Google OS: the end of the hard drive? - CNN

[fourdc]

This would be like Jurassic Park where they filled in the missing bits of dinosaur DNA with that of a sexually ambidextrous frog.

There's a lot of tech that could be used but the legal eagles don't want to overwhelm the jurors, a lot of times what you can't understand you just turn off.

[nihil]

This would be like Jurassic Park where they filled in the missing bits of dinosaur DNA with that of a sexually ambidextrous frog.

Sh*t we've been rumbled............the Yanks have gotten the formula for the last two prime ministers we have had!



DDDDC,

There's a lot of tech that could be used but the legal eagles don't want to overwhelm the jurors, a lot of times what you can't understand you just turn off.

That is exactly the same over here!

We have legislation called the "Misuse of Computers Act" (1990) ..........getting on for 20 years old and in all that time there have been less than 200 prosecutions (sorry, I have no stats on the success rate)

Courts like to go for "old fashioned" crimes like fraud and theft because it is a lot easier (and less expensive!) for them?

Our lot tend to use the computer evidence as a lead to more traditional stuff.

[chaosclown]

i agree ,what if the person cant get to a wifi signal or there internet gets cut off, they don't have access to there data then the computer is about as good as a paperweight

as far as a wifi signal goes, i guess google would bank on the fact that in the near future wifi would be everywhere. i think there was some thing floating around about taking old cell phone towers and using them for a wifi.

Now security is a whole different story. Even Google cant account for the disgruntled employee

[t34b4g5]

Storing Your Data on the Internet: Ignorant and Silly

This article on OSNews follows up on the recent Microsoft/Danger data loss issue and considers more widely the issue of storing your data on the internet. In the Microsoft/Danger disaster, it turned out to be not as bad as everyone (including the involved parties themselves) had thought; Microsoft was still able to recover the lost data, meaning that users still got their stuff back. Still, I'm sure Sidekick owners were less than pleased.

[dinowuff]

I will never store anything of interest on line. Photo bucket, Facebook, Antionline, Google. No where.

As to destroying data! I'm lucky in that where I work we have a machine shop. Big saws that will cut through anything.

This I promise.

Take all the drives from a RIAD 5+ configuration and cut them in half. You will never retrieve the data. And I mean NEVER!

[gore]

Dino:

Sawing a drive in half could still get read from. The magazine article I was talking about, one guy literally blasted a Drive with a 12 Gauge. I mean they had PARTICLES of Drives they had to put back together because of the way it was blasted.

They somehow managed to put the drive back together again enough to read almost all the data from it.

Here is the thing:

These things cost a LOT of money. If I was going to get rid of a Hard Drive that had data on it I didn't want read, I'd probably just format the thing, or if it had failed, physically destroy it which is what I've done before.

But there is one thing that makes a huge number of posts in this thread not even matter:

Who here has data on your home hard drive that is so valuable that someone would pay the thousands of dollars to have it read from again? I know I don't have much here someone would spend that kind of money on just to see my collection of movies and stuff.

Now at your jobs, you may very well have drives that need to be destroyed because of personal data and things competitors would like to see. I can understand that competitors would like to have access to data, and some govt employees should probably be careful too, but seriously, the type of Data restoration I'm talking about costs a LOT of money. You'd have to have some pretty damned expensive data on a drive for someone to first go through the process of stealing the disk itself, and then spending thousands and thousands of dollars to get data from it after it's been destroyed.

I don't think there are to many people who are going to be willing to go though all that just to read from a disk drive unless they worked for a high end company who had very good secrets. So the risk of this happening is so low that for most of us, simply getting rid of the drive and burning it or shooting it would be WAY more than enough.

There is only ONE Hard drive in my 10 years of computing I've ever had to get rid of. My Mom's Computer had a bad disk in it. The thing was failing. I had never gotten to dissect a drive before, so when I took it out, I played with it. I pried it open to see exactly what was inside, and messed around. Then I ended up turning it into a piece of artwork. I thought it was cool.

Now, had I been at a job where a disk had sensitive data on it, I'd have simply taken it apart, and melted the plates inside into liquid. That's about it.

Because no matter how good people at putting these things back together, and no matter how many pieces were made when a shot gun blasted the thing into shreds... They still managed to put it back together somehow and grab the Data from it.

But I don't know anyone who can take a disk that's been melted into a liquid form with pop cans added in and been able to read from it.

Melting the plates with Copper or Cans made of aluminum and making that into a ball of melted disk, isn't going to get read from.

But again, you have to look at the risks. The Hacking Exposed books have sections where it says "OK, this type of thing would lead to a root compromise so we'll give it a 10 there, but it's so hard to do and rarely ever is it used, so it only gets a 1 for those, so all around, it's going to have a rating of a 5 when it comes to risk". That's kind of what I mean. Even though the implications of someone stealing a disk with sensitive data on it would probably have a 10 for impact, the chances of it happening are so low, it's not worth worrying about unless you work in a high end target.

[brokencrow]

What about shooting HDD's into outer space? Anybody tired that yet?

Rocket space must be getting cheaper now. A few HDD's mixed in with all the space junk orbiting
Earth would be hard to find. And if they did find it, it's likely to be orbiting at 18,000 m.p.h. That would
be a trick snagging a 1/2 pound HDD moving that fast.

[westin]

What about shooting HDD's into outer space? Anybody tired that yet?

Rocket space must be getting cheaper now. A few HDD's mixed in with all the space junk orbiting
Earth would be hard to find. And if they did find it, it's likely to be orbiting at 18,000 m.p.h. That would
be a trick snagging a 1/2 pound HDD moving that fast.

Meh. Shoot it into the sun.

[romanticcowboy]

Linen,

I will be replacing 3 computers in my home network in January, building new ones. The old drives are IDE and not much use to me. Once the data is safely copied off of them, they will go to the target range. A couple of rounds of 9mm from 50 yds will make the data irretrievable. From there they'll go to a recycling center that states that hds are melted.

Sledgehammers, drills work well too.

i had an old maxtor ide hd i pounded with a 20 pound sledgehammer ,i later took it out of curiosity to my brother he needed a hd to get online, this was back in 2003 that hd still ran till last year when it died and i was able to do data recovery even after using killdisk and reformat it and retreived alot of my old data