<div dir="ltr">I can't figure out why the government just doesn't remove the hard drives and send them to a shredder. Even a private individual can achieve roughly the same level of security with a drill and a 1/2" drill bit. With the price of drives being what they are now it can't impact very much the resale value of the computer to sell it without a drive installed.<br>
<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Monty J. Harder <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mjharder@gmail.com">mjharder@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 9:32 PM, Leo Mauler <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:webgiant@yahoo.com" target="_blank">webgiant@yahoo.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
The government standard is a medium security level application that specifies overwriting a hard drive six times through three iterations. Each iteration consists of two write-passes on a hard drive. The first iteration removes the files over at the drive surface, while the second iteration registers "zeros" on the surface.</blockquote>
</div><br>What the hell does that even mean? <br><br>"removes the files over at the drive surface"<br><br>It sounds like they say to write six times to the drive, with the even-numbered writes being 0s. I suggested twice that. So what do they recommend writing on the odd-numbered passes if not (pseudo)random junk?<br>
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