Re: [tlug] Bits to Bits, Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes

["Micheal E Cooper" <mcooper@example.com>]

"Jim" <jep200404@example.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 22 Dec 2005 14:16:57 +0900 Edward Middleton
> <edward@example.com> wrote:
>
>> Probably more so literally, in that it is almost always easier to
>> extract a password from the owner then to break the cryptography.
>
> Why bother with the password? The owner knows what you want to know.
> Just skip the password and ask what you want to know.

In the last book by William Gibson that I traded leisure time for
fatherhood (I think it was Idoru), there is a scene in a hotel room where
the musician in love with the Idoru is using goggles and gloves to
interact with his AI fiance, in a very tense, near-climax scene. In the
middle whatever it was (please feel free tp enjoy just how close to
premature senility I have come), the Russian mafia comes in and
interrupts, physically moving them from the premises... using real weapons
and hairy muscular bodies. The guy using the goggles says something to the
effect of, "And here we have the physical world. You cannot escape the
physical."

While I just spent the past two days using the dd method of data wiping
(one pass of /dev/zero, then one pass of /dev/urandom), I sense a kind of
macho bravado about the way that techies, myself included, approach the
subject.

It becomes a kind of "extreme system administration," the kind of violent
pulp that should be on ESPN. Wouldn't you watch a show where cryptos go
against admins to see if the admins can really erase data? Then they could
spice up the show with some of the extremes: military methods, like
incendiary blocks and flame throwers to literally melt the disks into
scrap slabs; a road race of SUVs towing hard disks chained the bumper
until they are ground to nothing; an Olympiad episode of shotputting and
hammer-tossing hdds in the New Orleans Superdome parking lot, complete
with a nice grinder finale; and of course to mix in sex and corruption for
better ratings, Enron accounting records could be trampled by the Dallas
Cowboys cheerleaders wearing nothing but swimsuits and huge, high-powered
electromagnets in their boot soles. They could call it, "Restore This."

For my purposes, the /dev/zero single pass would be enough, since there is
nothing really important on these disks. I do the /dev/urandom pass as
self-protection. I cannot imagine what a stink it would raise if the next
user of the machine installs and uses a data restore program and comes up
with family photos and email of the previous owner. I would be canned, and
that again is the messy, physical world, encroaching on our paradise of
logic that does work for us.