Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data
wired.co.ukA few month ago i took a machine from a scrapyard. That machine fell into my eye because its PSU had a female C13 socket in addition to the male C14 one, which i took as indication for an AT (not ATX) machine.
It turned out to be a pentium with ISA ports. I cleaned it, upon booting, i noticed the CMOS battery needed replacement. The CMOS was part of the dreaded Dallas 1287 RTC. Cutting it open and attaching another story, but i did it. Reading the required disk geometry from the label, i was able to configure the CMOS correctly for the disk to boot.
The yield: It boots into a windows 95 desktop, with a naked women with spread legs as a desktop background. I guess i recovered someones porn collection.
I worked for an SMS provider at one point testing some new things (e.g. i8n). I had to buy dozens and dozens of old cell phone models from eBay. Nearly all of them had not been cleared. A very surprising percent of them had naked photos of the owners or their lovers on them.
Teenage-me once found a DOS porn text adventure on a used 286 I bought from someone up the street, at a garage sale. This was shortly before dual-core processors hit the market as a common item, so the 286 was already ancient by then. Never found it anywhere else, but I later scrapped the thing without thinking to preserve any of the stuff on the disk, in part because I didn't yet realize this was rare software, and just assumed it existed other places. It was really simple even by the standards of that kind of thing, just a single encounter that started with specifying some physical stats for your, ah, partner, which affected some of the in-game descriptions. For all I know the previous owner wrote it themselves in BASIC or something, and that was the only copy in existence.
> a DOS porn text adventure
It's not porn if it's text. It was interesting explaining the English vocabulary in a Chinese class that covered how to refer to porn.
黄色的电影 ["yellow movie"]: "dirty movie"
黄色的图片 ["yellow picture"]: "dirty picture"
黄色的杂志 ["yellow magazine"]: "dirty magazine"
黄色的书 ["yellow book"]: "romance novel"
There's a double standard in English, where pornographic books can't actually be porn because women don't consume porn.
The other interesting aspects of that lesson were that I wouldn't really have expected a module in a class formally offered through a Chinese university to focus on this topic, and that -- in the textbook's opinion -- the correct English vocabulary should have been "blue movie", "blue picture", "blue magazine", and "blue book".
(The module also covered phone sex! But for whatever reason, that isn't "yellow" in Chinese; it's "pink".)
> It's not porn if it's text.
Actual English usage rather emphatically disagrees with you. [0]
> There's a double standard in English, where pornographic books can't actually be porn because women don't consume porn.
No, there’s not. But “romance novels” aren't that, though arguably an adjacent category (whereas “erotic fiction” is an overlapping, but not identical, category to “pornographic fiction”.)
But English does not hold that what woman consume is not porn (and, in fact, you’ll find extensive English language studies of how women consume what is uncontroversially porn.)
> The other interesting aspects of that lesson were that I wouldn't really have expected a module in a class formally offered through a Chinese university to focus on this topic, and that -- in the textbook's opinion -- the correct English vocabulary should have been "blue movie", "blue picture", "blue magazine", and "blue book".
“blue movie” is correct, if somewhat dated; the rest are, at best, never as widely used.
[0] e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pornographic_novels
> But English does not hold that what woman consume is not porn (and, in fact, you’ll find extensive English language studies of how women consume what is uncontroversially porn.)
You can find extensive English-language studies of many phenomena that people prefer to pretend never happen. That doesn't mean the pretense isn't there.
> “blue movie” is correct, if somewhat dated; the rest are, at best, never as widely used.
As best I could tell, the "blue" terminology is correct Indian English; I would have no qualms about labeling it incorrect American English. No one I've mentioned this to has ever even heard of the term.
> Actual English usage rather emphatically disagrees with you. [0]
This would be a more convincing rebuttal if the page was willing to describe more than 12 books as "pornographic novels".
> I would have no qualms about labeling it incorrect American English. No one I've mentioned this to has ever even heard of the term.
