PreOwned machine privacy - Was: Acclaim Entertainment Indy (with data, emails, etc) on eBay

[jim stephens]

On 3/28/2017 6:38 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
> the guy on ebay made a big deal on the net about one SGI machine that he knew had video game source code on it.
Not unusual.  The more people crow about it the more hammers will swing 
on good hardware that could otherwise be repurposed.

I worked @ a company which was famous for their what I call Tidy-bug 
attitude.  They gathered up a lot of stuff about 6 months in and make a 
huge pile of free take stuff at the back door.

including one techs private stuff while he wasn't at his desk (he had 
permission) and several other such small nits.

but the satisfying bit of karma for this old hoarder was that they 
insisted on taking all the disk drives out which were of course 
"sensitive" and rather than hook them to a Linux machine or such with a 
wiper program, insisted on actually ball peening them.  just so sad.

They had three drives with irreplaceable no backed up software and pulls 
from systems which were rarely used but had software loaded which were lost.

I hate to take satisfaction but I just don't work the way of ignorant 
solutions being the way to go because they seem simple. This one really 
bit them in the ass.  An intelligent solution of wiping the hardware and 
then checking would have worked since all were sata or Pata or IDE 
drives easily readable.

but none of their data got out in the exercise.

thanks
Jim