Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence 181
An anonymous reader writes An Indiana court has ruled that a hard drive that was sent to recycling was not destruction of evidence. The ruling stems from a BitTorrent file-sharing case filed by Malibu Media where a defendant claimed that his hard drive had failed thanks to heavy use. Malibu claimed that the act was destruction of evidence and filed a motion demanding a default judgement. The court denied this motion suggesting that because the hard drive failed, there was no evidence to destroy in the first place.
Hello microwave (Score:4, Funny)
Hello microwave. I'd like you to meet hard drive.
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Hello microwave. I'd like you to meet hard drive.
Perhaps you intended your comment to be a joke, but in case anyone believes
a hard drive can be destroyed such that data cannot be recovered from it
by "cooking" the hard drive in a microwave, it should be explained that
a platter-type drive will NOT be destroyed by "cooking" it in a microwave.
The microwave, however, WILL be severely damaged.
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From what I understand, all it takes is one knock with a hammer to ensure platters are bent and can never be used again. And there is no known practical method to restore data after a single overwrite with 0s. Everything else is pure paranoia.
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Actually a single overwrite with zero is recoverable on older non-PMR drives by simply realigning the heads a bit to catch the edge of the magnetic track only weakened by the zero wipe (and I mean a very small bit) and re-installing the drive. On PMR, there are actually weak bits left after a zero wipe that are recoverable by equipment capable of reading weak bits. A random wipe is usually effective in all cases. A hammer leaves nothing to chance.
I also don't understand how a drive can be ruled as evidenc
Re:Hello microwave (Score:5, Insightful)
older non-PMR drives
Those drives are now museum artifacts, so your concern is of no practical use. No mainstream 2.5/3.5 in. hard drive manufactured in the last 15 years is recoverable after a zero-out.
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older non-PMR drives
Those drives are now museum artifacts, so your concern is of no practical use. No mainstream 2.5/3.5 in. hard drive manufactured in the last 15 years is recoverable after a zero-out.
Of course, an extra few words explaining that due to areal density on drives larger than 15 GB the chances of recovering a single 32-bit number from a zeroed drive is less than three percent would make you seem less like a dick spouting such an assertion. Residual magnetism used to be the way they recovered data from a zero out, but due to how tiny the bits are on the media these days it's not possible to do that, even after a single pass of zeroes.
Melting is a new one for me, but quite effective I am sure.
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I see your 62-grain 5.56 and raise it a 180-grain 7.62 :P
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older non-PMR drives
Those drives are now museum artifacts, so your concern is of no practical use. No mainstream 2.5/3.5 in. hard drive manufactured in the last 15 years is recoverable after a zero-out.
If it does't severely impact your wiping throughput needs, at least use some crappy PRNG instead of zeroes.
A more likely problem than using a 15+ year old hard drive today is today's hard drive being read 5/10/15 years from now with THEIR technology.
I would like to say all information about my life more than X years old is worthless, but I know that is not generally a safe assumption. All sensitive information has its own lifespan, sometimes very long.
Analog versus digital (Score:2)
Only in a digital sense as being above or below a certain threshold. The relative amount above or below the theshold can indicate what the value used to be, but that's not something you are going to get from the existing disk controller board.
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The Peter Gutman paper which talks about data recovery on hard drives by reading track edges and relying on imprecise positioning was performed on 20Mb MFM and RLL stepper motor hard drives (the kind which needed to be "parked" before switching off. These _are_ serious museum pieces which always had a bit of mechanical "slop" in the gearing/steel band mechanisms which actually drove the head position.
All drives greater than 200Mb use variable sector geometry, so track layout is nowhere near as predictable a
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For "older" meaning >15 years old.
Re:Hello microwave (Score:5, Informative)
I don't understand how the prosecution can ask for a default judgement without solid compelling evidence of a crime. Without a discovery of the drives contents I'm assuming they had other evidence.
First, part of the reason you don't understand this is because you are under the impression that copyright infringement for personal use is a crime. It is NOT. This is a civil matter, not criminal.
