Thursday 7 May 2009

Security Alerts, And Disc Utilities …

Now, I know I’m possibly going going to get critiqued for reposting, or repeating myself, but I always think this is something worth maybe writing about.

I posted, a while back, about wiping hard-drives, if ever we need to sell on a computer that we’re replacing; and what’s prompted this post is a news-report I saw on the BBC, earlier, about how the University of Glamorgan has done a study on how much residual data is left on  scrapped hard-drives.

Quite a lot, of residual data.

Including one bought on eBay that still had missile launch codes left on it!

Amazingly, how people don’t wipe them properly, although I’ll admit, as as guilty of faux pâs as anyone — one or two unwise usage's of the ‘cc’, rather than the ‘bcc’ field spring to mind — but I can’t believe that, in this day and age, people still don’t know wiping a hard drive is a good idea.

We might criticise a company or government department for doing it wrong, but, really, we should be able to do this ourselves, shouldn’t we?

Now, I’m lucky in that the Mini includes Disc Utility, that Apple say meets the relevant US Department of Defence standards, but I know that’s not an option for everyone.

But not being on Windoze or Linux, I’m not to sure where I’d start, finding an equivalent; but I am told that both Winfiles and Freebyte have utilities that you’d find useful.

We may criticise others for getting it wrong, but, well … 

He that is without sin …” and all that …


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