Posts tagged as:

hard drive

Dear Curves: respect your client and employee data [UPDATE]

by Adam on June 28, 2008

Original post removed on 7/5 due to threat of legal action by the owner of the Curves franchise but I don’t like being censored so I have decided to put the original post back and reopen comments.

I have a new policy: I will not remove posts because people don’t like them

After speaking with the owner I believe that the Curves in question takes this matter (data security) very seriously and that a similar situation will likely not take place. I believe that this was an isolated oversight and that the owners have learned a valuable lesson.

I should clear some things up:

  • Beyond the phone numbers and addresses contained in the letters (WordPerfect docs) there was no other data found on the system.
  • The Curves database was encrypted and NO EFFORT was made to circumvent this encryption; no billing information (if any existed) was exposed.
  • I was slightly misquoted on The Consumerist - no credit card information was found. My original post pointed out the potential for billing information to be found based off information I read on the iGo software.
  • The hard drive was wiped (by me) using DBAN and no copies of the data exist.
  • Upon request demand of the owner the computer (and hard drive) were returned to them.

[click to continue...]

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White Elephant Gift

by Adam on December 19, 2007

White Elephant Gift

Going to a Christmas party tonight and there is a white elephant gift exchange - someone is going to get 6 8GB IBM SCSI hard drives with their covers removed. Interestingly all the hard drives (same model) have an X mark (looks to be sharpie) on the top plater. The only information I could find in my (brief) research as to why, was this Ask MetaFilter thread.

Is it me or would it look cool to mount the drives to a backing board like they are shown in the picture and hang them on the wall?

click on pic for larger version

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How does one defrag their computer?

by Adam on November 29, 2007

A friend sent me an e-mail, in it he asked:

How does one defrag their computer?

My reply back:

Well…

You remove the hard drive from the system and using an electron microscope you need to examine each individual hard drive cluster (there are 180,000 of them) and using a special de-fragment tool (looks like a kitchen knife but it’s not; it’s special) you have to re-organize the clusters in the proper order; which in and of itself is pretty easy. Just don’t put them in the wrong order otherwise you could cause the drive to go nuclear. Really pretty easy stuff. I do it all the time.

Or…

You could:

Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –> Disk Defragmenter –> window pops up make sure the C: drive is selected and click on Defragment.

Depending on how fragmented the drive is it could take a bit.

And, sorry I can’t resist:

Q: How does one defrag their computer?
A: You don’t, you defrag your hard drive.

Unless you mean “frag” in the sense of the video game or military use of the word, which is to “kill.” If that’s the case then when you ask “how does one defrag their computer?” you mean “how does one un-kill their computer?”

That, depends on how you killed it.

Note that the bold text above is actually the way you defrag your hard drive in Windows XP, the rest of that stuff was me messing with my friend.

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