Comments on: Cocktail party geek: Me, Myself and My Old Machine

By: Michael S

Michael S — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:38:59 +0000

I love Alex’s thoroughness, however may I point out that (as far as I know) you did not work for the KGB in college (I would have intuited this even if they had not been defunct for a decade when you attended college) and there is little chance anyone will

a) follow you to whatever disposal location you ultimately find on ‘the epa page’

b) wait for cover of dark

c) collect the pits and pieces of your destroyed but reconstructible hard drive platter

d) re-assemble

e) pull the ‘seeds’ out of the ‘garden’ to re-assemble the ‘recognizable data’ from your college correspondence

Thus I must stand by my original position; whacking the heck out of the pc and drive is the best and funnest option.

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:44:41 +0000

I'd also like to add the following: Here is a link to the epa page for disposing of hardware. It might take 10 minutes research, but you can always use this to minimize the environmental impact after you bash the thing to smithereens... Here is a link to Will it Blend, a site where they destroy stuff with a blender. It's a very satisfying alternative to Michael's proposed violence :) As a last little note, your hard drive, when smashed (which may be tough to do... ) will still have recognizable information on it. I'm sorry to say that blanking it is still the best option... ~ab

By: Michael S

Michael S — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:32:51 +0000

Nice hypothetical situation, very inventive ;)

I think smashing electronics into tiny pieces with a hammer is a highly-underrated activity and one that Alex can probably confirm I’ve long been a proponent of. My perspective is more one of techno-revenge then security but I’d suppose you can combine the two.

I don’t think however it is simpler, but more fun; yes yes and yes. If you need help holding it down I’ll be glad to help there.

I don’t know what you’d actually recycle from an 8-year old computer; motherboards, video-cards, floppy-drives (Alex can explain what these were in another post), all are pretty useless, worthless and in many cases not compatible and will cause more headaches then they are worth. Certainly (inherent value + removal-time) / joy of wanton destruction ratio is quite low.

May I suggest beating the entire computer to pieces until you reach the hard-drive and then working on that especially well?

Oh Alex would like me to responsibly inform you that computers have gold/nickel/platinum/etc so that you may want to consider;

a) Goggles (not Googles)
b) Gloves
c) Take pictures before/during/after
d) Dispose of safely

By: Catherine

Catherine — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:06:28 +0000

Thanks, Alex. But say you have an OLD computer–like from college. You don’t still have the reformatting disks and it’s too old to bother hooking it up to the internet. And it’s been hanging out in your parents basement for the last 8 years because you’re too scared to throw it out. Is there a way to safely manually remove the hard drive, recycle the rest of the computer and smash up the hard drive into tiny little pieces with a hammer? This seems somewhat simpler and also slightly more fun? How do I do that?

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:56:33 +0000

Follow-up link;

http://www.safeit.com/products/index.asp#shredding

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:22:17 +0000

There is also an app called SafeIT Shredder which works with your Trash Can and so when you decide to ‘empty it’ rather then just ‘deleting the signs’ it ‘removes the seeds’ (just the way you thought it was since that is the point of analogies such as ‘Empty Trash’ when it should really be called ‘Sweep it under the Rug’)

Shredder also plugs into Outlook so you can erase emails directly from it and be sure they are gone (as an aside they really need a ‘Do you REALLY want to send this email?’ plug-in based on time-of-day and keywords but i digress)

A great app when you are *not* nuking your garden but want to make sure that if you decide you don’t want carrots anymore (if you ever reallly did) there will be no seeds left as evidence and you can plant again.

Ok back to my garden…