It is absolutely American English, but dated. The people you know are probably just too young; if you have doubts here is a New York Times review of the American blue movie titled Blue Movie which uses “blue movie” (as well as “stag film”) to refer to the class of films to which Blue Movie belongs:
https://www.nytimes.com/1969/07/22/archives/screen-andy-warh...
Stag film is a term I'd recognize, though I'm not familiar enough with it to use it.
> As best I could tell, the "blue" terminology is correct Indian English; I would have no qualms about labeling it incorrect American English. No one I've mentioned this to has ever even heard of the term.
Mostly Indian, but I've seen ocassional British reference to blue as an adjective for pornographic movies. Usually not 'blue movie', but "that's too blue for me" or something.
Also, a DVD by mail service originally based in San Francisco, GreenCine, had a sister site, BlueCine, which was porn. Otherwise, never seen it used in American context.
> I've seen occasional British reference to blue as an adjective for pornographic movies. Usually not 'blue movie', but "that's too blue for me" or something.
Try this in America and you'll get confusion and guesses that by 'blue' you mean 'sad'.
It's on its way out, but we used "blue" that way in the US, too. Boomer-aged people are almost certainly familiar with that usage.
> It's not porn if it's text.
Well the Greek roots are literally "writing about prostitutes". I'd argue explicit depiction of sex for the sake of getting off is porn. In literature, drawing, photo, or video. There's even the audio form.
English also has "erotica". Which is... porn which has some non-porn value? Semi-clothed porn? Most romance fiction is more to the clothed than unclothed end of the erotica spectrum, anyway. I wouldn't class most as porn. Though there sure are some pornographic books. I was surprised to learn how many synonyms for the genitalia there are.
> Well the Greek roots are literally "writing about prostitutes".
I mean, if you want to follow the etymology the graph root means "scrape", because you write by scratching marks into a soft surface.
But the word (actually) refers equally to writing and pictures.
I guess with text we sometimes use the term smut?
> It's not porn if it's text.
One of the first erotic text adventures is literally named "Softporn Adventure". [0][1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softporn_Adventure
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-o...
> in the textbook's opinion the correct English vocabulary should have been "blue movie", "blue picture", "blue magazine", and "blue book"
That instantly brought to mind Soft Cell's song "Seedy Films". It has the line "Blue films flicker / Hands of a stranger / Getting to know you / And I'm getting to like you". It would be amusing if that is a reference that got immortalized in your textbook.
Good song btw ;)
Well clearly people are referring to textual porn. That means there can be text porn. Convention is the only thing that determines the meaning and usage of words.
Meanwhile in English, "Yellow journalism" is an old-timey synonym for clickbait.
Yellow journalism refers to something more malicious than clickbait does.
I once managed to rescue AlphaServer 255/233 from being parceled out by unknowing e-waste dealer. Spent a bit of time trying to connect everything, connected the serial terminal that came with it, flipped the power switch expecting empty machine...
... Lo and behold, I see it autobooting into heavily customized VMS 6.1 (first patch level that could boot on it), that turns out to be special Blockbuster Video version with appliance-style licenses loaded (NET-APP-150), probably designed to run with a DECserver connecting multiple terminals over LAT.
Turned out the second of two SCSI drives still held not just the custom BBV software, but also the database, including PII and history data, with flags like "18+" on various movies.
I found a microfiche reader by a dumpster. Works great and came with one card showing the index of some historical church records from the 1700's. I ordered more cards on ebay and got what looks like the entire microfiche card set from an old TV repair shop in ohio. Loads of schematics, catalogs, and repair information. Lots of hand written notes on the envelopes and stuff too. I've got to upload some photos so Louis Rossmann has another historical data point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform#Readers_and_printers
I have a bunch of 8" floppy disks I got from fleaBay that have student records from a community college in California.
I have no use for them, so I just have one framed on the wall for nostalgia's sake.
