Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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?"
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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
So use the toilet after you've put your papers in and odds are REALLY good that you'll get them all to flush then
UPS Sucks
GBM would be relatively easy to "undo" with access to an appropriate lab. GBM ink is soaked into the paper; laser printing/photocopy ink is melted onto it.
It might be as simple as finding something which will react with toner to make it fluoresce under UV.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?