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

[Bob Stockler]

Mark Luljak wrote (on Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 05:53:21PM -0500):

| 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?

Well, you could send the CD-ROMs to Samsung and have them give
them the same treatment they gave to the Install CD-ROM that came
with the LCD monitor of their's I recently purchased - completely
unreadable.

Or get the promised Plextor device that promises to do the same
thing (I wonder if Samsung was testing that for them?).

Bob

-- 
Bob Stockler  +-+  bob at trebor.iglou.com  +-+  http://members.iglou.com/trebor