[clug] Hard disk destruction

[Brendan Jurd]

2009/7/1 Robert Edwards <bob at cs.anu.edu.au>:
> I think that you need to be careful with "genuinely not possible".
> The only way you can assert that something is "not possible" is if you
> are omniscient (ie. you know everything).

I think that for the purposes of fruitful discussion we can just go
ahead and figure that when somebody uses the phrase "not possible"
they mean it in a practical sense, not a philosophical or
epistemological sense -- unless the context specifically calls for
that kind of thinking.

> The person you are protecting the data from may well be someone in the
> future who has access to all sorts of cool tech that we just don't know
> about yet. They may look at our Scanning Electron Microscopes and our
> 2048-bit public keys and just laugh at how primitive we are.
>
> Melting the platters in a forge may be the best way to ensure data
> destruction - but we don't know that either (yet).

Which brings us back to practical vs. epistemological impossibility.
If Mister Devious Future Man can look at a pile of aluminium slag and
determine that it was once a stack of platters from an ancient
magnetic binary storage device, and then figure out a way to turn that
into recoverable data, then good luck to him.  I can (and indeed,
must) learn to live with that risk, because there is no defence
against it.

Cheers,
BJ