A New Technique to Quickly Erase Hard Drives 458
RockDoctor writes "Stories about 'wiped' hard drives appearing on eBay (and other channels) and being stuffed with personably-identifiable data are legion; rarer are spy planes having to land on enemy territory, but it happened in 2001 to a US spy plane over an un-declared enemy (China, and that's a topic in itself). Dark Reading reports the development of a technique to securely wipe a hard drive in seconds, and which is safe for flying. (The safe for flying criterion rules out things like fun with packing the drives in thermite. Also thermiting the drives may not erase the platters to the standard required, which is moderately interesting itself."
Computer systems and their hard drives (Score:3, Funny)
How curious that the anti-bot please-type-in-this-word word is kilobyte for this post.
Re:Computer systems and their hard drives (Score:5, Funny)
You never have to worry about arcane details such as hard drives, magnetic field strength etc etc.
Joe does it (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if it's just some random joe with an undelete program he got for $19.99 at the local shop then a single pass is often enough, more sophisticated software only tools might get past a few, but with hardware equipment (probably not used often below the fbi/pro forensics places) you might want to do something a bit more secure.
With good knowledge of how the data is actually stored on the disk you can figure out patterns that tend to degausse the bits being wiped and help eleminate the residual images left by the micro imperfection in head positioning (which are shrinking to almost nothing these days) and simular effects a trully sophisticated data recovery effort might use.
Peter Gutman put out a paper about this that can be read at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure
that explains it better.
Though with remapping and newer recording techniques things change and software only erasure becomes more and more problematic. At the highest levels of secrecy I believe most governments require over-kill levels of outright hardware destruction.
the product is stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
The obvious solution: encrypt everything that hits the disk, keep the key in RAM, and overwrite the key when needed.
I'd worry the most about antenna shapes and sizes and various analog circuitry.
Read the article more closely! (Score:4, Interesting)
you read the article more closely! (Score:3, Informative)
They do need one device per drive. You missed the part about the drive being automatically pulled into the device, and the part about a twist handle as a backup.
In other words, this is a drive enclosure. The drive sits in the safe part of the enclosure most of the time, connected to a destruction actuator. Nobody is going to be running around the airplane yanking out drives.
Probably a few drives could go into a mechanically complica
Re:you read the article more closely! (Score:3, Funny)
A variety of different vendors that all have to meet a spec, namely that the drive must be mounted in a non-metallic carrier of such-and-such dimensions. Or just specify that each drive must be mounted in a "Type SZW data carrier", and it's up to the primary contractor (who also supplies the SZWs) to make it all work. Either way, it's all pretty trivial: the Navy wants one of these mega-erasers for its P-3s, so (say) Lo
Re:you read the article more closely! (Score:3, Funny)
The six disc CD changer in my car pulls CDs automatically into one device. I'm sure this technology will never progress to such an advanced stage though.
Re:the product is stupid (Score:4, Informative)
I work on UAV's, so we have to care about this a lot.
Check out some of the standards:
DO-178B [wikipedia.org]
Or STANAG 4044, but I don't have a good link.
Re:the product is stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:the product is stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
My parents worked at (met at) a secret radar research site (the misleadingly named TRE - Telecommunications Research Establishment) during WW-II. My mom once mentioned that since it was known that in case of lost aircraft there was a real danger of some of the equipment falling into enemy hands, it was routine practise to include dummy circuitry and sometimes wholly bogus equipment just to add to the confusion. Sometimes such equipment was deliberately allowed to be "captured".
A slight weight penalty, but deemed worth it.
Re:Joe does it (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of worrying about residual magnetism which can at best be detected by government agencies with extreme funding, people should simply never write unencrypted confidential information anywhere. This also protects you in cases where you didn't schedule the removal of a harddisk, i.e. theft.
Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, some people have called into question a lot of the sources used in that paper. It seems that some of the sources don't even exist.
Re:Joe does it (Score:3, Insightful)
In term of data on hard disk, there are three circumstances. First, a person may not protect the asset, i.e. not erase the hard disk, and a bored kid then rummages throughthe harddisk. Second, a user may not understand what erase means. There was a time when erase simple
Re:Joe does it (Score:5, Informative)
Let me correct that: There is no way in this universe software can recover anything from a disk overwritten once with zeros. It is fundamentally impossible.
