Monthly Archives: January 2016

When you need a hard disk failure … on purpose

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This article ( The Right Way To Destroy An Old Hard Drive) got me thinking……

I’m a huge fan of privacy. And any sod that tells me that I don’t need crypto because ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide’ is a short-sighted statist who will be one of the first ones up against the wall when the revolution gets here.

Will snoop-proof cryptography and secure phones/computers make law enforcement and governments job more difficult? Absolutely. Is that a good enough reason to prevent it’s availability? Absolutely not. Yes, terrorists, murderers, kid diddlers, and all sorts of scum are going to use it. The fact that bad guys use it is not reason enough to keep me from using it.

By and large, I’m a pretty law-abiding guy..in the Heinlein way (“I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.“) But that doesn’t mean I feel anyone…spouses, government, church, my mom….should be able to just go spelunking through my hard drive when they have an itch.

Government is a shoddy creature when it comes to respecting your privacy, but it’s an Einstein-level genius when it comes to violating it. And thats why when you decide it’s time to upgrade your computer, it takes more than a simple wipe to make sure your German dungeon porn, Picard/Riker slash fiction, Katy Perry bootlegs, and .jpgs of that really, really, ill-advised waitress from Buffalo Wild Wings don’t wind up on someone elses computer.

Lots of people say that all you have to do is degausee your drive. Look, I’m not the trusting type. If I degause a drive how do I know it really worked? I’m not cracking my computer open, putting the degaussed drive back in , and then trying to read it. No..the best way is utter destruction. And, fortunately, for guys like you and me, there’s a very convenient method that is just a range trip away.

Seems like a good idea. But, really, you need to sink more than just a few rounds into each one of these.

But you have to remember – you would think that punching a couple holes in a drives platter would be enough. I would too. But I am virtually positive that someone, somewhere, has the technology to ‘skip around’ those damaged parts of the disk and get information. Sure, not all of it, but perhaps enough to be a problem. So…a couple holes ain’t gonna do the trick.

40harddrive

One or two hits won’t do it. You need to see daylight…a lot of it…through this thing.

Don’t spare the FMJ. What you want is enough metal-shredding terminal ballistics to remove great gouts of material.

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Much better!

I usually take the drive to the range, stand a few yards back from it, and hammer it with half a mag of .223 or .308 until it looks like some sort of shredded-metal sculpture. Then I twist and break it into a couple different pieces and toss ’em in the dumpster.

I saw on the news that the FBI is looking for the hard drive the San Bernadino shooters used. The feds had sent divers into a pond looking for the drive, which means that they fully expect to be able to recover data from a waterlogged drive…which is reasonable, since water won’t really affect magnetic disks. But you just know those guys have all sortsa technology for recovering data from disks people ‘thought theyd erased’.

I mention this not because you or I are engaged in criminal activities that we need to hide, (Well, I’m not..I dont know what youve been up to), but rather because it’s too easy to take the simple way out, whack the ol’ Western Digital with a hammer a few times, call it good, and toss a drive into the trash that could potentially come back and bite you in the butt.

So…if you got a new computer for Christmas, and youre tossing out that old drive to make new for the new shiny one, do the smart thing and head to the range with it.

Mag prices

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Today, Obama is supposed to give his ‘Im doing something’ speech on gun restrictions. I fully expect this to trigger yet another wave of panic buying. As a semi-scientific benchmark, at 9am MST the cheapest Magpul AR mag was $11.97. Let’s see what happens.

ETA: 5PM and they are all outta Magpul Pmags.

Adventures in food shelf-life

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When it comes to storage-type food, you very often trade flavor for shelf life. You can have a product that tastes really good, but only lasts a minimum amount of time…or you can have a product with a great shelf life but its flavor is such that you would only eat it after the fallout settles and the Kroger’s is a smoking ruin.

Years ago (eight years, actually) I bought a bunch of the Idahoan instant potatoes in pouches. I recommend these highly, and find them to be very good. So good, in fact, that when I’m feeling too lazy to peel, boil, and mash ‘real’ spuds I reach for these. For the price of two of these pouches I can buy a 5# bag of potatoes at my local supermarket, so economically it may not make a lot of sense to have them all the time, but for storage food….very highly recommend.

One concern I had was the durability of the paper pouches. Its heavy duty paper, to be sure…but how will it hold up over time? Funny you should ask….

13890According to Idahoans website FAQ, this particualr pouch o’ spuds was born almost eight years ago. I’d bought a bunch of these when they were on sale and stuffed ’em into a plastic tub, sealed it up, and sat it on the shelf with all the other mid-term food storage in the classic ‘cool,dry place’. But…after a few years, I was pretty certain theyd have gone stale or bad or whatever happens to dehydrated potatoes. In fact, while I wasnt sure enough to pull them off the shelf and discard them, I was sure enough to pull them off my inventory spreadsheet.

Well, to make a long story short, it appears that even in the simple heavy paper pouch, stored under good conditions, they actually held up quite well for eight years. No discernible loss of flavor or texture. In fact, they seemed just fine. So, despite theyre not being packaged in a long-term manner from the factory, if you just stuff the pouches into a hard container, seal it up, and store it under the usual conditions…it lasts just fine.

So…if you’re looking to ads something to the ol’ pantry that tastes good enough to eat on a regular basis, but has a shelf life that goes on for quite a while…..these come highly recommended.

 

2016

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2016 promises to be a pretty ungood year, if the current electoral prospects are anything to go by. Of course, 2015 wasn’t exactly full of happy-happy-joy-joy either.

One staple in scienc fiction and survivalist literature is the plot device where the hero(es) has access to some sort of stasis/cryonic teechnology that lets them ‘sleep’ for a few decades or centuries, to take up their life again in the future.otta admit, it has some appeal.

There’s an election in 11 months and the clock really is ticking in terms of being able to buy what is likely to become prohibited/regulated as ‘common nonsense’ and ‘unreasonable’ gun control laws get bandied about. More than anything else, I’d go with magazines by the bucketload if I were you.