Generally speaking, copyright infringement is only criminal if you are doing it in bulk for profit. Historically, that meant what has been known legally for about 100 years as copyright piracy, which again in general refers to making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works and selling them.
It is today's media industry which has deliberately attempted to confuse you by labeling downloads of copyrighted material for personal use piracy. It is not. Piracy is a legal term referring to PROFITING from unauthorized copying of copyrighted works.
Now, back to the case at hand: being a civil matter, and not criminal, the court need not require probable cause in order to demand that evidence be produced (although it probably can't be seized beforehand. However, because of this, people have been known to destroy evidence after being served notice of a lawsuit. If they do that for the purpose of hiding the evidence, and the plaintiff can show that, it may be ruled spoliation of evidence, and could result in a summary judgment in favor of the plaintiff.
But despite this not being a criminal matter, plaintiff still bears the burden of showing that spoliation happened, via genuine evidence. In this case, plaintiff's claim of spoliation was not backed by evidence; it was a claim without substance. Defendant had a reasonable explanation for the drive's demise, and plaintiff could not show otherwise.
I also don't understand how a drive can be ruled as evidence if nothing is yet discovered on the hard drive.
Remember that this is a civil matter. Standards of evidence are different. If a reasonable person would believe that the drive contained evidence, a judge might ask that it be produced. It very much depends on the circumstances.
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" I also don't understand how a drive can be ruled as evidence if nothing is yet discovered on the hard drive. I don't understand how the prosecution can ask for a default judgement without solid compelling evidence of a crime. Without a discovery of the drives contents I'm assuming they had other evidence.
"
they DO
it is a IP address that anyone in the world could have spoofed
very very very week evidence
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Depends on just how motivated someone is to recover the old data. The hard drive itself will almost certainly be unable to read the previous data after a single overwrite, but remove the platters and install them in a machine specifically designed to read the edge of the tracks, which as a rule *aren't* overwritten, and most of the data can generally be recovered easily enough. (Since head placement is imperfect, every recording of a track writes to a slightly different path, leaving the previous N record
Re:Hello microwave (Score:5, Informative)
most of the data can generally be recovered easily enough
Nope. The drives manufactured in the last two decades, give-or-take, have the size of magnetic domains matched to the size of the field generated by the heads. The "edge" of the track is defined by where data from one track ceases to be, and the data from another track begins, and this is a binary thing. One domain here has data from this track, another domain there has data from that track.
What people constantly fail to realize is that if there was an area of disk, the mythical "inter-track gap", that was any good at storing any data, it'd be stupid for the manufacturer to not put the expensive platter real estate to good use. And they do precisely that: they use all of the platters to store your current data. There is no inter track gap.
Re:Hello microwave (Score:4, Informative)
If they could reliably position the heads in *exactly* the same place every time that would be the case. But they can't - mechanical devices and perfection are mutually incompatible. So assuming there's an error of +/- N um in head positioning, your track has to be at least 2*N um wider than the recording head to avoid partially overwriting adjacent tracks. You can cut that roughly in half by sharing the buffer zone between adjacent tracks - hence creating the " inter-track gap". Modern drive heads are are more precise than they used to be, but that only reduces the width of the necessary buffer zones, it doesn't eliminate them entirely.
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The heads don't work like that any more. They pick up the magnetic field from multiple tracks, some stacked vertically or aligned at right angles to each other. The drive then has a DSP that sorts it all out and decodes just the track that was requested.
This both increases the density of tracks and means that the head doesn't need to be positioned as accurately. The head itself in fact has more than one pick-up, it doesn't rely on a single one being aligned and in fact must combine data from at least two to
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The head positioning error is much smaller than the width of the track. There are no buffer zones.
