've been teaching my son, William, HTML. The shreds thumbnail page, and all the rest of the lewisperdue.com pages are his. He's 10.
About a decade or two ago, the US Navy was installing beefed up garbage disposals on all their ships. Classified documents were fed in, along with sea water. The disposal made a puree out of the documents, diluted the puree even more then spewed it over the side. Impossible to reconstruct. I'm not sure if the ink was water soluble or not. I'm not sure sewage systems could handle that without significant enlarging in most towns and cities though. Home septic tanks (like mine) certainly couldn't.
;-).
In a company I worked for, one person took the shredded documents home and mulched them into his garden. That would be very difficult to reconstruct.
For the home shredding fan, you could soak down your shredded documents and add it to your compost pile (what, you don't have one? Well, now's the time to start
then stir the ashes.
Your credit card company sucks. I've reversed charges at least four times -- over the phone. The fraud happened for the following reasons:
1) Sombody got a new card of mine w/out me ever seeing it. It could have been from my mail box?
2) A gas station charged me at two locations miles apart at the same time.
3) A subscription company failed to cancel my account even after it was requested twice.
4) An online merchant sent me an inferior product to the one I ordered refused to respond to phone or e-mail inquiries.
These happened on three different credit cards backed by different companies. All the charges were cancelled with no hassle. In one case, the charge was cancelled instantly. In the others I had to wait for at least one statement to pass.
t'nera semordnilap
Old:
1.Shred
New:
1Shred.
2.Dissolve in alcohol.
3.Burn.
4.Spread the ashes in ocean.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
1. Shred Paper
2. ???
3. Profit!
Sorry.
I've just discovered that sometime recently my karma has gone from "terrible" to merely "bad." Help in rectifying this situation would be much appreciated.
Yours,
BOM
I wonder what kinds of goodies we could find in those piles of shredded paper. Evidence implicating all the executives? How about top government officials? That's IF the stuff is still stored as evidence by the authorities.
Better yet, burn them. That's what I do. I make a large file of all sensitive information, and then when its time to get rid of them, I go into the backyard with a large metal barrel, and burn all of it.
It goes something like this:
1. Release unsubstantiated statement that for a prohibitive cost, you can recover cross-shredded documents.
2. Tell people that burning documents -- while also inconvenient -- doesn't always work either.
3. Hey, wanna buy a nuclear-reactor to destroy your documents?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I have heard of rumors that US Embassys have shredders that will take documents by the pounds and turn them into dust including bound documents such as books, etc.. It will shred as fast as one can shove material into it.
If Kerry was the answer, it must have been a stupid question.
The UN - The largest "political" cause of death.
YOU FAIL IT!
I told him that even if you shred then burn your documents, that THEY have devices that look at the smoke coming out of your fireplace chimney, and can decode the information that is in the smoke patterns. I told him that as the paper burns, the chemicals that make up the ink vs the paper are different, and this difference changes the information matrix encoded in the smoke, and that a detector with sufficient processing power behind it could reconstruct the document data after it was burned.
Boy, am I an evil fuck...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Check forging, for one. Someone writes you a check (or you steal someone else's), you add a zero or turn a 3 into an 8 (or a 1 into a 7), cash it and run off with the money.
Heh. You don't have to do any chemical analysis to prove that, unless they managed to turn the "Sixteen Dollars and 95/100" into "One Hundred Sixty Nine Dollars and 50/100".
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Just tie little rocks to them with string! Gosh, why does no one ever think of the simple solutions?
Yep! You're exactly right. The big problem nowdays is, there are so many "middle men" (aka. collections agencies) involved in recouping unpaid charges - the whole concept of tracking down the *real* person charging the stuff has become practically pointless.
The collections people simply know they get a cut if they can force the card-holder to pay up. If, say, 20% of the people they harass are actually fraud victims, so what? It isn't going to earn them any more money if they have to pay their employees for a bunch of time and effort to prove that's the case. It's more cost-effective for them to go after the people in their database, plain and simple - and not to take "not my charge!" as an answer.
