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Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

wired.co.uk

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Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#51

Post by dragonwriter »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #45
dragonwriter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not porn if it's text. Actual English usage rather emphatically disagrees with you. [0] > There's a double standard in English, where pornographic books can't actually be porn because women don't consume porn. No, there’s not. But “romance novels” aren't that, though arguably an adjacent category (whereas “erotic fiction” is an overlapping, but not identical, category to “pornographic fiction”.) But English do…

> But English does not hold that what woman consume is not porn (and, in fact, you’ll find extensive English language studies of how women consume what is uncontroversially porn.) You can find extensive English-language studies of many phenomena that people prefer to pretend never happen. That doesn't mean the pretense isn't there. > “blue movie” is correct, if somewhat dated; the rest are, at best, never as widely u…

> I would have no qualms about labeling it incorrect American English. No one I've mentioned this to has ever even heard of the term.

It is absolutely American English, but dated. The people you know are probably just too young; if you have doubts here is a New York Times review of the American blue movie titled Blue Movie which uses “blue movie” (as well as “stag film”) to refer to the class of films to which Blue Movie belongs:

https://www.nytimes.com/1969/07/22/archives/screen-andy-warh...

Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#52

Post by thaumasiotes »

dragonwriter wrote: post #51
thaumasiotes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But English does not hold that what woman consume is not porn (and, in fact, you’ll find extensive English language studies of how women consume what is uncontroversially porn.) You can find extensive English-language studies of many phenomena that people prefer to pretend never happen. That doesn't mean the pretense isn't there. > “blue movie” is correct, if somewhat dated; the rest are, at best, never as widely u…

> I would have no qualms about labeling it incorrect American English. No one I've mentioned this to has ever even heard of the term. It is absolutely American English, but dated. The people you know are probably just too young; if you have doubts here is a New York Times review of the American blue movie titled Blue Movie which uses “blue movie” (as well as “stag film”) to refer to the class of films to which Blue M…

Stag film is a term I'd recognize, though I'm not familiar enough with it to use it.

Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#53

Post by marginalia_nu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #26
handrous wrote: post #4

Teenage-me once found a DOS porn text adventure on a used 286 I bought from someone up the street, at a garage sale. This was shortly before dual-core processors hit the market as a common item, so the 286 was already ancient by then. Never found it anywhere else, but I later scrapped the thing without thinking to preserve any of the stuff on the disk, in part because I didn't yet realize this was rare software, and…

> a DOS porn text adventure It's not porn if it's text. It was interesting explaining the English vocabulary in a Chinese class that covered how to refer to porn. 黄色的电影 ["yellow movie"]: "dirty movie" 黄色的图片 ["yellow picture"]: "dirty picture" 黄色的杂志 ["yellow magazine"]: "dirty magazine" 黄色的书 ["yellow book"]: "romance novel" There's a double standard in English, where pornographic books can't actually be porn because w…

Well clearly people are referring to textual porn. That means there can be text porn. Convention is the only thing that determines the meaning and usage of words.

Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#54

Post by bj-rn »

chx wrote: post #36

> We all have SSDs in our laptops now. These are hard to wipe Not at all if you have an OPAL SSD which are quite common these days. These have a key which encrypts the data at rest and a user facing passphrase which decrypts this key. If you override the encrypting key, the rest of the data is gone unless you can break AES.

You can also do "Memory Cell Clearing" by using Secure Erase (SATA) or Sanitize (NVMe)[1]. Parted Magic provides a simple GUI for these operations [2]/[3].

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive/Memory_ce... [2] https://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/ [3] https://partedmagic.com/nvme-secure-erase/

Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#55

Post by GrayShade »

emodendroket wrote: post #50

> “We all have SSDs in our laptops now. These are hard to wipe because they come with firmware that stops the same sector being written over multiple times. This means the data you want to wipe isn’t completely removed, or at the very least, can be recovered by someone sufficiently motivated,” he says. Is that really true? The idea you need a million passes always struck me as dubious.

It's just an ATA Secure Erase command away.

Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#56

Post by neilv »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #46
MerelyMortal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending when you did this, it's possible you destroyed private keys to BTC. I always check any discarded computer I come across for that reason, before wiping.

What would you do if you found some, steal the BTC?

Great ethics question. At least two variables:

* Can the owner be found?

* Does the owner have control of another copy?

The second question makes the rationalization harder: "Aw, shucks, no way I can find the owner, and no sense letting BTC go to waste."

Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#57

Post by handrous »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #49
toast0 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As best I could tell, the "blue" terminology is correct Indian English; I would have no qualms about labeling it incorrect American English. No one I've mentioned this to has ever even heard of the term. Mostly Indian, but I've seen ocassional British reference to blue as an adjective for pornographic movies. Usually not 'blue movie', but "that's too blue for me" or something. Also, a DVD by mail service originally…

> I've seen occasional British reference to blue as an adjective for pornographic movies. Usually not 'blue movie', but "that's too blue for me" or something. Try this in America and you'll get confusion and guesses that by 'blue' you mean 'sad'.

It's on its way out, but we used "blue" that way in the US, too. Boomer-aged people are almost certainly familiar with that usage.

Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#58

Post by chx »

Nextgrid wrote: post #39
chx wrote: post #36

> We all have SSDs in our laptops now. These are hard to wipe Not at all if you have an OPAL SSD which are quite common these days. These have a key which encrypts the data at rest and a user facing passphrase which decrypts this key. If you override the encrypting key, the rest of the data is gone unless you can break AES.

This assumes the SSD properly implements AES. I wouldn't trust it and prefer using OS-level full disk encryption.

Obviously such trust could be misplaced but you will find a lot of very large organizations trust the OPAL SSDs shipped by Lenovo/HP/Dell.

Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#59

Post by MerelyMortal »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #46
MerelyMortal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending when you did this, it's possible you destroyed private keys to BTC. I always check any discarded computer I come across for that reason, before wiping.

What would you do if you found some, steal the BTC?

If the computer was discarded, I wouldn't consider it stealing. However would I feel like I had a duty to return it to it's previous owner or heirs? It depends on the circumstances. I have not taken/stolen significant sums of money in the past for moral reasons.

I don't think your comment should have been downvoted as it is thought-provoking, but it might have been downvoted since I said "discarded", and thus taking it wouldn't be stealing.

Re: Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

#60

Post by brokenmachine »

8note wrote: post #41
chx wrote: post #36

> We all have SSDs in our laptops now. These are hard to wipe Not at all if you have an OPAL SSD which are quite common these days. These have a key which encrypts the data at rest and a user facing passphrase which decrypts this key. If you override the encrypting key, the rest of the data is gone unless you can break AES.

What happens when you delete data?

Probably just like a hard drive, just removes the file's entry from the file allocation table.
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