30 Mar
1998
30 Mar
'98
12:51 p.m.
On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Seth J. Morabito wrote:
But unfortunately, it's _not_ that simple.
Curiosity got the better
of me, and I at least had to see what types of directories were on
the system. This system came from Lockheed Martin, and very much to my
surprise, contained lots and lots of Hubble Space Telescope simulation
information. Stuff I didn't understand, but nonetheless, I found myself
peeking at some of it -- how could I not? Something that cool and
interesting has quite the pull to a geek like myself.
Hell, as far as I'm concerned that's valuable data that should have been
preserved. I'm sure the Lockheed Martin folks kept a copy for themselves.
But look at it this way: in this case the data you found was paid for by
American (ie. your) tax dollars. So you have every right to look at it.
It's not like it was somebody's love letters.
I've since simply re-initialized the drives: My
thinking was, "This
data is not mine, I have no right to keep it. It may be sensitive,
even though I don't understand it. If Lockheed Martin had wanted it,
they surely made backups and transferred to another system." Since it
wasn't really historically significant _that_I_could_tell_, I felt
somewhat obligated to delete it without reading more.
Ugh! I would've kept it. It wasn't hurting anybody, and its not like I
was going to sell it to the Russians (as if they could do anything useful
with it anyway).
implications. Hypothetically speaking, for instance,
let's say you came
accross a tape with some interoffice memos and source code from Bell
Labs, 1970 -- UNIX development notes, memos to and from Dennis Ritchie
and Ken Thompson, that sort of thing :) Certainly very historically
significant, and I'd probably end up cutting it to CD or something.
But that's a pretty black-and-white example, I'm sure there's a lot of
gray area out there.
I wouldn't lose any sleep over this issue. If you get a system from the
original owner with data still on it, ask them how you should proceed with
it. If the original owner is not available, use your best judgement.
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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