Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Hammers are for Wimps

I think I once read that the average U.S. driver keeps a car for eight to 10 years. Certainly, if Microsoft had to wait that long between upgrades, Bill Gates wouldn’t be living in a 50,000 square foot house. As much as we’d like to have desktop computers last for 10 years before we have to replace or upgrade them, I seem to be doing it every three or four years. The older systems aren’t as adept at manipulating pictures, videos, and MP3 files, and simply upgrading software doesn’t always work. In fact, if 20 years of computer experience is any guide, I can count on my present system grinding to a halt the instant I try to install the latest and greatest feature-creep bloatware. The only sane course is to start over with a completely new system every so often.

I won’t bore you with the details. My concern isn’t about how fast the processor should be or how many gigs the drive should be. It’s about something a lot more mundane. How do you securely re-task or dispose of the old computer? Given the fact that these transistor knickknacks cost thousands of dollars, it’s hard to just chuck them in the trash. Usually I just pull out the hard drive and give the rest to someone who can still use it.

I was discussing the matter with a friend and he related his recent experience with the issue. His son wanted a new ATV. Instead of acquiescing, he placated his son by handing him his former laptop for schoolwork and giving him a challenge that if he did better in school, they’d think about the ATV later. Of course, the challenge also included a warning that because the family had just spent $40K on a new car and $30K for some home improvements, the savings account couldn’t accommodate more big expenses.

Like most teenagers these days, the son quickly understood more about the inner workings of the laptop than the father ever did. Someone at school told him that anything stored on the hard drive when the father used to own it was probably still there and all he had to do was look for it. He downloaded a couple of free utilities and started digging. A couple of weeks later he confronted his father again about the ATV. When my friend gave him the same wealth-challenged excuse, his son said, “But Dad, you never touched the savings account for either of those purchases. You’ve been depositing $500 a month into the savings account all along. And, as for the car, it looks like it’s a three-year lease that only costs $440 a month. Better than that, the new porch was done on a home-equity loan. Given the money you and Mom make, $327 a month for the porch surely isn’t a big deal, and I don’t see why you can’t swing another $119 a month for an ATV!”

I’m sure his first reaction was to brain the kid with the laptop, but my friend was horrified at his son’s instant knowledge of family finances from a hand-me-down computer. While most of us are aware of hard drive security issues, my friend learned it the hard way. He had done a quick-and-dirty data file deletion with Windows Explorer and then handed the laptop to his son.

Unfortunately, deleting My Documents and Excel files doesn’t eliminate them. It removes their references from the directory, but it doesn’t mean they’re physically erased from the hard drive. In fact, not only is the data still there, but it is easily recovered using programs like EasyRecovery from Ontrack and DriveSaver. Even reformatting a hard drive doesn’t necessarily remove all of the sensitive data.

Although all of his personal data was now a political tool in the hands of a minor, my friend could eventually deal with his son. The horror for the rest of us is that an improperly erased hard drive in the wrong hands can be a real disaster. In fact, it’s been all over the news recently about how a couple of MIT students bought 100 secondhand drives and found thousands of credit card numbers, personal correspondence, pornography, medical records, and much more. Only 12 of the 100 drives were actually erased. In this age of identity theft, handing everything to a thief on a platter takes on a whole new meaning.

Rather than bother John, our operations manager, with wiping all of my accumulated hard drives so I could dispose of them, I downloaded a couple of free utilities from ZDNET.com and considered the options. Running the software wasn’t the challenge. The problem was having to reinstall the hard drives to run the software.

About that time, I decided to revert to a tried-and-true hard drive erasure method that would prove more expedient. I entered the combination to my safe, grabbed a heavy metal object from it, and shoved it in my belt. I picked up the hard drives, walked out behind the house to a safe area, and put them on a stump. I backed up about 20', pulled the 8 3/8" “Dirty Harry ” Smith & Wesson Model 27 .44 Magnum from my belt, and BLAM! Instant data erasure.

steve.ciarcia@circuitcellar.com

Published: March 2003