love the 'running ancient operating system' DOS part

the platters weren't warped and as long as those are ok...
still it's a great feat

as for shredding...
i dunno, i figger 1-2 minutes baking in an mri would do it
or a longer exposure to any commercial degauser.

A small pile/cake of thermite is always popular and will burn clean through casing, controller and platters, demands you have someplace fireproof though. Then again there is something to be said for the 'want my data? pick it outta the slag molecules'

I figger one of the large advantages to shredding and other physical measures as opposed to 'multi format/partition/overwrite' sequences isn't actually so much in security as it is in 'we can see it's destroyed'

yes they can recover data on hard drives, the old 'you need to overwrite more than 30 or so times' was a misunderstanding refering to electrosweep microscope analysis of a hdd of a technology that isn't even in common use any more. what was actually said is that there are 30 different patterns depending on harddrive that need to be used.

That being said a 'successful assuming you read one byte per second, with that error margin
it'll take quite a bit of time and man power to recover even a small hdd (100meg), not to mention trying to restore the questionmarks.

add in an encrypted filesystem and it becomes a bit of a nightmare.

l successful overwrite is not recoverable the problem is judging successful from the perspective of:
a/ did it overwrite ALL the data (heads whilst more accurate today, are not 100% accurate)
and
b/ did the write succed?

also comes down to time vs hassle factor as anything does
from Guttman's paper there is a discussion of 35-40% recovery
that's on a bit level using electron microscope.
ie: 100?001?
assuming you read one byte per second, with that error margin
it'll take quite a bit of time and man power to recover even a small hdd (100meg), not to mention trying to restore the questionmarks.

add in an encrypted filesystem and it becomes a bit of a nightmare.

all computer security in the end comes down to manpower vs gain/profit

also all comes down to how far to push it
install os on hdd, make 2 swaps, one encrypted that is being used and wiped on startup and shutdown and random time intervalls, the other you run once or twice during a 'sterile' session to fill it with 'crap data', encrypt user folders, on windows any file that refers to what you did during a session should be imaged back over

basically run OS in a sandbox with overwrite after use, and keep userdata encrypted preferable with other encrypted areas that are full as well 'red herrings' as well as unencrypted areas with other red herrings.

and they say paranoia is a disease...way of life man! way of life!

heh
wow was gonna post 'impressive' and it just kept growing *rolls eyes*

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