Meanwhile, the original company owed money for the purchase(s) has long since forgotten about the whole situation, since they wrote it off as a loss, and shelled out the money to make it someone else's problem (the collection agency hired to get back whatever they can from a big list of debts owed).
The way credit is issued and credit reports are handled in the U.S. these days - I honestly can see why some people just say "screw it" and max out their cards, change their phone number, and refuse to make payments.
It's harder to get by with "no credit" than "bad credit". If your credit report is basically a blank sheet of paper (due to not having any credit cards or buying a car or house on a loan), nobody wants to offer you a thing. But heck, bad credit and bankruptcies are "no problem!" at most car dealerships.
I also work in a USAF research lab. Powdering shredders are cool, but only permitted for low level stuff.
Antimatter.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
You may ask why we 'shred' the genome in the first place? This has to do with current technical limitations of the size of a fragment that can be reliably sequenced at one time. It's as if our current 'scanners' only have flatbed areas of 1 square cm, making it necessary to do lots of individual scans of the large genome 'page' before re-assembly.
See, for example: http://nema.cap.ed.ac.uk/teaching/genomics/Genomic s3.html
A much simpler alternative is to pulverize it. First, cross-cut shred. Then, get a cheap blender, or a few cheap blenders (they're like $10-$20 a piece at Wal-Mart or from numerous vendors online). Place cross-cut shreds in blender (cross-cut not really necessary, but helpful because paper is smaller to start with), add some water, and blend. You will have pulp within about twenty seconds.
You can also use a food processor, although with less satisfactory results, and at a higher price.
If you are really adventurous, you should be aware that you have just completed the first step towards making your own recycled paper! Congratulations! Now all you need is a wire mesh screen, and you'll be churning out 100% recycled stationary in no time.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
They do seem to have trouble shreading human bones though.
As an intern for a major chemical company during college I specialized in Marketing Research. It was that experience that pushed me into IT. Marketing can teach you many things about the "dark side" you do not want to know. One of these lessons is that the deepest secrets are often intrusted to the lowest-level employees. The main steward, read janitor, at one place was in charge of the shreading. Twice each week she would collect the documents out of the shredding bin and shred them. After they were shredded, she would take them to the dumpster and discard them. One interesting fact though, the "To Shred Bin" is right next to the copier. In a matter of seconds she could keep anything she thought might be valuable,and make copies of anything she could sell twice. The background check her revrealed her husband is in jail for felonly theft. After seven known leaks they kept her on. It was only after several documents were released that the image had the "Shred" stamp on them that a camera was put in place and the leak closed. Sad, but true, people are cheaper. I have bought interns for the price af a few cases of beer. A good hacker can get cooperation for no cost at all. You machinery is important, and your software and firewall are very important, your people are even more important. It is useless to buy a lock for the barn, if you give the key to a dolt! Good luck!
--To get around shredded-paper reconstruction, follow what Sarah Connor and the Terminator did in T2: BURN THEM.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
See "deshredding", posted on kragen-tol on 1999-06-01. It describes the primary heuristic mentioned in the article --- edge intersections and textual redundancy, for example --- and some others not presently in use, such as scanning both sides of each scrap. It also anticipated the likely achievable results --- blocks of text rather than full documents.
However, it did not suggest using the shapes of pieces of paper to piece them together, because I was writing about shredded documents, not torn ones. Also, the countermeasures I suggested --- feeding paper to the shredder accurately, using uniform fonts, single-sided printing, whitespace between paragraphs, and adding printed random text --- differ from the countermeasures suggested in the article --- using large fonts and feeding your paper into strip shredders sideways.
Of course, what I published was a direction for research, not a usable system of algorithms. Still, it's nice to know I had good foresight.
Perhaps you should consider getting a life? I know, it's a lot of work. But in the end, you'll have more fun.