RE: What about OLD computers??

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

[...]
> Also, for those who advise people "just drill some holes" through the
> platter - with the increase in drive density, even a 1 sq. cm section
of
> platter can contain many megabytes of data - enough to store an entire
> (defragmented) sensitive document.
> 
> For truly sensitive data, melting it into slag is the only known
secure
> way of destroying magnetic data.
> 
> This isn't merely theoretical speculation or scare tactics: people
have
> demonstrated reasonable recovery procedures already.

You remind me of /m/y/ some kid's earliest foray into data destruction.
Back in an era when children had time to indulge such fancies AND were
relatively unsupervised), a certain crew of 12-and-13-year-olds
destroyed a cabinet-full of ancient records after reading about how
military and secret government agencies were reputed to have done it.

Of course, since /w/e/ they didn't have a self-contained thermite
grenade handy, they had to improvise - this was the next stage after the
home-brew gunpowder days... the stuff you get into when pursuing the Boy
Scout "Chemist" badge...

So, they expended an enormous amount of elbow grease powdering a chunk
of old aluminum door, and an equal amount of effort scraping and
chipping several ounces of iron oxide off of rusted-out equipment.
Along the way, I learned how easy it is to gum up or warp somebody's
dad's grinding wheel, but that's another story.

The crucible was a funnel-ish ceramic part from some abandoned piece of
equipment.

The starter was a strip of magnesium, liberated from a high-school
chemistry lab (with help that shall go unnamed, as I was pre-high-school
at that time).

Getting the magnesium to ignite involved burning a pre-starter,
consisting of broken firecrackers against it.  Once it was burning well,
the coiled magnesium was sufficient to get the aluminum powder burning
in the mix with the iron oxide. The resulting molten iron was sufficient
to melt through the top of the filing cabinet and all four drawers,
right down to the concrete floor, incidentally turning all the old file
folders and ancient receipts to ash. By sheer dumb luck, the garden hose
was sufficient to keep the surrounding shed from also becoming happily
involved.  Just a bit of scorching of the rafters and the nearest wall.

My /a/c/c/o/m/p/l/i/c/e/s/ buddies and I inhaled far more burning metal
smoke than is strictly good for ya, but we didn't know, and the show was
enthralling - what we could see of it, around the spots in our vision
(magnesium burns brightly; we knew it was worse than watching a solar
eclipse, but we kept peeking anyway).



Do those qualify as halcyon days?

 - Kevin 












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