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Yes, let's bring an untested (in the real world) new technology with what may always be compromised performance into a generalized discussion of hard drives, that won't muddy the waters. Besides, even they have to have some sort of mechanism in place to deal with the imprecision of the head positioning, presumably they have some sort of a "slop zone" built in to the design as well, even if the particular mechanism is something different than traditional techniques: If the head positioning is precise enoug
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There's two things in this picture that are very different than what you have, say, in an audio tape recorder. 1. A head producing very high magnetic field gradient. 2. A high-coercivity material that doesn't give shit about fields that aren't strong enough to remagnetize a domain. This adds up to a situation where domains at the boundary between tracks work in a binary fashion. Either they flip, and they contain data from the current track, or they don't and they contain data from the neighboring track. Th
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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That's not the case with modern hard drives, at least nothing made in the last decade. You worked on such a machine long time ago and/or you weren't told really what it was for. The machine you worked on, if it was done for recovery of drives made after 1998 or thereabouts, was simply made to read data that was not overwritten. It was to be used when one wished to read the drive's contents without using the drive's electromechanical system to do so. Such a machine makes life easier iff you have reverse-engi
Re:Hello microwave (Score:5, Informative)
When did you do this? Data densities have gotten so tight and tolerances so small that while I won't call bullshit on your statement I will call it out of date. It's impossible to recover data at this day and age. While you're right that the head doesn't perfectly write over the track, the gaps between the tracks are so small that the magnetic field is not sustainable when something is written. Heck one of the challenges the industry is facing is writing a track without having the tracks either side break down, and you're taking about a sustained field an order of magnitude smaller.
over write once and be done with it (Score:3, Insightful)
From what I understand, all it takes is one knock with a hammer to ensure platters are bent and can never be used again. And there is no known practical method to restore data after a single overwrite with 0s. Everything else is pure paranoia.
Overwriting with 0s will not perfectly overwrite the tracks.
NIST disagrees:
On the other hand, according to the 2006 NIST Special Publication 800-88 (p. 7): "Studies have shown that most of today’s media can be effectively cleared by one overwrite" and "for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) the terms clearing and purging have converged."[5] An analysis by Wright et al. of recovery techniques, including magnetic force microscopy, also concludes that a single wipe is all that is required for modern drives. They point out that the long time required for multiple wipes "has created a situation where many organisations ignore the issue all together – resulting in data leaks and loss."[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence#Feasibility_of_recovering_overwritten_data
There is some slop on the read head positioning that will normally allow enough data to be recovered that the ECC can be used to rebuild the full data set.
This has been found not to been the case per Craig Wright, Dave Kleiman, Shyaam Sundhar R.S. in "Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (doi:10.1007/978-3-540-89862-7_21 which is [6] above).
Do you have any studies that indicate otherwise, or are you just repeating something which you once heard, at some point in time (which may or may not be valid any longer)?
If you're really that paranoi
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BULLSHIT, name ONE lab and ONE documented recovery from single overwrite
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From what I understand, all it takes is one knock with a hammer to
trip mems sensor on HDD and leave permanent SMART 'physical damage' record
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Well, if you take the magnetic surface above the curie temperature, on cooling it will assume a random domain pattern on cooling. Depending on the temperature, this can be far from the metal melt point.
I am not sure what magnetic coating is on the platters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
Note, temperatures on chart are in Kelvin, deduct 273 to bring to Celsius.
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I disagree... (Score:4, Insightful)
...without knowing how the drive "failed" the court cannot prove that there was no evidence to destroy. I guess he never heard of drive recovery places that can recover some information from a majority of drives that "fail"
Re:I disagree... (Score:5, Interesting)
That requires the plaintiff to spend money to have the analysis done which isn't part of the copyright extortion business plan.
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The hard drive "failed" and was subsequently recycled, there would be nothing recoverable after it was melted.
Presumption of innocence (Score:5, Insightful)
correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIR the US justice system, It is up to the prosecution side to prove there was evidence on teh HD, not on the side of the defense there was not. Therefore from the court in absence of proof of existence of evidence, the assumption should be by default there was no evidence. IF the prosecution has proof tehre was evidence they are free to provide them. But until then by presumption of innocence, the court has to assume the recyclage was lawful. Otherwise if the presumption was it was destruction of evidence, then it amounts of a presumption of guiltiness.