Also to Peter Gutman's paper: It is still relevant, but the technology has changed. Gutman is very relevant for things like floppy disks (that can hold 100MB, but are used only for 2MB). But todays HDDs go so close to the limits of the amount of data that can be physically present on a disk (as dictated by S/N ratio and surface area), that even a single overwrite with random data may be completely unrecoverable with any technology. Nobody really knows.
Re:Joe does it (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting stuff (Score:5, Informative)
Nitpick. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Joe does it (Score:3, Informative)
That depends on how much attackers know about a given drive. If they can rewrite the drive firmware to give raw access to disk tracks and sub-track positioning, there's a lot that can be done in software without opening the drive.
But todays HDDs go so close to the limits of the amount of data that can be physically present on a disk (as dictated by
In related news . . . (Score:3, Funny)
Dozens of prank hard drive erasing have occurred within the Georgia Institute of Technology's nerd population. This was preceded by large orders of extremely powerful magnets. When questioned, the victims only had this to say:
"Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!"
not good enough.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:not good enough.. (Score:5, Funny)
First question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First question: (Score:2)
Re:First question: (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, this is a fricking no-brainer. Make the key 4096 bits of random data, load it into battery-backed RAM from a storage device kept at the air field. When you run in to a problem you have 4K of data in RAM to destroy instead of GBs of data on disk with the added benefit that if you ever get the disk back to the air field you still get your data. Unless the Air Force doesn't have access to unbreakable encryp
Re:First question: (Score:2)
Re:First question: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:First question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Given Moore's law, and assuming it holds beyond physical limits, the expression "billions of years" accurately describes the length of time required to brute force a 4096-bit key.
Given the possibility of quantum computing, the only thing you can do is use one-time pads for all your needs, provided you need these things to stay secret for more than the 50-100 years required to develop quantum codebreaking systems.
Now, that solution is quite feasible, but time-consuming. Here's how you'd do it:
1. Have a secure [D]RNG fill a hard drive to capacity. Copy that to the plane's hard drive.
2. Have a filesystem that writes raw data to the disk--you only want one file containing all data that's collected, and that should be append-only.
3. Instead of simply writing data, XOR the block you're writing with the one that's currently on disk.
4. Once you're back on base, another XOR gets your information back.
Re:First question: (Score:3, Insightful)
These problems can be addressed, but a one time pad cannot prevent the problem in the article since it only works for data produced while in flight. It is far mor
Re:First question: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:First question: (Score:3, Insightful)
Encrypting the harddrive (which it may have been) simply changes the problem from one where you need to destroy the unencrypted information quickly and compleatly to one where you need to destroy the encryption key quickly and compleatly. Destroying the key may or may not be any easier that destroying the data depending on how it is stored. Also, even if the data is encrypted and the key compleatly destroyed, you probably still want do destroy the encr
Re:First question: (Score:5, Informative)
Strong encryption algorithms with suitably long key lengths will take longer than the lifetime of the sun to crack (barring the possibility of quantum computing taking off).
Re:RISK of quantum computing taking off (Score:3, Funny)
Line 3 is obviously a Digg imposter.
Re:RISK of quantum computing taking off (Score:4, Insightful)
The way that one-time-pads work, if "attack at dawn" is a possible result, then so are:
attack at dusk
eat more veges
Where's Waldo?
hoist the sail
What you say!!
Zerowing Rules
Do you get it?
search google.
Cryptonomicon.
This is ending
Game is ending
Fire is ending
Heat is ending
What is ending
Iraq is ending
USAF is ending
It isnt ending
Now, which one was the correct decryption?
The reason a one-time-pad is "completely unbreakable", even resisting brute-force cracking, is that every possible string of length X is a valid decryption result for some key. So without knowing the "correct" key, it is impossible to recover any part of the plaintext. The four character ciphertext "sjrw" could decrypt to any of the following strings, even if you found my working paper and were able to deduce that the first two letters were "go":
golf, gods, gore, gold, gone, gout, goal, goad, goat, gosh, goog, go.., go??
No plaintext has higher probability than any other of being correct...
