Why would flash memory be non-replaceable? Sure, the stuff that was on it when it failed might be hard to replace, but that's why you keep backups, right?
The ROT13 thing was funny once. It is now just irritating.
Please stop being such stupid unfunny fuckwits. Allowed HTML
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You haven't been paying attention. It's called e911 and it is a requirement so that a caller can be located when calling 911 from a cell phone. The wire system provided that information for a long time, and now the cell system does too.
It's only a requirement in the US, and it doesn't use GPS. GPS would be a waste of time for this, because it would either need to be on all the time and thereby kill your battery in an hour, or only enabled in response to an emergency call and need a good ten minutes to get a lock from cold.
Why would GPS be "mandatory" on a phone? It's only in the past two or three years that GPS receivers have got small and low-power enough to fit to phones, without requiring a battery the size of a brick.
If you want to locate a phone, GPS is close to useless.
Aha, the trick is, only the ones actually carry information - that's when the bit is actually holding a voltage. So, you can compress out all the zeros and get a roughly 2:1 saving on space!
The only downside is that for decompressing, the codebook is necessarily rather large, in fact the same size as your original data. But the compression works well and it's fast!
When you fly opt out if the scanners. I always do and get the TSA Preflight Massage. If more people did this it would make it look like the invasion of privacy it really is.
Wear a kilt. Be louche as fuck. "Yeah, you just keep moving your hand up there until you meet 'resistance', that's right... Yeah, back down there, boy, I didn't tell you to stop."
The "somebody else's problem" is good, but it's expensive.
All you need to do is configure one of the "scrap" machines as a PXE boot server, find a switch from somewhere, and then get your trainee to do all the plugging in and unplugging.
"Here you go, it's a vitally important job, and a big responsibility. Now do this pallet, and when you're done, do this pallet, and then when you've done *that* do this pallet. Then I'll teach you how to drive the forklift..."
Oh yeah, I mean if you have a process that says that then I guess there's no way round it. However, it's a pointless waste of time that just adds to the ever-growing pile of e-waste that isn't really being dealt with properly.
I know from personal experience that at least one organisation that deals with confidential medical information simply hooks a pallet of decomissioned machines up to power and a switch, PXE boots the whole lot into DBAN, and calls it a day at that. "Good Enough".
Now would be a good time, too, because they've just changed the page layouts again and people are moaning about it.
If you want to get customers to jump ship (and yes, you are a paying customer; you pay with information like geotagging restaurants and shops you visit) then bring along a better product right at the point where people are starting to dislike what they already use, and make the transition quick and painless. "Hi, sign up for Placescroll and import all your facebook data *for free*!" and give them the option to upload their saved-off facebook.zip file to prepopulate their friends lists, messages, posts etc.
Years ago I started blocking US dynamic IP ranges from port 25 because of the amount of spam from compromised machines. I started mapping the attempts to send spam using an intelligent guess based on the hostnames (most ISPs have a clue to the city in their reverse DNS) and GeoIP lookup. Now, I'm sure it's an artifact and not a "real" effect, but there seemed to be a strong correlation between red states and compromised machines sending spam. I'd love to see the results of a more rigorous investigation.
I'm in the UK. The licensing authorities here take people trespassing on mobile phone frequencies pretty seriously - and pretty much anywhere else that you've paid for a licence. Furthermore, certain technically-qualified people are legally able to confiscate or shut down equipment that is causing interference.
It doesn't matter if you're the police, if you're jamming something you get your toys taken away.
If you write 1s and 0s to a disk then overwrite them then *theoretically* it is possible to look at the data coming off the disk, and work out that a 1 that's a little higher than normal was previously a 1, a 0 that's a little higher was previously a 1 and so on.
But this only works with extremely old drives.
With modern drives, the signal written by the heads on disk is quite complex and consists of a mixture of signals with rapidly changing amplitude and phase. It's not as simple as on or off. How do you tell the difference between a really strong residual "1" and a really faint residual "7"? You can't, pretty much.
The military do not have some big magic machine that can extract data from overwritten hard disk tracks. It's not possible to do this, on any drive that's younger than the Internet.
So with a bad sector, you might be able to recover a couple of bytes of the old data. Maybe.
Bear in mind that the most likely reason for the drive to map out a sector is because it can no longer find the address marks to tell where the sector starts. If that's the case then no amount of vendor-specific commands will fix that...
1. having search boxes on menus and windows is just a crutch. the whole point is to see what you're looking for in a graphically intuitive way. Adding search boxes is just admitting the design sucks.
No, it isn't. How do you meaningfully represent the thousands of different things? As it is, the Gnome and Unity app menus with masses of identical little boxes is confusing enough.
You don't walk into a shop and point at stuff behind the counter and say "that" "that" "that" to get it, you ask the person for what you want.
