"Side Bar" WTF

Re: Secure IT Disposal

serguey123 — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:05:21 GMT

bridget99:
You should go work for the US Department of Defense. Instead of "income" you can just call your central figure "deficit reduction." The DOD has plenty of money to spend on that kind of crap. They stole my children.

MICFY

Re: Secure IT Disposal

bridget99 — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 06:35:45 GMT

Lorne Kates:
fterfi secure:
Oh, and they've only recently agreed that monitors cannot contain proprietary information once unplugged, regardless of how confidential the information they were displaying was, so up until recently they were keeping old monitors too.

There's TRWTF. Have they never heard of Screen Burn-In? Those CRT are a treasure trove of information just waiting to be stolen. After all, it's the information that's on the screen for the longest period of time that gets burned in, and it's the largest clients who are on screen the most. Someone is going to steal all the big clients-- you know, the ones that matter and that can sue!
Put this in a power point, add a few bar graphs, and you can convince the suits to permanently store CRT monitors. They can add a nice, huge number on the books that say "Income: Prevented privacy lawsuits". They won't notice the actual, real huge number on the other side of the books that say "OMFG paying for storage!". You just might drive them out of business.
For bonus points, you can sell them the method to securly destroy information that may have been burned onto the screen, which is, of course, displaying an ultra-bright white image until the entire screen is burnt in. Can you imagine it? The entire dodgy basement alight in a sea of humming, flickering white light from below. And they must be left running 24/7 until ever bit of secure data is gone-- all running off the bank's electricity, of course. It might be too much of a drain on the grid. Get them to build their own nucular power station just to support it. No pixel left unscorched.
Depending on the spectrum those CRTs put out, you might be able to rent out the basement as an light-therapy room. Or a tanning salon. Or both.
If they complain about the heat, start a "greening initiative" company. Sell them on heat reuse to save the environment. After your large consulting fee, and "green premium" service, go in and spend 10 quid to run a vent into the air intake system. Instant heating in the winter! Fold the company by summer.

You should go work for the US Department of Defense. Instead of "income" you can just call your central figure "deficit reduction." The DOD has plenty of money to spend on that kind of crap. They stole it from my children.

Re: Secure IT Disposal

alegr — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:42:54 GMT

Here is what you should do. After you erased the disk, install an image with some autorun program that will phone home by sending an HTTP request to your server, or like that.

Re: Secure IT Disposal

EncoreSpod — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:14:47 GMT

yeah :D

Re: Secure IT Disposal

Master Chief — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:59:43 GMT

OP: So, the real WTF is that you're bosses are adament on spending money on a private firm specializing in secure computer disposal, of which you and your bosses are openly distrustful of, which does the same things your internal IT does, to the point that they give you orders to condition junked PCs for the firm so they don't complain, just so you can get a certificate from them, a company you openly distrust?

I swear, if I ever run a huge company, and I hear about anything like this ridiculous crap costing us even one penny, people are getting fired.

Re: Secure IT Disposal

ais523 — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:55:04 GMT

blakeyrat:
irreal:
Since we're on the topic of disposal, i once happened to be enjoying a snack in the break area when the cleaning crew arrived to empty the bins. They casually took all the different recycling bins one by one and poured all the contents into one big bag.
Our recycling company does that, they have a mechanical sorter which (apparently) smooshes everything into tiny bits, then can sort out the different materials from the pile of bits. Our local government actually got rid of the 3 recycle container system and just replaced it with one.
Not necessarily a WTF, in other words.

Right, the recycling bins here, you can put anything recyclable in, and don't have to worry about differentiating. (Except glass, not because they can't sort it from the other stuff, but because broken glass is a health and safety risk.) Seems like a better option than making people split, to me.

Re: Secure IT Disposal

ender — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:46:44 GMT

fterfi secure:
The second is that these were first-gen TFTs, not CRTs.

My old TFT (Hansol H530) had a nice burn-in of the minimize/maximize/close buttons in the top-left corner, though that did go away after a few months when I repurposed it for my (text-only) Linux server.

Re: Secure IT Disposal

pjt33 — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:28:43 GMT

Zemm:
Since his best stories are from the olden days (1990s) he pre-dates TDWTF!

