[clug] giveaway - old PCs

[Cameron Patrick]

Pietro Abate wrote:

> "All computers donated have the hard drives wiped and all information
> removed, using software and procedures approved by the USA Dept of
> Defense and Microfoft Australia.
> 
> This is done to a standard where the majority of the population cannot
> recover the data, unless using specialist equipment."
> 
> Giving the bad record of PCs sold on EBay by various US gov depts, I'm
> wondering which procedures they are really using :))

I suspect they're doing the equivalent of blatting zeros over the drive.
No idea how rigorously they're doing it, though.  While I can't speak
for Charity Computers, I do know that at Computer Angels we do run a
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda" over drives that are donated to us; in the
case of drives which are too small to be useful, or obscure (i.e. SCSI)
we dismantle the drives and remove the platters - or otherwise make it
physically tricky to recover any data on them.

Some people do think about these issues!  (Sadly, many do not.)

Cameron