Re: Optical media destruction Was: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc.

["Jeffrey F. Bloss" <jbloss () tampabay rr com>]

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On Tuesday 25 October 2005 07:40 pm, Alloishus BeauMains wrote:
> Fire.......just melt it.
>
> However, shredding a CD will pretty much do the trick for all but the
> most dedicated intents and purposes. I almost doubt even the
> government would go that far to try and resurrect a CD that has been
> through a shredder. Not only would you have to piece together the CD,
> and then read the information off of it. You would problablythen need
> to unscramble the pieces somehow. It would be a super act to actually
> get the pieces to be correctly aligned, especially if the CD was
> shredded fine enough. As far as I know, there really isn't an
> algorithm out there that will unscramble something that drastically
> fubarred. So, the time you would have to take in order to get it right
> by hand would be enormous.

I disagree. I think it would be considerably easier to put a shredded CD back 
together than it would be a comparable sized paper document. It's already in 
digital format, so you could apply computer power without the additional loss 
of having to digitize the document first.

There's no need to really put the physical CD back together. Just dump the 
pieces into a machine that spread them out in a single layer and move the 
laser across the pieces.  You'd get a bunch of data "fragments", but for text 
I'd think you could at the least systematically put fragments together and 
feed them to a high tech spelling and grammar checker. 

Throw a couple super computers at a CD full of text and I'll bet you'd be 
surprised at how fast you'd start seeing real results. ;) I'd wager binary 
data wouldn't be far behind. Encrypted data might be a bit more problematic, 
but then again, why bother... it's assumed the encryption would make 
rebuilding the CD a useless exercise.

- -- 
Hand crafted on October 26, 2005 at 22:45:26 -0400

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
                                  -Groucho Marx
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