[PLUG] No partition table for file erasure

[Rich Shepard]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, Elliott Mitchell wrote:

> With a dead partition table `sfdisk` won't be able to recover things, but
> recovery would still be trivial. Doing `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd?` will
> make things impossible for low-budget attackers, and hard for large budget
> (>$100K) attackers.

   Thanks, Elliott. I've nothing of such sensitivity that it requires
paranoid erasure steps, but I will take everyone's advice and write zeros
(or random bits) across the platters.

   Similarly, for the past decade-and-a-half I've used my venerable Bostich
1/4" shredder for anything with my name and an account number on it before
it goes to the recyling barrel. I could spend more money and get a cross-cut
shredder that makes 1/8" squares of the paper, but I doubt that anyone would
find what I shred to be worth the effort of separating 1/4" strips, putting
them together in order and reading what's there. Holding up convenience
stores is much less work.

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>