Also: Software piracy, Linux, telecommuting
Shatter the platter
Regarding “How to destroy a hard drive in five seconds”: If you go here, you will find that all you have to do to wipe out a high-end government drive is move a jumper on the drive as per “Supporting stringent security standards required by military and other mission-critical applications, M-Systems’ FFD 2.5. SATA is equipped with a fast security erase feature and complies with the sanitizing standards of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), National Security Agency (NSA), Navy, Air Force (FSSI), and IREC (IRIG).” (Please note the hard drive from M-Sys.com is a solid-state hard drive with no moving parts.)
Although the degaussing by magnetic field is a great idea, most people forget how fragile the actual platters are these days. If you have opened up an IBM or Maxtor drive lately, you will find platters that look like mirrors — that is because they are made out of what appears to be glass. I recently “disabled” 5 drives in 10 seconds simply by taking a large hammer and driving a large timber nail into the drive. The platters instantly shatter. I have not heard of a technology that can recover data off a shattered platter (beware if you take the platter outside the drive to do this then it is best to shatter it inside a bag because some of the glass dust is so fine that it would take a trip to the emergency room to get out).
Mark Mills
Houston, Texas
The value of telecommuting
Regarding “Telecommuting isn’t all that, survey says”: I worked in an organization for 23 years where, despite endless hours of working on the network on nights and weekends, they wanted to see your face in the office during regular work times. I finally convinced them to let me telecommute part of the week. I got more work done and my family appreciated seeing me more. I enjoyed it so much I left that company for a job with much less pay that allows me to telecommute 100% of the time. I love it. I don’t need a car, gas, dress clothes, etc.
I just wish I had done this when my kids were younger. Maybe this tells us something about our society. Do we value the relationships with coworkers more than the relationships with our spouse and children?
Mark Dye
Gadsden, Ala.
Pushing Linux
Regarding your interview with new Novell CEO Robert Hovsepian in which he talks about Novell’s Linux push: I think one big obstacle to adopting Linux on the desktop is the Internet Explorer/Active X/Active Server Pages dependency that some business applications have. Novell and other Linux vendors need to push hard to get vendors to move to Java, HTML, and so on. Also, in terms of Linux, Novell and other suppliers need to make sure they continue to evolve Samba to integrate into their products so non-Microsoft shops can host applications with NT Domains and Active Directory dependencies.
Jeff Kohut
Evansville, Ind.
Piracy vs. public’s rights
“Software piracy: Love it or hate it” dances around the big question: What is software piracy? There is a consensus against stealing something that belongs to someone else. But many in the entertainment and software industries would have us believe that anything we do with something we bought from them that they have not given us explicit permission to do is illegal and immoral.
A copyright is not the same as ownership. It is accepted as a norm and as a matter of law that if you buy a book, you can give it to a friend; that you can copy portions for research, criticism, or parody; that you can purchase an LP and make copies on tape for your car; that you can videotape television programs to watch again or later. These and many other rights belong to the public as part of copyright law.
But the software and entertainment industries are working hard to convince us that we do not buy software or entertainment, we license it. The reason for this is that if you buy it, you own it, and your use is restricted only by law — such as copyright law. If you license it, then you do not own it, and you can only do with it what they say you can do — and most licenses don’t let you do anything actually useful.
Most of us have a very similar basic understanding of what should be right and wrong. Copying something you had to pay for and giving it to all your friends is wrong whether it is a book, CD, DVD, or software. Making a copy of something you bought to protect the original, or to play in your car or to edit out parts you find offensive seems natural and right. Ripping all your CDs so that you can play them on your computer does not seem any different than taping an LP or recording a TV show. Even downloading MP3s of the Beatles or U2 when you already own the LPs does not seem wrong. In fact, it seems wrong that all the music of the Beatles, or Frank Sinatra, would have entered the public domain long ago but for the meddling of Congress and the entertainment industry. But do not be deluded into believing that what the software and entertainment industries calls piracy are acts that most of the rest of us accept as wrong.
The software and entertainment industries have managed to finagle progressively more restrictive legislation through Congress over the past 50 years because ordinary people’s eyes glaze over when the conversation turns to intellectual property rights. Yet the virtual elimination of the public domain constitutes an enormous theft from the public. We have allowed the entertainment industry to steal our culture and birthright.
David Lynch
Lititz, Pa.
