On Sat, May 21, 2005 at 08:00:40AM -0400, Mark Roberts wrote: > David Mann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >I just try to stop the opportunists - the determined burglar is going > >to get what they want and stopping them is not worth the expense and > >day-to-day inconvenience. > > This is exactly the point: I'm just interested in thwarting > dumpster-divers who are after my credit card information. I'm not > concerned about the NSA using cutting edge spy technology to see what I > might have had on my hard drive. (And although I'm sure the NSA has > technology far beyond what a commercial hard disk recovery service lab > has, quite a few items that have appeared in this thread have set off my > Urban legend Detector.)
By a strange stroke of serendipity, a discussion on this subject has been running for a while on another group of which I am a member. One rather interesting reference was a 1996 paper which claimed that it was possible to read three or four previous versions of a data block stored on typical rotating magnetic media. One or two versions back was 'easy' - you didn't need to remove the disk from the original enclosure - all you needed was more precise measurement of the head currents. That was almost a decade ago, from unclassified sources. I haven't seen any claims made here that I consider in any way implausible.