Re:Presumption of innocence (Score:4, Informative)
Close. This was a civil case, so the plaintiff doesn't need to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt, as the prosecution would in a criminal case. Only has to prove that he was probably infringing.
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Well, it's a little more than "probably". They have to show a preponderance of evidence. It's not enough to say, "this guy's a big movie fan and had 200gig of downloads every month and never rented a movie or went to a theater, so he probably was pirating movies". There still has to be a pretty high level of evidence showing that there was piracy going on and that the guy was doing it. Not "beyond a reasonable doubt", and a step down from, "clear and conv
Re:Presumption of innocence (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it's a little more than "probably". They have to show a preponderance of evidence. It's not enough to say, "this guy's a big movie fan and had 200gig of downloads every month and never rented a movie or went to a theater, so he probably was pirating movies".
Preponderance of the evidence is a 51 percent standard......i.e. "more likely than not".
Barring any statutorily necessary elements of the Plaintiff's claims, if the jury finds that to be sufficient then the dude can be found liable. It's all circumstantial, certainly. But I have guys doing decades of prison time based on circumstantial evidence, and that was "beyond a reasonable doubt". With what you lay out above, I could *easily* see a jury making a few key inferences and finding liability in that.
Never try and predict what the 12 geniuses in the box will or will not do.
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When you say, "I have guys doing decades of prison time", that means you're either a mob boss, a pro football coach or a lawyer.
Or maybe a bishop.
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Language changes. Words acquire new meanings.
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The redefinition of the word "piracy" is not natural evolution though, it's a deliberate attempt by copyright maximallists to prejudice courts and pressure Congress.
Yes, language changes. But corruption and manipulation should be resisted.
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Ain't that the truth. I'm surprised they didn't start calling file-sharing, "babyrape" or something.
I actually think they missed the boat a little bit by calling it "piracy". I mean, who doesn't like Captain Jack Sparrow, eh?
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Except "piracy" to mean "copyright infringement" actually predates civil law. It was first used around the very early 17th century (1603-ish) - The Stationer's Company of London received in 1553 the right to hold monopoly on publication (what we would later know as copyrig
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Hey, you don't have to convince me. I think the best producer in Hollywood is named "YIFI".
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Pirating is copying or capturing ships on the high seas.
Nothing strikes terror in even the most hardened crew like seeing a giant Xerox machine sailing towards them flying the Jolly Roger.
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Do you think everyone should be responsible for preserving any evidence that may exist that they have committed a crime, before a crime is charged? Because I nicked a candy bar in the 4th grade and didn't save the wrapper, so...
Re:Presumption of innocence (Score:5, Informative)
Not this.
The accused is not bound to preserve any and all possessions that might be discoverable in litigation at a later date after even a rumour that the accused will become a party in a suit.
Evidence does not exist before probable cause defines the scope of what will constitute evidence, only after a motion to preserve evidence is filed.
Re:Presumption of innocence (Score:5, Informative)
I bothered to RTFA and you are both a little way off what actually happened.
The guy received notice of the lawsuit. Five months later, the drive failed and he threw it away. The court concluded that because five months had passed it was unlikely he was trying to destroy evidence; if that had been the goal he would have done it sooner.
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Precisely.
I received a take down notice from Sony because a wedding I taped had one of their songs going in the background.
I did not tape-seal my refrigerator, impound my car, box up my computers and turn off my phone or secure anything else that MIGHT, at some future date, be listed in a discovery request.
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Point 1 is true but it happened a month after the drive was destroyed according to TFA.
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It's a fuzzy clock in this natter, as TFA makes clear.
Probable cause does exist in civil cases. [thefreedictionary.com]
The probable cause standard is more important in Criminal Law than it is in Civil Law because it is used in criminal law as a basis for searching and arresting persons and depriving them of their liberty. Civil cases can deprive a person of property, but they cannot deprive a person of liberty. In civil court a plaintiff must possess probable cause to levy a claim against a defendant.