This happened to me once nearly a decade ago when I copped a Powerbook Duo 270c from a flea market in San Francisco and ended up with all the defense attorney's files for this dude: http://www.murderpedia.org/male.R/r1/rich-darrell-keith.htm :S
I used to salvage a lot of discarded PCs (use the parts, refurbish, etc.).
I quickly decided on a rule to immediately wipe any hard drive, and destroy any drive that couldn't be wiped.
One reason is that I'd been involved in some early online privacy discussions, so I had an awareness that snooping might be invasive.
But if curiosity might tempt me to rationalize away the nagging sense of possible invasiveness, there was a second reason...
I never wanted to technically be in possession of, say, a private photo that a 17.9 year-old took. Nor ever see anything worse than that. Thus, immediately pull and DBAN/destroy any hard drive.
Given that I eventually salvaged around 100 PCs, the private photos scenario didn't seem too unlikely.
Depending when you did this, it's possible you destroyed private keys to BTC. I always check any discarded computer I come across for that reason, before wiping.
What would you do if you found some, steal the BTC?
Great ethics question. At least two variables:
* Can the owner be found?
* Does the owner have control of another copy?
The second question makes the rationalization harder: "Aw, shucks, no way I can find the owner, and no sense letting BTC go to waste."
If the computer was discarded, I wouldn't consider it stealing. However would I feel like I had a duty to return it to it's previous owner or heirs? It depends on the circumstances. I have not taken/stolen significant sums of money in the past for moral reasons.
I don't think your comment should have been downvoted as it is thought-provoking, but it might have been downvoted since I said "discarded", and thus taking it wouldn't be stealing.
I worked for Peter Gabriel (musician). He was throwing out his old iBook, so I took it. It had all his files on it, and all his logins. I could still log into his AOL email account.
I erased everything, pointed the browser to https://www.worldsdumbestgame.com/ , wrapped an elastic band around it to hold the button down and put it in a cupboard for two years.
You should have used a sledgehammer. No pun intended.
It isn't uncommon and it does raise generally ethical questions. I rescued a VAX 4000/600 and found that it still had the original drives in the main chassis (they aren't obviously in there and the system had an external drive chassis that had been destroyed.) The disks contained the OS and a shipping ledger (it came from a logistics company) of shipments that had come and gone from SFO during it's lifetime. Just from, to, short description of the contents and a tag of 'customs duty' or not.
Given that it was clear the company thought they had destroyed all of the data on the system I went ahead and deleted all of the non-system related files, leaving just the OS and layered products that they had originally installed.
My personal experience with this: finding an old test NNTP server from Netscape. http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/10/shiner-esb-apple-network-...
I think all of us old unix admins have variously been fascinated by the Apple Network Server boxes, and this one is a prototype even!
Archivists are increasingly sad and concerned that this generation of security and privacy may leave little trace of reality in history, but instead fill it with carefully-curated versions of history without the "undesirable" bits. It's definitely a tough problem to answer.
Relevant: http://astronaut.io/
(a website that plays youtube videos with default filenames or 0 views. unexpectedly great capsulation of humananity. or at least where humans can get cameras)
Old computers are the new "old farmer's barn". You open it up and find some interesting stuff inside.
There was even a “barn find” ceramic 6502 — https://www.cpushack.com/2020/01/14/barn-find-mos-mcs6502-a-...
I collected old machines about 20 years ago. It was very common to leave the data intact back then, even if it was being donated to a thrift store (where sale to an unknown party was assured) rather than being dropped at a recycle depot (where there was an assumption the machine would be destroyed).
There was no real dilemma regarding what to do with the data, it was wiped without peeking. I figured out that looking for interesting software was unethical early on, since launching some software will expose you to the prior owner's data automatically (e.g. databases) while browsing the directory structure for such software can open the perilous doors of curiosity. Not only that, but it is very rare for the data to require preservation. Most machines are intentionally disposed of. The cited case of a stolen computer is likely rare (though I suppose that depends upon one's sources and the market value of the machine).
