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Data Still Left on Storage Devices for Sale
cluedweasel writes "According to a BBC story many people are still putting up their old PC's and storage devices for sale without taking basic precautions to ensure that confidential data is erased. The suggestion at the end of the story is to get a professional forensics firm to wipe your data or just destroy the item in question. With the low price of storage devices, the latter is probably preferable."
On the other hand, I always thought it was a good bonus for the custom when I sell a hard drive on eBay with my mp3 and pr0n collection still intact.
Then again... they probaby would see the reiserfs partition as "Unknown" in the Windows installer.
Microsoft and the BSA don't want people having access to the software products left on hard drives. Even if the original owner is no longer using it and has thrown out the original media.
Would be to disgard all used storage devices in a black hole. One could possibly snoop the emitted hawking radiation, but by then you will propably have changed bank accounts.
>> "Wheel, fire invented!"
No, that was before the printing press was invented.
1) Write all 1s then 0s to the drive, repeat 5x.
2) Use acetylene torch and reduce drive to slag.
3) Encase slag in concrete.
4)Drop concrete in Marianas trench.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
The only hard drives that I have got rid of have had a nail driven thru all the platters after a full reformat.
I wonder if they auction them off too?
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
I wipe all my drives with both Windex and Formula 409 before disposing of them yet my identity still gets stolen. Good thing I only I have a Visa Lead card.
A simple Troll, born of Rock and Fire, leaving in the basement of my parents volcano and typing on an asbestos keyboard.
professional forensics firm to erase your hard drives? really?
how do I market myself as this and sell that service to people? sounds like a great article to whip up some Fear frenzy that we geeks can make good money on.
"Yup, I can safely eradicate your data and wipe that drive, no it's not easy, but that is why it costs $100.00.
thank you, no we dont accept personal checks."
adding that to my spyware cleaning racket and I can quit my job as a web programmer/IS manager.
This rocks, any way to get CNN to stir it up as well to help the fear factor in the general public?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
format c:
how hard is that?
5) Ship via US Postal Service
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A couple of years ago, we had to buy a PC with Windows/95 on it because a speech therapist had a program for my daughter that only ran on Win/95.
We were able to find a PC that had just turned in to a local "Cash Converters" and the OS had not yet been wiped/updated and got it for $50. We did try the PC before leaving the store but did not hook up a set of speakers.
When we got home, we discovered that the previous owner of the PC was an affectionado of Jamacian S&M. The first time I turned it on, the PC started up with somebody screaming "Hurt me Mon!" and every mouse click produced a woman's scream.
I was able to reset the default sounds on the PC and delete the thousands of jpegs of bondage pictures, but my daughter (who was 8 at the time) was pretty much traumatized and refused to work on the PC until I could demonstrate it wouldn't make the "scary screams" any more.
We were able to run the speech therapy program, but my daughter never did trust that PC and made me sell it when the therapy was finished.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Have they made some change to zero in the last 8 years that makes it less constant?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yeah, that's what you did.
Favorite quote: "
I tried using 2000+ passes using /dev/urandom, but somehow I ended up with a full installation of Windows 95.
Then a friend of mine told me something about monkeys hitting typewriters and Shakespeare's complete works...
And I here they fixed that problem with dividing by it.
Sounds like you might be a member of this group of people