And another one...

http://www.franklinmiller.com/electronics-shredding.htm

In 1994 I worked at an IBM facility that hosted the data center for Equifax. Once a month they had a truck that would pull into the loading dock and they would bring out carts of old tape cartridges. They would fire up what was essentially a giant wood chipper in the back of the truck and throw the tape cartridges in it one at a time. It would grind them up and spit them into the of the truck. When they closed the back door, it simply looked like any other 18-wheeler on the road. Very cool to watch.

From: kclug-bounces@kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] On Behalf Of Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 12:27 PM To: KCLUG Subject: RE: Shredder?

There are industrial shredders that WILL shred anything. There is a company, that frequently shows up on Discovery channel, that makes all sizes of industrial shredders. They go as big as one that shreds cars down to shredding trash which includes 2x4s and cans.

http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/watch-en.htm

http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/hard_drives.htm

Brian Kelsay

________________________________

From: kclug-bounces@kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] On Behalf Of Sean Crago Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 12:18 PM To: KCLUG Subject: Shredder?

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.

Shredders don't like metal, but there are things that'll make quick work of a drive: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/062706-guard-dog.html

The Air Force seemed to think a 1-2 punch was in order, according to Cryptome: "2.5. Destruction. It is a good practice to sanitize media before submitting it for destruction. Media may generally be destroyed by one of the following methods (see Table 2.1). (NOTE: Although approved methods, options d and e use acid, which is dangerous and excessive, to remove recording surfaces. Options a, b, and c are recommended over d and e.) " http://cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/afssi5020.htm

-Sean

--- On Tue, 9/30/08, James Sissel jimsissel@yahoo.com wrote:

But even with all of these methods there is a possibility that some data might still be read. Other than total destruction of the platters there is no absolute guarantee. Surface grinding, acid baths, extreme high temps are pretty safe methods. But that makes the drives unusable again.

I sense a new project for NASA: launching an annual rocket which contains instruments for learning more about our Sun, and a load of old hard drives with sensitive data on them.

Its destination? Isn't it obvious? ;-)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

Philip Dorr wrote:

Mars, because a scientist entered miles instead of kilometers. ;-)

<grin>

These things happen...just today, while testing out some new hardware I was momentarily stumped when the command-line utility I wrote dumped unexpected results (the contents of register 42) for register 52.

I had started entering 0x52 on the command line, realized the number was decimal and not hex, so deleted the x, but not the leading zero. It took a few seconds of staring at the screen and wondering who repealed the laws of physics before I realized my helpful C library was interpreting the 052 I entered as an /octal/ value. I removed the leading zero and all was once again right with the world...or at least a tiny corner of it! :)

- -- Charles Steinkuehler charles@steinkuehler.net