Re:First question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Heard often, that is an urban myth and nonsense. There is proven secure encryption that is impossible to break, unless the assumption that you can generate secure (i.e. random) keys and some other very simple ones are wrong. ElGamal has this property. Even for less secure ciphers, the statement is untrue. Sure, a single cipher may have weaknesses that may allow a break with high (and often prohibitive) effort. Just use two different ciphers with independen keys and the problem becomes exponentially more difficult since you now need to find a joint vulnerability.
Of course there is a lot of bad encryption on the market, like home-brewed, not peer-reviewed ciphers. Ciphers are also often used in an insecure way, see, e.g., the very good ECB example here: Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
But the basic problem can be solved. There is just a lot of ignorance.
Re:First question: (Score:3, Informative)
One can always use brute force to find a solution.
P.S.: And before I forget: This is wrong as well unless you can do a known-plaintext attack (i.e. cheat). If you do not already know what the plaintext is, there is a minimal amount of ciphertext and knowledge you need. And it needs to be more than the entropy in the key. If it is not, you cannot brute-force it. For example the Enigma is completely secure, unless you encry
Wrong word? (Score:2)
I think the word that should be there is legend. Or am I just unaware of another definition of legion?
Re:Wrong word? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wrong word? (Score:2)
It's really simple... (Score:5, Funny)
Why not use flash memory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, just encrypt the data with the key in RAM. (Linux can already do this with swap - it's completely transparent to the user, and the key only lasts as long as the system remains running).
Re:Why not use flash memory? (Score:3, Interesting)
What a crock... (Score:5, Interesting)
What a crock of crap. That and the rest of the story.
I worked in the military long enough to know that they would have encrypted sensitive data as a requirement (destroy or erase a security token, in the use of a combined token/passphrase crypto system and the data is safe) and that the military already use storage devices which can be erased in seconds with a function specifically built just for that.
This story sounds like it is just trying to inject some life into the stock price of some crap company that provides too little, too late.
Re:What a crock... (Score:4, Insightful)
Those guys are a laugh riot.
Re:What a crock... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes Francis Gary Powers over flew the Soviet Union and was shot down. Never said he didn't
The EP-3 was in international airspace and was rammed by a Chinese fighter.
How is one anything like the other?
BTW according to international law it is illegal to shoot down an aircraft just from intruding into your airspace. There has to be a clear threat involved. Every attempt has to be made to contact the aircraft and to escort the aircraft to a landing field. There is an entire protocol worked out.
Russia did have at least a marginal case that the U-2 was a threat since it was so far in it's airspace and overflying military sites.
RAM (Score:2)
Re:RAM (Score:2)
RAM has the same problem. If a bit has been set a particular way for a long time, it will have detectable effects afterwards. It's not enough for your computer to be able to suspend to RAM without power to maintain the memory, but a forensics lab would have better luck recovering the data.
Too fragile, too complicated (Score:2)
Re:RAM (Score:2)
Fluff (Score:3)
"We developed a 125 rare earth magnetic eraser with self contained power source"
Interesting, but adding in this US spy plane angle has got to be simply PR.
Drill+Thermite? (Score:2)
Combined with an encryption scheme I would think it virtually impossilbe to recover data if you can reduce the platters to slag reliably..
Re:Drill+Thermite? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know by itself thermite and similar methods have difficulty penetrating the outer case reliably, but I would think drill+thermite injection to fill the internal cavity of the system would be effective..
Takes too long to drill the disks and insert the thermite, while your spy plane is spiralling down.
And anyway, if the themite didn't fully destroy the disks [chalmers.se], you weren't using enough [chalmers.se] of it. See? [chalmers.se]
Erasing, not Voodoo (Score:5, Interesting)
You DO NOT have to overwrite a file 35 times to be "safe". This number originates from a misunderstanding of a paper [auckland.ac.nz] about secure file erasure, written by Gutmann.
The 35 patterns/passes in the table in the paper are for all different hard disk encodings used in the 90:s. A single drive only use one type of encoding, so the extra passes for another encoding has no effect at all. The 35 passes are maybe useful for drives where the encoding is unknown though.
For new 2000-era drives, simply overwriting with random bytes is sufficient.
Here's an epilogue by Gutmann for the original paper:
Re:Erasing, not Voodoo (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, the bad sectors that get transparently reallocated leave dead sectors that can probably be recovered and would not be wiped with stock firmware, so it's academic anyway. If you can't take that risk, you have to turn the media inside the drive into molten slag. There's no other way.