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If you read TFA carefully, you will see that the defendant disposed of the hard drive before he knew that he was a defendant in a lawsuit. If people have to preserve all data just because they receive a letter stating that they might be sued, there would be havoc within every large company.
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correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIR the US justice system, It is up to the prosecution side to prove there was evidence on teh HD, not on the side of the defense there was not.
In the real world of the courtroom, the burden of proof is constantly shifting back-and-forth.
The destruction or disappearance of records under circumstances which are wildly improbable, suspiciously well-timed, or very unusual, to say the least, raises questions that the defense cannot afford to ignore.
It's the defendant's behavior that jury is examining here, not the contents of his files.
The geek in court tends to think that he holds the jury spellbound by his intellectual superiority and technical geni
Re:I disagree... (Score:5, Informative)
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The article says he destroyed the drive five months after being notified of the lawsuit. The length of time made the court think it unlikely he was destroyed evidence, or he would have done it sooner.
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As best as I can piece together from the excerpts from the ruling, he knew there was a John Doe suit before the drive was destroyed but he wasn't notified that he had actually been named in the amended suit until a month after.
The judge found that his actions were consistent with someone who had no reason to expect to be named and so required to preserve evidence.
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You should actually read the ruling. The issue was that the defendant destroyed the hard drive before he was notified that he was being sued. He had no reasonable expectation that he would have to produce it for evidence.
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The court has no obligation to prove anything at all. Even though the bar is set much lower in a lawsuit than in a criminal trial, the burden of proof still lies with the plaintiff. They presented no evidence whatsoever to show that the destroyed drive contained any data at all, much less data damaging to the defendant.
The plaintiff tried to convince the court of the defendant's wrongdoing through circumstance. However, the defendant provided reasonable enough explanations for his actions so the court reall
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"I had a drive fail once, and didn't have backups. The drive failed in such a way that I was quoted $2,000 for an attempt to recover the data, and no guarantee the procedure would work. "
$2000 is the standard price. It happens semi-regularly here despite warnings to researchers that if they fail to allow backups to run, they're liable for recovery costs.
In most non-servo board failures, it's a case of loss of the servo track and recovery outfits get the drive working by tweaking arm position until it recapt
Wow - interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
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lol... Come on man...
Plaintiff: I'm suing you for infringement! Turn over your hard drive as evidence!
Defendant: Um... oh, that failed 6 months ago, I threw it out.
No potential for abuse there at all... lol
But it seems fair to me. Businesses have retention policies for this very reason. A retention policy is not usually designed to retain data. It's there to make sure data doesn't stay around for decades waiting to be discovered by some random lawsuit. After I got into the industry and saw how they did thin
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It was destroyed before he knew that he was named as a defendant in the lawsuit. The only thing he knew from the Comcast letter was that they had received a court order arising from a lawsuit to hand over logs and customer information associated with an ip address on specified date(s). The letter did not say he was a party to the lawsuit (that happen Nov., but he had still not been officially notified) and only contained Comcast's notification to their customer that they would comply with the court order. I
How is this supposed to work...? (Score:2, Interesting)
- person uses drive for illegal activity
- police raids and collects drive
- somehow drive gets destroyed by 'person'?
Or the other way around:
- person uses drive for illegal activity
- drive gets destroyed by 'person'
- police raids and collects broken drive
Does this imply that it is illegal to destroy any evidence while doing criminal activities? e.g., illegal to wear gloves to avoid finger-prints when murdering people?
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The police aren't even involved in copyright cases.
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They aren't involved in this particular case, but they are involved in other copyright cases. In the US, internet copyright infringement has been a criminal matter since the NET act - which makes all online for-profit infringement criminal, and defines for-profit as including an expectation of access to additional infringing material. Here in the UK, PIPCU (A division of the CoLP) has made a name for itsself by routinely overstepping their authority in order to take action against torrent sites.
Re:How is this supposed to work...? (Score:5, Informative)
- person uses drive for illegal activity
- person receives DMCA notice
- person "catastrophically fails" their drive
- person receives subpoena
- person notifies court that sole evidence no longer exists due to drive failure.
