One more reason Lego rocks: they don’t mind if people hack their stuff.
Need to wipe, kersplat, zap, nuke, delete, a hard disk, but don’t want to have to physically pull it out of the machine and jump on it, drown it, then take a hammer to it? Like, if you want someone else to be able to use it? Try Darik’s Boot and Nuke. (via Colin)
With hot rumours of the Australian iTunes shop being about to launch, this guide to DRM covers how various online stores restrict what you can do with the music you buy.
The guide linked above is probably only relevant to American laws. Under Australian laws there is no ‘fair use’ clause, and you’re not allowed to make any copies at all. For example, ripping a CD to your hard drive is considered copyright infringement in Australia. I am also pretty sure that once you’ve bought a song through iTunes, it would be copyright infringement to copy it to your iPod.
There is currently no lawful way to have copyright music on your iPod/MP3 player in Australia.
If you wanna nuke a hard disk, open it up and purposely crash the two heads together. If you can do that, get it back together again and get it running again then you’ll soon render the platter very un-renderable to even the most professional data recovery engineers.
Read about that on a web site on data recovery once when my hard disk crashed and I was going to try and rescue my data be transplanting the PCB. I soon gave up because I realised it was going to be a mammoth task to find a hard disk from the same manufacturing batch and there was nothing on it that was particularly important.
Generally though you wouldn’t open up a hard disk chamber without a clean room environment either, even the slightest spec of dust can do a lot of damage over time.
uhhh, but what if you want to be able to use the drive for something else afterwards?