Re:Erasing, not Voodoo (Score:2)
Re:Erasing, not Voodoo (Score:5, Interesting)
That may be true at some point in the future but it currently is not, and won't be without radical changes in the storage method. There must be a certain amount of tolerance in the current systems in order to compensate for drifting effects. The problem is that if you magnetise a surface such that there are two fields with opposing polarities next to each other, they will over time drift together and kinda-sorta cancel each other out (or at least, you will no longer be able to tell which one was where). So that hard drives keep their data for some number of years, the fields have to be sufficiently strong and spaced out for the drive head to still be able to identify them after they have sat there for a year. That means the head is writing strong, clear fields, and then after a few months it reads back a weaker, fuzzier field.
Now, if the head then writes a strong, clear field over the top of the fuzzy one... then there will be residual traces of the fuzziness in the space between the clear fields. Forensic analysis can use a far more expensive and accurate device to read the fields, and so it can spot several generations of this stuff - it's like a buildup of sediment.
That's not the only possible technique (I don't know which one the professional data recovery companies use), but it's one that drives based around the current methods will always suffer, simply because they must have those tolerances. You can't build a drive where the residuals are completely unreadable, because it means your data will be unreadable after a few months - you have to allow enough for the data to be readable, and that means that residuals can be readable too. Anywhere that you have tolerances like this, you can build a device with a finer tolerance and discover more data.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Erasing, not Voodoo (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not what the text you quoted said, nor is it correct. It's true that overwriting 35 times doesn't accomplish anything more, though. The quote said:
For new 2000-era drives, simply overwriting with random bytes is the best you can do [from software / without breaking the drive]. That's because the firmware makes it almost impossible to 'securely' erase data from the drives, so you just can't do any better. It's nowhere near 'sufficient'; in fact it's almost useless against any modern hardware analysis. (The best you can do, if you don't want to keep the drive, is to heat the platters until they melt; that is guaranteed to destroy the data, but almost everything else isn't).
The other important part of the quote is:
This is true, but more commonly you've got several Gb of sensitive data, and the 'enemy' manages to recover some percentage of it. There are companies who do this stuff on the open market - you send them your drive, pay a figure on the order of several thousand dollars, and a while later they send you back most of your data. Their customers tend to be law enforcement, divorce lawyers, private detectives, and companies who are big enough to afford it but not big enough to have a proper backup system in place for their laptop hard drives. They don't need to recover 100% of the porn that has been in your browser cache, just a few pages from some of the sites.
Re:Erasing, not Voodoo (Score:5, Interesting)
The big problem is that the firmware can remap the physical layout in any way it likes. There's no guarantee that the sector 5 you just wrote to is the same sector 5 you wrote to six months ago - the only guarantee is that if you write some data to sector 5, and then later you ask for sector 5 back again, you get back the data you wrote. Successive writes aren't necessarily placed in the same location. Flash memory is notable for rarely putting two writes in the same place, but hard drives do it too (just not so often). So far as I know, the current desktop drives only remap for reliability and not for performance... but that's quite bad enough (and it seems likely that they'll start doing it for performance sooner or later).
A secondary problem is that secure erasing requires knowledge of the physical layout (to know what sectors and pattern to write in - you may need to overwrite the adjacent sectors in both directions, depending on how the disk is laid out, but which ones are they?) and the firmware hides that information.
There may be others, those are just the ones I'm aware of.
Re:Erasing, not Voodoo (Score:3, Funny)
DMCA! (Score:5, Funny)
Easy solution (Score:5, Funny)
If the burning is a problem, just make the platters from cheddar cheese, and add a mouse in a cage adjacent to the drive. Open the hatch, and problem is solved.
Re:Easy solution (Score:3, Funny)
Equip the mouse with a flight suit though, and you're all set.
Re:Easy solution (Score:3, Funny)
Not really new (Score:3, Interesting)
Other Georgia Tech innovations (Score:5, Funny)
They have also designed a novel camera which, instead of a digital CCD array, uses a tough, thin strip of polyester polymer coated with a chemical, light-sensitive substrate. Intended for spy applications, if caught the captured images can be destroyed in seconds simply by opening the back of the camera.
