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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."
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?"
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.
...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
... Arthur Andersen accountants and Enron executives were reported to have pooped their pants upon hearing this.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I was working at an office in Manila for a while and one day some other guys in the office noticed a man at a table down the street a ways selling papers. When they stopped and looked at the papers, they discovered they were from our office- they had been pulled from the trash and he was selling them for something like 10 pesos a sheet (though it didn't look like he was making much of a killing). Not that they were particularly sensitive, but some of the papers had contact information on them, so we began shredding everything that had names on it.
When I got back home to the states, I was a product development manager, and one of the first things I did was buy a nice shredder for my company. At first everyone laughed- they said I was being paranoid, but it was mostly out of habit. Pretty soon everyone was using it, though. I realized after a while that deep down I hadn't really bought the shredder because I was worried about privacy or anything, but because it's addictive. Sometimes there were lines in front of the shredder. People were shredding notes from the morning's staff meetings. People were shredding poems that they had just printed off the Internet. If anyone were to pay $8,000 to recover one of our documents, the truth is that they'll likely find a page of Holy Grail script. ("Aha! Just as we suspected! This document proves they're doing research on swallows.")
The lesson is, shred lots of junk while you're at it. It's fun for you, bad for whoever's trying to look at your stuff, and probably fun for the guy with the glue getting paid to recover stuff.
It's substantially more effecient to just throw your statements out to the street on trash day under your coffee grinds.
Coffee grinds? Bah! As a parent, I have two words for you:
diaper pail
If someone gets my credit card statement, they damn well deserve it.
--
Ihave no confidence in straight line shredders.
After doing some reading about how easy it was to put documents back together after they'd been shredded I did a little bit of testing.
The unit tested was a Fellowes DM-3. I think I paid $50 for this thing at Staples a few years ago.
Out of a waste basket that had about 50 shredded items in it, I was able to put 2 documents back together before I quit.... the first 2 I tried.
It's ridiculously easy. Advertisements usually come artwork on them... it was trivial to match up one of those. I just found all the strands that were (in this case) predominantly blue and orange, and arranged them. Easy.
In the second case, I went for something more like plain paper, a greyscale bank statement. The type of paper.. slightly grey, and the bank logo helped me identify those strands. After a few minutes, there were my transactions and balance. Not cool.
Part of what made this so easy is that the shredder doesn't seperate the strands after shredding. They just kind of fall on the pile more or less in linear order.
I've heard that bi-directional shredders are better, I haven't gotten around to buying one yet.
Huh?