By the same token, sit a newbie down in front of Windows and how will they guess where things are?
It took me about 20 minutes to work out how to get into the network settings, and I'm reasonably familiar with computers (but still quite new to using Windows).
The other issue is the KGB threat model. DriveSavers isn't going to drag out electron microscopes and other ridiculously high-tech stuff to catch the magnetic images of that 1 bit that weren't quite wiped out by writing a 0 bit over it.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, that's an overly-simplistic way of looking at hard disks, and one that hasn't worked since before the vast majority of/. readers - hell, even the folks that created the site - were born.
You cannot magically read off "magnetic signatures" and reconstruct data from a drive, after the data has been overwritten. If you believe that you can, then presumably you believe in homeopathic medicine too, since it's the same principle.
Wrong. A single pass of zero is often recoverable. Not for civilians, sure, but recoverable nonetheless.
Bullshit. Once the data has been overwritten, it is *gone*, forever. There is no way to get it back. There is no "residual magnetism", and if there is it would be impossible to reconstruct it into a valid data stream.
It might be just-about-possible on 1970s MFM hard disks.
I would suspect that anyone with a sufficiently good enough data recovery system can probably read the bits that have been zeroed. Since you're changing everything to the same state, it doesn't seem at all unlikely that reading small fluctuations in those "zero's" would be possible.
But you still need some way of knowing what the difference between a valid zero and the residual print-through is - and that difference is *tiny*.
Furthermore, drives haven't written 1s and 0s since the very earliest days of IDE, over 20 years ago. Now they use something similar to QAM so rather than trying to pick out the traces of 1010101010 from underneath 0000000000, you're trying to pick out 1758923065 from underneath 8959205253 - if you see what I mean.
I can say this though, if I worked in a data center, and had the job of wiping old drives being taken out of commission, I would definitely ask my company to buy one of those systems to save me the time and aggravation of doing it some other way.
You've got the asset number and the MAC addresses, right? PXE boot and DBAN...
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Why would flash memory be non-replaceable? Sure, the stuff that was on it when it failed might be hard to replace, but that's why you keep backups, right?
The ROT13 thing was funny once. It is now just irritating.
Please stop being such stupid unfunny fuckwits. Allowed HTML
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Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
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Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there.
The ROT13 thing was funny once. It is now just irritating.
Please stop being such stupid unfunny fuckwits.
You haven't been paying attention. It's called e911 and it is a requirement so that a caller can be located when calling 911 from a cell phone. The wire system provided that information for a long time, and now the cell system does too.
It's only a requirement in the US, and it doesn't use GPS. GPS would be a waste of time for this, because it would either need to be on all the time and thereby kill your battery in an hour, or only enabled in response to an emergency call and need a good ten minutes to get a lock from cold.
Why would GPS be "mandatory" on a phone? It's only in the past two or three years that GPS receivers have got small and low-power enough to fit to phones, without requiring a battery the size of a brick.
If you want to locate a phone, GPS is close to useless.
Great idea! Then not only are you giving away your location but you're transmitting your message in the clear, for anyone to eavesdrop on!
I can't help but think you've missed the point a little...
Surely if you're worried about being seen doing illegal things, you keep the illegal things private or don't do them at all?
Aha, the trick is, only the ones actually carry information - that's when the bit is actually holding a voltage. So, you can compress out all the zeros and get a roughly 2:1 saving on space!
The only downside is that for decompressing, the codebook is necessarily rather large, in fact the same size as your original data. But the compression works well and it's fast!
When you fly opt out if the scanners. I always do and get the TSA Preflight Massage. If more people did this it would make it look like the invasion of privacy it really is.
Wear a kilt. Be louche as fuck. "Yeah, you just keep moving your hand up there until you meet 'resistance', that's right... Yeah, back down there, boy, I didn't tell you to stop."
The "somebody else's problem" is good, but it's expensive.
All you need to do is configure one of the "scrap" machines as a PXE boot server, find a switch from somewhere, and then get your trainee to do all the plugging in and unplugging.
"Here you go, it's a vitally important job, and a big responsibility. Now do this pallet, and when you're done, do this pallet, and then when you've done *that* do this pallet. Then I'll teach you how to drive the forklift..."
Oh yeah, I mean if you have a process that says that then I guess there's no way round it. However, it's a pointless waste of time that just adds to the ever-growing pile of e-waste that isn't really being dealt with properly.
I know from personal experience that at least one organisation that deals with confidential medical information simply hooks a pallet of decomissioned machines up to power and a switch, PXE boots the whole lot into DBAN, and calls it a day at that. "Good Enough".
Now would be a good time, too, because they've just changed the page layouts again and people are moaning about it.