Re:Other Georgia Tech innovations (Score:4, Funny)
What about encryption? (Score:2)
But if you're on a spy plane, wouldn't you have the enemies military secrets?
Forget the secret information (Score:2, Interesting)
Wiping disks... (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
DRM (Score:3, Funny)
Attempt to copy a protected product and BAM, your hard drive is toast.
Random? (Score:2)
So after they passed the test drive through a very strong magnetic field the data was random? Wouldn't it be in a pattern to match the field??
How do you read a thermited platter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, shouldn't all the data vanish due to the reaction bringing the surface above the Curie temperature?
Sounds fishy to me (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a second problem with degaussers: You have to physically remove the disks from their housing. That may take more than minutes.
And there is a third problem with degaussers: You have to very carefully check they work with each device they are to be used on. For example, older degaussers do fine for older disks, but are completely useless for modern ones.
And a 4th problem: Degaussers do not work at all for solid-state disks. Since they are not that uncommon in military application and actually may look the same, that seems to be a serious problem. One that encryption does not have.
I see one advantage for the permanent-magnet solution in military application: It works without power. But if you use the encryption-in-the-cable approach I described above, you can keep the key in a battery-buffered memory chip and erase that securely using the power of the battery (not quite as simple as it sounds, but it is possible to do). All in all, this mainly seems to be a scheme to sell the military something expensive.
correction (Score:3, Insightful)
This is offtopic, although a more interesting topic than "wiping data", but the plane itself was over international waters and never over China's territory.
Also, since when does spying require a declaration of war? The whole point of spying is to aid in deciding-the-need-for or course-of preemptive actions. Given the Chinese government's penchant for secrecy and censorship, it seems fair to want to keep an eye on them. The same point can be made about spying on any other country... everyone knowing what everyone else is doing has a stabalizing affect. All bad decisions are made in fear, which brought on by ignorance, and governments, whose decisions affect millions, need all the tools possible to make correctly informed decisions.
China?? (Score:5, Insightful)
China may have different attitudes and morals standards than the US, but they are doing many things right as well; more than western media tends to portray (e.g. according to the CIA world factbook [odci.gov] China has a lower percentage of citizens suffering from poverty than the richest country in the world (namely the US)). I don't want to whitewash anything, but reading things like "undeclared enemy" in a tech article on an international website just pisses me off.
Re:China?? (Score:3, Insightful)
>What's with all this hate mongering against China?
When your spy plane is making an emergency landing because another country's fighter just rammed it, it does take a while to start thinking of that country as a friend again.
Re:China?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, I was sure that was the USA. Clean up your own damn backyard before focusing on other people's problems.
China is not an enemy (Score:3, Insightful)
China is not an enemy. We buy a ton of stuff from them. They buy a ton of stuff from us. Our businesses have offices there. Our colleges have exchange programs with them.
Yeah, our diplomatic relations are a little bit strained over things like Taiwan, but we're nowhere near going to war with them. If you're a troll, shame on you. In any case, shame on the Slashdot editors for choosing this ignorant or trolling person's story.
Not a spy plane! (Score:5, Informative)
Waste of money (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a solution, with the total weight being under 5 lbs and total cost being under $130 (not counting any logic/switching required to enable it).
Keep in mind:
- the aircraft is disabled
- flight instrument interference is a non-issue
- The HDD not only does not have to be usable, it is intended to be unusable after this process
- 12V, 24V, and 48V taps should all be readily available in the aircraft (NiMH batteries would suffice)
Ready?
Here are the required components:
- a heavy-duty consumer-level inverter costing under $100 in bulk
- a Radio Trash (or generic) degausser costing well under $30 in bulk.
Total weight: under 5 lbs. Renders a hard drive unusable in a couple of seconds.
Thermite should work... (Score:3, Interesting)
If I needed to destroy a the data on a drive in seconds I would simply heat it well above the curie temperature [wikipedia.org] for the magnetic material being used. If you are feeling really paranoid add a variable field strength magnet as well - once above the curie temperature you wouldn't need much of a magnet to make sure things were well scrambled.
Re:New technique? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:New technique? (Score:4, Funny)
Step 1. In emergency, overwrite data with Chinese porn.
