19 Jan
2007
19 Jan
'07
1:15 a.m.
On 1/18/07, Billy Pettit <Billy.Pettit at wdc.com> wrote:
Ethan Dicks wrote:
It's not just manufacturers (who are trying to comply with various
regulations on scrapping equipment and taxes)... When I was at Lucent
in Columbus, they started drilling through the HDAs of discarded
drives, not to protect against data theft from a working drive, but
against employee harvesting of the scrap bins.
There is another reason for this. Warranty fraud has become a 7 digit
problem for most OEM manufacturers. Get a good stock of scrap products,
take parts off a good product, replace them with the bad parts and send the
good product in for repair....
I did not witness this, but I heard at a DECUS that some time in the
late 1980s, DEC had a different kind of scrap problem - they would
scrap numerous things at the factory, load them into bins and sell
them to gold scrappers. The problem came with a gold scrapper started
selling bits and pieces (like MicroVAX CPU and memory boards) to other
parties which would end up in the 3rd-party resale stream and end up
in customers' hands. The damage was two-fold... 1) reputation, and 2)
the IRS discovering that "scrapped" items were being bought and sold.
The solution, I heard, was to get a chipper that could reduce boards,
racks, etc., into postage-stamp-sized chunks before handing the waste
over to the salvage companies. I understand that the first guys to
get a bin of metal and PCB chips rather than boards and boxes they
could cherry pick, were a bit surprised.
OTOH, one of my co-workers from Software Results took a pile of boards
from the scrap bin and drilled and mounted them to make
a 1.5m-tall
PCB Xmas tree (the solder mask was green). The bean counters were
initially upset until the drilled holes were pointed out to them -
clearly the boards had been damaged sufficiently that nobody was going
to be mistaking them for usable product.
-ethan