OT: cd's again... one last question....

[Fairlight]

Is it just me, or did Mike Schwartz (PC Support) say:
> > I don't. Not even a little. I bet there is no end of things that can
> > be used to match up exact tracks from one edge to another, avan across
> > large gaps from missing pieces, especially with the help of the other
> > not-missing pieces to draw context hints from.  I bet it's even easy
> > to have it detect mixed shards from different disks and regroup them
> > appropriately.
>
> > Brian

Clearly "out there".  Write-once discs are written like old LP's, in a
single spiral track.  The best explanation I've seen of this was at:

http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/t235-p-some-facts-about-securom-v48x.html

The implications of DPM and the whole configuration of the discs themselves
suggest that it's a fairly fragile process to read them.  If you chop a
disc into pieces, given the granularity of the media inside you're likely
entirely dispatching a fair amount of key bits just by making the cut.
Even if you could glue the whole thing back together and buff it out so
that it spun halfway reliably without snags, the way the data is laid out
makes it far less possible than a random-access HD to actually do something
like raw sector-editor reads from the media.  Then there's the refraction
of any bends or edges in the plastic skewing the data viewing in and of
itself.

>      Reconstructing the pebbles from 100's of destroyed disks would be such
> a horrendous task that nobody would attempt it, unless the data was
> invaluable to recover.  Then again, look at the painstaking effort that has
> gone into the dead sea scrolls and other documents.

Well the whole thing gets down to "-reasonable- diligence".  We're not
talking NSA/CIA levels of security, here.  I don't have vacuum-sealed and
monitored pipes for my cabling, either.  :)

However, destruction of the disks is preferable IMHO to just scratching the
surface.  Ideally, burning them would be great, but no access to an
incinerator.  That said, anything that actually breaks the thing into a
-bunch- of pieces would be fine.  Nothing out there today -to my knowlege-
would be able to handle a disk that was that mangled.

The whole thing is that it's for home use, pretty much.  I don't feel like
spending $250+ on a "shredder" that either doesn't do a sufficient job or
burns out after 25 uses.  Having broken the things by hand before, I know
how resilient they are, and I just can't see any of the solutions I've
looked at so far lasting very long until you get up into the $500+
industrial range.  Is destroying your Quicken backups from 6-18 months ago
really worth $500+?  Likely not.  But none of the cheaper solutions look
like they're worth a damn.  I'm particularly wary of ones that just scratch
the surfaces.

I'm starting to wonder if just holding the thing over a Zippo at
scattered/random intervals would work.  The whole dye sublimation
thing on CD-R's is heat-based.  Not so sure about how the DVD's are
made though--never researched it.  I know this likely would NOT work
for RW media, as that actually rotates the crystals into a different
phase...totally different technology, at least for CDRW.  But RW media
isn't an issue because you could just use a zeroing deletion tool.  It's
the write-once that puzzles me.

You know, much to my annoyance I had a Dokken disc fall out of the glove
box in my car once, onto the floor...and then a case fell cornerwise on top
of it.  The data layer (on this conventional CD) actually squeezed so thin
that you could see through that area as transparent.  That'd be one way to
go about it, but you find which exact areas of the disk to mutilate...how?

mark->
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