Step 2. Actually, there's no need for step 2.
Degaussing Technique (Score:5, Informative)
I'm most familiar with procedures for erasing magnetic tape than hard drives. The conventional method that I was always taught was to put the tape very close to source of a strong alternating electromagnetic field (so easy way is to just have a small coil hooked up to the wall socket). Then -- and this is the important part -- you move the media away from the coil, while the coil is still operating. So it goes from the near field out to where the field is basically no longer having any effect, but without the field going off. The result is that different layers of the media end up with different magnetic fields: as the media moves further and further away from the coil, the field is no longer able to saturate the center of it, so it's left with a certain state. The material just next to that gets left with a different state, because by then the coil's field has changed directions. So you end up with different magnetic states (polarizations) being written to the media both in the depth direction, and lengthwise (as you pull the tape along past the coil). I guess the thickness of the "stripes" would depend on characteristics of the media, plus the frequency of the coil's field and the speed with which the media was moving past it. I just always moved it slowly away at a few inches per second, personally.
Just holding the media next to a magnet, even an AC electromagnet, and turning the magnet on and off, doesn't erase the data as effectively as moving the media from close to the coil to far away. Or at least that's what I was always told. I suppose if you had a circuit that powered down the coil slowly, it would have much the same effect.
Re:Degaussing Technique (Score:5, Interesting)
It wouldn't, but you're nearly right. Simply placing a conductive object inside a magnetic field does nothing at all. In order for something to happen there must be motion. When you're using a coil powered from regular mains AC, the power resembles a sine wave, so the field is oscillating back and forth - this is sufficient to have a small effect, but you really want to move the object relative to the coil or you're mostly wasting power (and unlikely to stop the media from working, using a little coil like that). Specifically, the object needs to move across the direction of the field, not along it. A regular coil has field lines that move out from the top of the coil, move around it in a circle, and meet again at the bottom of the coil - so the overall shape in three dimensions is like a torus, with the hole going down the centre of the coil. So you want to move the object repeatedly towards and away from the side of the coil; that cuts the field at 90 degrees, which is where you'll get the maximum effect.
Powering down the coil slowly accomplishes nothing directly - it's not about changing power levels. If you want to make the coil have a stronger effect without moving anything, you need to oscillate it faster, but that's impractical. Just move the media towards and away from the coil, in close proximity, a few times. Speed doesn't matter much, but the power developed by the coil and the length of time you spend doing it does. Moving the media towards the end of the coil (where the hole is) does very little; moving it towards the side is best. However, if you want to actually *remove* all traces of magnetism from something, then you do want to gradually reduce the power level - you see this most often in a monitor's degaussing coil. This may be necessary for tapes and floppies, if the drive can't handle media that has been randomly magnetised and you want to use the media again, but it's not required if you just want to wipe the data before disposal.
Re:New technique? (Score:5, Informative)
Poster wrote:
If you had read the article , you would have found that they ARE using magnets to wipe the hard drives. FTFA:
There's powerful and then there's powerful... (Score:3, Informative)
The 'powerful' in the article refers to the power akin to an MRI scanner. Ever see that video of somebody holding a scissor on a string several feet away from the aperture, and the scissor points straight to it with some duress on the holder's finger from the string when the MRI is on?
Suffice to say that nobody in a home/office environment is going to have one t
Re:There's powerful and then there's powerful... (Score:4, Funny)
agreed, but its obvious that the original poster never read TFA (or they were doing a TFAD :-)
Well, I can't see too many people getting excited over porn featuring pirates myself, but "arrrrgh, matey, to each their own ..."
Re:New technique? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New technique? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:New technique? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New technique? (Score:5, Funny)
What about a magnetic hammer?
Re:Thermite... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thermite... (Score:2)
yes (Score:2)
A budget equivalant to many billion dollars can support a rather large and dedicated team of geniuses. Getting the info from a partly melted platter sounds like a fun challenge.
Hammer (Score:2)
Re:I've got a near-flawless erasure method. (Score:3, Funny)
Also it will keep the plane attached to the steel in the concrete of the landing strip and thereby prevent it from falling into the enemies hands in the first place. A soun
Re:Violation of Chinese airspace (Score:3, Funny)
This is an act of war.
This has never bothered the US before, why should it now?