If Gentoo can die off, ReiserFS is doomed (was Re: Reiser FS or ext3?)

[Oren Beck]

Actually there's a new threat looming. The USB "thumbdrives" that we
take for granted first gave the warning. Seems the "wear spreading"
logics they use make for a grim risk that anything stored on one as
being potentially recoverable... Which then made someone wake up
sweating at midnight over a fruit phone's SSD. Oh? SSD? As in EEE etc.
I suspect the confluence of EEE boxes being coveted by tech savvy
folks and having been sold with XP may get interesting. As We all know
that XP makes oddly redundant files. So someone getting a resold EEE
and running Photorecovery or similar?

Back to Gentoo. To my recall in the past hardware not hefty enough
took simply eternities to emerge on .The part I still am curious about
centers on if the "creation" of a Gentoo image for a machine could now
be done on a fast box then simply cloned to the lesser machine by dd.

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 8:46 PM, Leo Mauler <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Sun, 9/28/08, Monty J. Harder <mjharder at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 11:58 AM, Leo Mauler
>> <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Reformatting a ReiserFS filesystem can sometimes
>> > result in data files from the previous contents
>> > reappearing on the now allegedly-wiped hard drive,
>> > a detail which folks interested in tax breaks for
>> > donating old machines, while simultaneously
>> > protecting their corporate secrets, would be
>> > dismayed to learn.
>>
>> Anyone who thinks that "reformatting a filesystem"
>> is the same thing as "wiping a hard drive" doesn't
>> understand the meanings of the words "reformatting",
>> "wiping", or "filesystem' for that matter.
>
> Sorry, bad choice of words there, I do know what wiping means.
>
> Actually, anyone who thinks that completely wiping a drive can be done with software is sorely mistaken.  A friend of mine who, shall we say, did some "shady computer things" back in the 1980s, had an external hard drive (long before home computers had external hard drives, this was a homemade model) which was conveniently placed between two powerful electromagnets.  Should anyone choose to come into his home to, shall we say, "inquire about his shady computer things", he could simply press a Big Red Button (his happened to be big and red) and completely wipe his hard drive.
>
> There are government labs with the technology to go through a "software-wiped" drive and piece together some of what was previously on said "wiped" drive, but not drives which were "hardware-wiped".  I wouldn't doubt that there are independent labs (such as in corporate secrets espionage) with the same level of technology.
>
> I suppose ideally companies should buy brand new hard drives for their donated computers and run the old ones over with a steamroller.
>
>
>
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-- 
Oren Beck

816.729.3645