If you want to get customers to jump ship (and yes, you are a paying customer; you pay with information like geotagging restaurants and shops you visit) then bring along a better product right at the point where people are starting to dislike what they already use, and make the transition quick and painless. "Hi, sign up for Placescroll and import all your facebook data *for free*!" and give them the option to upload their saved-off facebook.zip file to prepopulate their friends lists, messages, posts etc.
Years ago I started blocking US dynamic IP ranges from port 25 because of the amount of spam from compromised machines. I started mapping the attempts to send spam using an intelligent guess based on the hostnames (most ISPs have a clue to the city in their reverse DNS) and GeoIP lookup. Now, I'm sure it's an artifact and not a "real" effect, but there seemed to be a strong correlation between red states and compromised machines sending spam.
I'd love to see the results of a more rigorous investigation.
I'm in the UK. The licensing authorities here take people trespassing on mobile phone frequencies pretty seriously - and pretty much anywhere else that you've paid for a licence. Furthermore, certain technically-qualified people are legally able to confiscate or shut down equipment that is causing interference.
It doesn't matter if you're the police, if you're jamming something you get your toys taken away.
You're missing the point.
If you write 1s and 0s to a disk then overwrite them then *theoretically* it is possible to look at the data coming off the disk, and work out that a 1 that's a little higher than normal was previously a 1, a 0 that's a little higher was previously a 1 and so on.
But this only works with extremely old drives.
With modern drives, the signal written by the heads on disk is quite complex and consists of a mixture of signals with rapidly changing amplitude and phase. It's not as simple as on or off. How do you tell the difference between a really strong residual "1" and a really faint residual "7"? You can't, pretty much.
The military do not have some big magic machine that can extract data from overwritten hard disk tracks. It's not possible to do this, on any drive that's younger than the Internet.
So with a bad sector, you might be able to recover a couple of bytes of the old data. Maybe.
Bear in mind that the most likely reason for the drive to map out a sector is because it can no longer find the address marks to tell where the sector starts. If that's the case then no amount of vendor-specific commands will fix that...
You've not actually read further up this thread, have you?
Drives don't write 1s and 0s, and they haven't done since before Jurassic Park was released.
1. having search boxes on menus and windows is just a crutch. the whole point is to see what you're looking for in a graphically intuitive way. Adding search boxes is just admitting the design sucks.
No, it isn't. How do you meaningfully represent the thousands of different things? As it is, the Gnome and Unity app menus with masses of identical little boxes is confusing enough.
You don't walk into a shop and point at stuff behind the counter and say "that" "that" "that" to get it, you ask the person for what you want.
By the same token, sit a newbie down in front of Windows and how will they guess where things are?
It took me about 20 minutes to work out how to get into the network settings, and I'm reasonably familiar with computers (but still quite new to using Windows).
You can confiscate them, though, because they're probably being operated without the appropriate RF licence.
I can't wait for someone to try that out over here.
The other issue is the KGB threat model. DriveSavers isn't going to drag out electron microscopes and other ridiculously high-tech stuff to catch the magnetic images of that 1 bit that weren't quite wiped out by writing a 0 bit over it.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, that's an overly-simplistic way of looking at hard disks, and one that hasn't worked since before the vast majority of /. readers - hell, even the folks that created the site - were born.
You cannot magically read off "magnetic signatures" and reconstruct data from a drive, after the data has been overwritten. If you believe that you can, then presumably you believe in homeopathic medicine too, since it's the same principle.
Wrong. A single pass of zero is often recoverable. Not for civilians, sure, but recoverable nonetheless.
Bullshit. Once the data has been overwritten, it is *gone*, forever. There is no way to get it back. There is no "residual magnetism", and if there is it would be impossible to reconstruct it into a valid data stream.
It might be just-about-possible on 1970s MFM hard disks.
I would suspect that anyone with a sufficiently good enough data recovery system can probably read the bits that have been zeroed. Since you're changing everything to the same state, it doesn't seem at all unlikely that reading small fluctuations in those "zero's" would be possible.
But you still need some way of knowing what the difference between a valid zero and the residual print-through is - and that difference is *tiny*.
Furthermore, drives haven't written 1s and 0s since the very earliest days of IDE, over 20 years ago. Now they use something similar to QAM so rather than trying to pick out the traces of 1010101010 from underneath 0000000000, you're trying to pick out 1758923065 from underneath 8959205253 - if you see what I mean.
I can say this though, if I worked in a data center, and had the job of wiping old drives being taken out of commission, I would definitely ask my company to buy one of those systems to save me the time and aggravation of doing it some other way.
You've got the asset number and the MAC addresses, right? PXE boot and DBAN...
'Not to mention the fact that destroying non-defective drives is FUCKING WASTEFUL'.
A million times, this. You don't need a 2TB drive in your desktop that uses network shares for saving everything.
Exactly. A single pass of /dev/zero will wipe all the data on the drive beyond any hope of recovery, and sure as hell doesn't cost nine grand.