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Is this my hard drive?

I could write a self help book on breaking ****.
 
Chagos said:
...........or send it to yerself by US mail. Good chance it'll never be found again by anybody.
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Oooh, that's the best one, so far.....
 
Chagos said:
and with a bit of luck "outside" will be your new way of life.:mrgreen:
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Nah, 300 won't start a fire, it'll barely warp the plastic. But it'll fry all the stuff inside.....p




Oooo, deep fryer.....







Deep fry that sum bitch!
 
KevinKohler said:
Nah, 300 won't start a fire, it'll barely warp the plastic. But it'll fry all the stuff inside.....p
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Ah, I was talking European (centigrade). Okay, that won't start a fire either (normally) but with the flurry of combustibles so far recommended as additives on here, who knows ?
Deep fry that sum bitch!
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Might even not be so bad with salsa mexicana
 
When I add a computer to my household the first thing I do is encrypted the whole disk with AES level cipher before placing any private information on it and there after I could mail the old hard drive to the NSA without any concerns.

But it would not hurt for the hell of it to do a one time pass with randoms numbers.

No need to hit the poor thing with a sledge hammer or drill holes in it.

Footnote the FBI had been paying for example best buy technicians to search their customers hard drives and report anything of question on the drives including erase spaces.

Constitution what constitution?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...6028b4-d442-11e6-9cb0-54ab630851e8_story.html


At a giant Best Buy repair shop in Brooks, Ky., Geek Squad technicians work on computers owned by people across the country, delving into them to retrieve lost data. Over several years, a handful of those workers have notified the FBI when they see signs of child pornography, earning payments from the agency.

The existence of the small cadre of informants within one of the country’s most popular computer repair services was revealed in the case of a California doctor who is facing federal charges after his hard drive was flagged by a technician. The doctor’s lawyers found that the FBI had cultivated eight “confidential human sources” in the Geek Squad over a four-year period, according to a judge’s order in the case, with all of them receiving some payment.

The case raises issues about privacy and the government use of informants. If a customer turns over their computer for repair, do they forfeit their expectation of privacy, and their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches? And if an informant is paid, does it compromise their credibility or effectively convert them into an agent of the government?

Best Buy searching a computer is legal — the customer authorized it, and the law does not prohibit private searches. But if Best Buy serves as an arm of the government, then a warrant or specific consent is needed. And a federal judge in the child pornography case against Mark Rettenmaier is going to allow defense attorneys to probe the relationship between Best Buy and the FBI at a hearing in Los Angeles starting Wednesday.

“Their relationship is so cozy,” said defense attorney James D. Riddet, “and so extensive that it turns searches by Best Buy into government searches. If they’re going to set up that network between Best Buy supervisors and FBI agents, you run the risk that Best Buy is a branch of the FBI.”

The FBI and Justice Department declined to comment. Federal prosecutors argued in California that when a technician doing repairs “stumbles across images of child pornography” and the government wasn’t aware of the search, “the technician is clearly not performing the search with the intent of assisting law enforcement efforts.”

Best Buy spokesman Jeff Shelman said in a statement Monday that “Best Buy and Geek Squad have no relationship with the FBI. From time to time, our repair agents discover material that may be child pornography and we have a legal and moral obligation to turn that material over to law enforcement. We are proud of our policy and share it with our customers before we begin any repair.”

Shelman added, “Any circumstances in which an employee received payment from the FBI is the result of extremely poor individual judgment, is not something we tolerate and is certainly not a part of our normal business behavior.” Court records did not detail how often or how much the technicians were paid, other than one $500 payment to one supervisor.

But emails between Geek Squad technicians and FBI agents in the Louisville field office indicate a long-running relationship. In revealing those publicly in a Dec. 19 order, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney required technicians and agents to take the witness stand this week. The ruling was first reported by Orange County Weekly.
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MaggieD said:
Someone told me to put a nail through it about ten times and soak it in water to destroy it. Okay by you?
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Just whack it with a sledgehammer a couple times if you want to destroy it, but first I've gotta ask why you want to destroy it... If there are things on it that you might still want, then hanging onto to it doesn't really cost you anything. If you're worried about someone getting ahold of it and pulling personal info off of it, then keep it locked up.
 
Thank you all. Great info and lots of laughs. 😀
 
faithful_servant said:
Just whack it with a sledgehammer a couple times if you want to destroy it, but first I've gotta ask why you want to destroy it... If there are things on it that you might still want, then hanging onto to it doesn't really cost you anything. If you're worried about someone getting ahold of it and pulling personal info off of it, then keep it locked up.
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After reading everything, I'm going to drive a couple of nails through it, put it in a Glad container with water in it, and put it on a shelf in the garage.

I used to have all of my investments, bank accounts, checking acts on line and in my computer. Passwords, the works. That's the reason for extreme care.

Great info all. Love you guys!
 
MaggieD said:
After reading everything, I'm going to drive a couple of nails through it, put it in a Glad container with water in it, and put it on a shelf in the garage.