Indeed, but El Reg are still publishing his new material, and this is better than a lot of it. Maybe Lorne could moonlight as his ghostwriter.

Re: Secure IT Disposal

Zemm — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:12:07 GMT

pjt33:
Does anyone know whether Simon Travaglia reads TDWTF?

Since his best stories are from the olden days (1990s) he pre-dates TDWTF! Here's your 4MB home space!

Re: Secure IT Disposal

pjt33 — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:52:55 GMT

Lorne Kates:
There's TRWTF. Have they never heard of Screen Burn-In? Those CRT are a treasure trove of information just waiting to be stolen. After all, it's the information that's on the screen for the longest period of time that gets burned in, and it's the largest clients who are on screen the most. Someone is going to steal all the big clients-- you know, the ones that matter and that can sue!
Put this in a power point, add a few bar graphs, and you can convince the suits to permanently store CRT monitors. They can add a nice, huge number on the books that say "Income: Prevented privacy lawsuits". They won't notice the actual, real huge number on the other side of the books that say "OMFG paying for storage!". You just might drive them out of business.
For bonus points, you can sell them the method to securly destroy information that may have been burned onto the screen, which is, of course, displaying an ultra-bright white image until the entire screen is burnt in. Can you imagine it? The entire dodgy basement alight in a sea of humming, flickering white light from below. And they must be left running 24/7 until ever bit of secure data is gone-- all running off the bank's electricity, of course. It might be too much of a drain on the grid. Get them to build their own nucular power station just to support it. No pixel left unscorched.
Depending on the spectrum those CRTs put out, you might be able to rent out the basement as an light-therapy room. Or a tanning salon. Or both.
If they complain about the heat, start a "greening initiative" company. Sell them on heat reuse to save the environment. After your large consulting fee, and "green premium" service, go in and spend 10 quid to run a vent into the air intake system. Instant heating in the winter! Fold the company by summer.

Does anyone know whether Simon Travaglia reads TDWTF?

Re: Secure IT Disposal

fterfi secure — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:44:03 GMT

If you want a recycling WTF, check out what happens to recycled glass. A large proportion of it gets ground up into sand so we can say it's been recycled, even though that takes much more energy than chucking the glass in a hole in the ground and digging out some more sand.

Re: Secure IT Disposal

morbiuswilters — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:14:00 GMT

toon:
morbiuswilters:
toon:
morbiuswilters:
All my confidential information is always encrypted. So I don't care who gets the drives when I'm done with them.
FTFY
Wow, did you just learn how to read or something? Thanks for pointing out the obvious.

No sir. I was quoting someone who was trying to point out that information that's secure should always be encrypted or it's their own fault. The thought that it might be a typo hadn't occurred to me. (not being sarcastic; it honestly hadn't.)

It wasn't really a typo, the "my" was implied.

Re: Secure IT Disposal

toon — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:03:03 GMT

morbiuswilters:
toon:
morbiuswilters:
All my confidential information is always encrypted. So I don't care who gets the drives when I'm done with them.
FTFY
Wow, did you just learn how to read or something? Thanks for pointing out the obvious.

No sir. I was quoting someone who was trying to point out that information that's secure should always be encrypted or it's their own fault. The thought that it might be a typo hadn't occurred to me. (not being sarcastic; it honestly hadn't.)

Re: Secure IT Disposal

toon — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:58:59 GMT

C-Octothorpe:
toon:
Anketam:

the boss pointed out everything he could do to him

What would that be?
Fire him and/or have his clearance revoked. It would be impossible for him to ever get any kind of clearance again. Getting another job would also likely be difficult, depending on how long he was there (the longer the gap, the harder it is to explain away in an interview).

Ah, I didn't gather that from the original comment. To me it sounded like a guy with security clearance slapped the sticker on a clueless coworker with no clearance at all... Makes much more sense. :)

Re: Secure IT Disposal

C-Octothorpe — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:42:08 GMT

morbiuswilters:
All confidential information is always encrypted. So I don't care who gets the drives when I'm done with them.

Wait, so you're telling me "Recycle Bin" on my "Desktop" isn't a secure means of information disposal? Shit, I gotta make a few calls...