Hence, your assumptions are flawed (for this case).
The ruling found that it was NOT illegal to destroy evidence before it is called for evidence. It is illegal to intentionally destroy evidence that has been called for by the court. There are also retention laws that cover certain situations. Setting data retention guidelines prior to the suit protects you from getting into this mess (if you can prove that you ALWAYS destroy your data after X days/ x failed writes/ etc. then you're not culpable if you do what you always do just prior to being served).
yep. Unless you know it is coming (Score:2)
>. (if you can prove that you ALWAYS destroy your data after X days/ x failed writes/ etc. then you're not culpable if you do what you always do just prior to being served).
Yep, that's one reason to have a data retention policy. One footnote though - it is unlawful to destroy evidence if you have reason to believe it's about to be subpoenaed. See Rose law firm, Clinton et al.
Which is how it has always worked (Score:3)
Same deal with physical evidence. As an individual, you generally have no records retention requirements. You are welcome to destroy your stuff as pleases you. So you can shred bills, old receipts, etc as soon as you want. None of this is destruction of evidence if you get sued. When it changes is if you get sued, and you are told to keep things, and you then destroy it. Then you are in trouble. So if a court case happens, the court can, and will, say "You need to keep anything related to this around in cas
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There are also retention laws that cover certain situations. Setting data retention guidelines prior to the suit protects you from getting into this mess (if you can prove that you ALWAYS destroy your data after X days/ x failed writes/ etc. then you're not culpable if you do what you always do just prior to being served).
Excellant point. I have worked for several companies that had very clear and strict data retention and destruction guidelines; thus ensuring all of our working papers were destroyed and thus not subject to being part of discovery in a lawsuit. The only time we did not destroy the working papers was when we were informed we were about to served as part of a lawsuit against a client; we beat feet and got out Dodge before the server arrived and turned all the working papers over to our lawyer.
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It is illegal to destroy evidence of a crime if you know that it is required or likely to be required as evidence and you destroy it with the intention of preventing it from being used as evidence.
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- person uses drive for copyright infringement, a civil offense
- a lawsuit is filed
- it's now a criminal offense to destroy evidence
For civil cases, police is not involved, but it's legal requirement for both parties to preserve evidence and testify truthfully. For criminal cases, you can lie/conceal all you want without additional penalty. But jury will consider how trustworthy you appear to be very heavily.
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Melted down hard drive (Score:3)
Since when do they melt down hard drives?
I thought they had to be carefully taken apart and the toxic materials removed to the special areas so they don't contaminate the environment.
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They go through a shredder, and then toxic chemicals are used to extract gold, then it gets sorted in aluminium, steel, and copper. (I suppose everything not of value is dumped)
one word: (Score:2)
bonfire.
Uninformed court? (Score:3, Insightful)
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And the assumption is still that the defendant is not liable unless the plaintiff can show otherwise, so what is your point?
Did the court say that? (Score:2)
Okay I skimmed the article, but I couldn't find a comment suggesting that.
It seems more that there's no evidence that the defendant wilfully destroyed evidence. The plaintiff wanted the court to assume that there was harmful evidence on the hard drive, simply because the defendant had thrown it out. The defendant on the other hand threw it out simply because it was dying, and ha
Kill-ur-drive contest? (Score:2)
while true ; do hdparm -y /dev/sda ; sleep 5 ; hdparm -z /dev/sda; done
I've not tested it but don't really want to.
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If the goal is to kill a drive, there's a much faster way. Pull it out of the case, but keep the wires connected. Shut down the machine. Turn the machine back on. When the drive is just starting to spin up, slam it flat on the desktop.
Before the platters are up to speed, there is very little Bernoulli force holding the heads up. The above operation will crash the head and leave a nice big scratch.
Re:Kill-ur-drive contest? (Score:4, Informative)
Before the platters are up to speed, there is very little Bernoulli force holding the heads up. The above operation will crash the head and leave a nice big scratch.
