Personal attacks against other posters are not permitted in this forum, whether you’re quoting a movie or not. Do not do that again.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Two items:
Bench Grinder
Really Heavy Gloves
Keep Grindin’ 'till nothing is left larger than a politician’s concience.
quote:
Originally posted by Novus Opiate
I hear there are utilities which will completely erase files from disk. I think PGP may be one of them
“Nonsense; somebody would have mentioned it if this were the case”
i’d like to get sailor’s opinion on all of this.
Oh, can I contribute too?
PGP has utilities called “Wipe” and “Freespace Wipe” which are available via the “PGPTools” which come with it.
Back in 80s I was working for DoD. Back then the standard was to sandblast the platters and then put the platters in a blast furnace. Way overkill if you ask me. Anyway, someone came to me sheepishly admitting that they had written classified information onto the hard drive of his unclassified machine. He wanted to destroy the information, but he obviously didn’t want to get in trouble, and we didn’t have the facilities to properly destroy it.
First I ran a disk utility (Norton Utilities Secure Delete, or something like that) on it’s most rigorous setting (write all 1s, then all 0s, then all random), three times. However, that’s only good enough for the casually interested. I then took the hard drive out and took it apart, until I had just platters. I got a bulk tape eraser from Radio Shack and picked up each platter off the table for at least a minute on each side. I didn’t have sandpaper handy, so I used a push pin to scar each side. And finally I bent the platters in half with a hammer, which was really hard to do.
I took the results to our security officer and handed him the folded over drive platters, telling him what had happened. He just started to laugh, and said he thought they were pretty much declassified.
If you wanted to go the heat route, just mix up some sugar and saltpeter, put the platters in that, and light the mixture with a match. Be extremely careful though, as I found out the hard way in my teen years that mixture is hot enough to melt asphalt! Definitely don’t try that inside, you’re likely to burn the house down!
Uh, you mean a handgun isn’t household equipment?
Dang.
Try a big hammer or something. Sandpaper is good, too. A bonfire will work.
I think we’re done here.