Ethan Dicks wrote: On 1/18/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com <http://www.classiccmp.org/mailman/listinfo/cctalk>> 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. Saw a lot of things there I wish I could have saved, including a 3 cu ft box loaded with PDP-11 core memory, and other DEC items from the 1970s and 1980s. I would have happily have paid many times the gold scrap value of the boards, but, for obvious bean counter reasons, no mechanism exists for that. -ethan ---------------------------------------------------- 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. Whether very little effort, you can amass a huge stock of good parts and sell or assemble them in units for resale. There are even places on the internet where you can get labels made, or do it yourself. The best way to discourage this type of fraud is to physically damage the parts so they can't be reused. At Philips, we specified a hydraulic punch through the PCBA and the Optical Pick Up unit. But by time this was implemented, Philips had lost several million dollars to the fraudsters. So most OEM companies have explicit protocol for scrap destruction. There are just too many people out there trying to make a buck out of it. Billy