I used to have all of my investments, bank accounts, checking acts on line and in my computer. Passwords, the works. That's the reason for extreme care.

Great info all. Love you guys!
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For good measure write Botulinus-A on outside of container.
 
MaggieD said:
After reading everything, I'm going to drive a couple of nails through it, put it in a Glad container with water in it, and put it on a shelf in the garage.

I used to have all of my investments, bank accounts, checking acts on line and in my computer. Passwords, the works. That's the reason for extreme care.

Great info all. Love you guys!
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I never travel without at least one of my netbooks along with me containing as you point out passwords to banks accounts tax records,investment funds and so on for myself and some of my family members.

Hundreds of thousands repeat hundreds of thousands of laptop computers go missing at US airports alone every years.

So getting rid of a hard drive at the end of it life is hardly the main security concern for laptops and even desktops for that matter as either type of computers can fall into evil hands.

Once more I suggest encrypting the whole disk as that will take care of the end of life problem as well as the computer walking away problem under some criminal arms.
 
The only true way to ensure a hard drive stays erased is to drive a iron stake through its heart, sprinkle it with blessed garlic oil, turn it three times clockwise while skyclad under a harvest moon, and bury it at a cross road in a box made of cedar underneath a copy of the Bible, the Koran, and Hard Drive Recovery For Dummies.
 
Slyfox696 said:
It is your hard drive. And rather than going through a bunch of effort to destroy it, just keep it. Put it someplace out of the way. If you REALLY want to clean it properly, the first thing you would do is run a data-erasing program on it (think Clinton e-mail server). The program I always recommend is Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN). Wipe the hard drive as many times as you want and then just store it some place. Far easier.
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Mac has a good utility for that - "disk utilty". You can write zeros over every portion of the drive one time, seven times (DoD does that), or 35 if you're super-duper-worried. 35 would take days though.
 
Anyone else really curious as to what's on this hard drive that requires such total obliteration?? Evidence of aliens? The location of Jimmy Hoffa? Trump's tax returns?? Clinton's REAL email archive???

need to know.jpg
 
OlNate said:
Anyone else really curious as to what's on this hard drive that requires such total obliteration?? Evidence of aliens? The location of Jimmy Hoffa? Trump's tax returns?? Clinton's REAL email archive???

View attachment 67220264
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I used to pay all of my bills on line through a hookup with Harris Bank. All of my investment accounts downloaded into my Quicken program. Every account...every password...balances, transactions, account numbers, stock lists, everything. While I decided to take it all offline, this computer has it all. I'm not particularly paranoid, but I am cautious. Simply throwing it away would be exactly like simply throwing away all my statements, cancelled checks, blank checks, list of accounts, passwords, etc., etc.

I've decided to simply keep that hard dive. It's in the garage in a plastic container. Next time someone comes over with a sledgehammer, they can have at it.
 
MaggieD said:
I used to pay all of my bills on line through a hookup with Harris Bank. All of my investment accounts downloaded into my Quicken program. Every account...every password...balances, transactions, account numbers, stock lists, everything. While I decided to take it all offline, this computer has it all. I'm not particularly paranoid, but I am cautious. Simply throwing it away would be exactly like simply throwing away all my statements, cancelled checks, blank checks, list of accounts, passwords, etc., etc.

I've decided to simply keep that hard dive. It's in the garage in a plastic container. Next time someone comes over with a sledgehammer, they can have at it.
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Hrmm...very disappointing, Maggie. Next time please be more creative. After all, this is the Internet.


:lol:
 
Mr Person said:
Mac has a good utility for that - "disk utilty". You can write zeros over every portion of the drive one time, seven times (DoD does that), or 35 if you're super-duper-worried. 35 would take days though.
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Yeah, but seeing as how I'll never understand those who buy a Mac, I have never bothered worrying about them. ;) :)
 
Slyfox696 said:
Yeah, but seeing as how I'll never understand those who buy a Mac, I have never bothered worrying about them. ;) :)
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Eh, I've used both all my life. I've always found Macs less frustrating, in many respects. More expensive, yes, but less frustrating. It's also nice to know that only a small fraction of the malware out there is aimed at me, and that I can run Windows off my Mac too, if I please..
 
MaggieD said:
I used to pay all of my bills on line through a hookup with Harris Bank. All of my investment accounts downloaded into my Quicken program. Every account...every password...balances, transactions, account numbers, stock lists, everything. While I decided to take it all offline, this computer has it all. I'm not particularly paranoid, but I am cautious. Simply throwing it away would be exactly like simply throwing away all my statements, cancelled checks, blank checks, list of accounts, passwords, etc., etc.

I've decided to simply keep that hard dive. It's in the garage in a plastic container. Next time someone comes over with a sledgehammer, they can have at it.
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Got a big, strong magnet?

The data is wiped out the moment all the ferro particles on the platter are all align the same direction.
 
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