And then your opponent finds an expert witness who examines the hard drive, finds the scratch, and explains to the court that it was most likely intentionally damaged. They don't need proof, just likelihood. And now you are stuck, because whatever your opponent claimed is on the drive, the court now assumes it was there before you destroyed it.
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It can still be recovered forensically though.
You can pretty-much wipe a drive through software - not even the best equipment can recover overwritten data on a modern drive, though back in the drives of years ago it could be done. The only issue here is remapping - if the drive has transparently remapped bad clusters, some traces of data may remain in those.
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It was awesome to learn that dd if=/dev/zero is actually enough. I have no idea if the "secure erase" function does anything else than that.
If you used that drive with encryption, and then zero it out or overwrite with innocuous content I guess the bad clusters's contents look like useless garbage.
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It used to be possible to use some very sensitive equipment to find overwritten data because the head didn't always align over the track, and could miss a little at the edge. But that hasn't worked in years - track density and drive precision got far too high.
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Here's the thing. dd will overwrite all the available sectors. All the available sectors. If a sector has been moved due to errors detected, it could very well be sitting out there waiting for the right software, hardware or firmware modifications to allow it to be read again. There are also potentially several areas (cache memory, and other things I am not enough of a hard-drive tech wiz to recall) where your data could be stored.
Secure erase is supposed to erase all the available sectors, all sectors outs
Pretty Fine Line There (Score:5, Informative)
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You have this backwards. The accused is presumed innocent until proven otherwise (the wishes of copyright holders notwithstanding). The burden of proof is thus upon
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Since the automated Comcast etc letters are polite, in legal terms, requests to take down the allegedly infringing media, you can argue that they are the entity requesting the destruction of evidence in their own case. Since they allege they own the media, they assume it is within their rights to do so. Until you actually get sued, acting on those legal requests is perfectly valid even if you delay the deleting of the media. It would only be once you were served with notice of intent to sue with instruction
Court made the right decision (Score:5, Informative)
I know this because I RTFA'd
Defendant received notice of this lawsuit at the beginning of October 2012. []Defendant, however, did not destroy the hard drive until “late February 2013.” [] Thus, almost five months passed between the time that Defendant learned of the lawsuit and Defendant’s destruction of the hard drive. Had Defendant truly wished to hide adverse information, the Court finds it unlikely that Defendant would have waited nearly five months to destroy such information. Instead, Defendant’s continued use of the hard drive for the months after he learned of the litigation suggests that the hard drive contained no information to hide at all, or that Defendant did not intend to hide any such information.
The timing of Plaintiff’s amendment and the service of its complaint also detract from an inference of bad faith. Plaintiff amended its complaint to add Harrison as a Defendant on November 9, 2012. [] Plaintiff, however, did not serve the amended complaint on Harrison until April 2013, [], after Defendant had arranged to order the replacement hard drive, [], and after the recycling of Defendant’s hard drive. [] Furthermore, Defendant testified that the service of the complaint was the first time that he became aware that he was personally being sued for copyright infringement. []
Malibu Media (Score:5, Interesting)
Magistrate Judge Stephen L. Crocker didn't like this tactic. He froze eleven of Malibu's cases in western Wisconsin, and ordered Malibu's lawyer to explain why she shouldn't be sanctioned for violating court rules. Filing paperwork with the Court with no purpose except to harass or embarrass an opponent is a big no-no. Judge Crocker wondered why Malibu would file a list of movies with embarrassing titles that Malibu doesn't own and can't sue over.
https://www.eff.org/cases/mali... [eff.org]
Sarbanes-Oxley applies to fish (Score:2)
This SCOTUS case might be relevant:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bi... [wsj.com]
Just an FYI: who is Malibu Media: (Score:2)
If it's good enough for the IRS... (Score:3)
...then it is good enough for us. Right?
Re: (Score:2)
One can have a little humor without making it into a political war, which I hadn't, nor was I intending to do so.
Breathe.
Smile.
Relax.
It's okay.
I hope the rest of your day goes well.