I was recently given an old machine by someone I was barely acquainted with, data intact. He said he didn't mind if I looked, just destroy the data if I pass it on to someone else. I took the liberty to create bootable diskettes from the existing software since I haven't had a vintage computer in well over a decade. There was no question about how to handle the data though: even with permission, it had to be destroyed.
I still hold out hope that the very first game I ever made, in middle school using HyperStudio[0] on a Mac running At Ease for its desktop, will turn up on archive.org some day.
[0] It may have been HyperCard with some extensions for color. I distinctly remember color.
I bought an old Sparcstation at university auction. After gaining access found one of my professor's account. It was his workstation. Had a chuckle, wiped it, and installed FreeBSD.
Some years ago I got a workstation (either a VAXstation or MIPS DECstation) that originally belonged to a university group where my then-boss had studied. Since the OS was old enough to have used the original weak crypt(3) for /etc/passwd, I checked… and yes, he did still use the same password.
(I wiped it and installed NetBSD.)
Since we're sharing weird unwiped data stories, I'll tell mine:
I bought an old Dell PowerVault (rackmountable backup tape library) a few years ago. Upon taking out the drive that was already in there, I found that it still had a tape inside of it. I was able to dump the tape contents; it's files were all gzipped TAR streams. Inside those archives were assets and project files for... a ProtectMyID.com commercial.
I bought a MacSE at an estate sale and found a bunch of half written stories [novels?] (they weren't very good).
I'm so glad everything is password protected & encrypted on my machines now. Wouldn't want some rando to buy my funeral estate and find personal stuff on my hardware. My next of kin are my parents so I don't think they'd be very savvy about destroying drives.
people still leave unwiped hard drives into machines, sometimes because old and forgotten but sometimes because the usb bridge died but the actual hdd is working fine
beware
Not retro, but when I worked for a consulting company, one of our clients had just acquired a small electronics company. He gave me all the information he had about the product we were supposed to update. He did a data dump without looking closely at the files because one of the flash drives had a bunch of invoices issued by the previous software consulting company so we had a pretty detailed view into what they were paying that vendor. I turned them over to our GM. No idea if he ever used the information!
I once pulled an image of the CF card in my work's coffee machine (darn thing runs Slax linux...). I found a well-appointed home directory full of the developer's web history. Yes, they copy from Stack Overflow too.
> darn thing runs Slax linux
Not surprised. I know of a commercial beverage machine that runs Android, of all things.
I was given a C64 with a case of floppies by a friend. It had been sitting in their attic not doing anything. The friend is also a nerd and was given it by a widow after her husband died as she "didn't know any computer stuff." Really weird feeling going through this guy's documents that survived.
Sadly something got shot on the board and I don't have the EE skills to fix or diagnose.
> We all have SSDs in our laptops now. These are hard to wipe
Not at all if you have an OPAL SSD which are quite common these days. These have a key which encrypts the data at rest and a user facing passphrase which decrypts this key. If you override the encrypting key, the rest of the data is gone unless you can break AES.
You can also do "Memory Cell Clearing" by using Secure Erase (SATA) or Sanitize (NVMe)[1]. Parted Magic provides a simple GUI for these operations [2]/[3].
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive/Memory_ce... [2] https://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/ [3] https://partedmagic.com/nvme-secure-erase/
This assumes the SSD properly implements AES. I wouldn't trust it and prefer using OS-level full disk encryption.
Obviously such trust could be misplaced but you will find a lot of very large organizations trust the OPAL SSDs shipped by Lenovo/HP/Dell.
What happens when you delete data?
Probably just like a hard drive, just removes the file's entry from the file allocation table.
I have a big "hard disk museum." Partly because it's sort of a cool collection going back to old 5 1/4" platter days. But also because, at a minimum, I'd want to give the drives a few whacks with a sledgehammer before I tossed them. I'd also want to at least look through my floppies to make sure there's no "personal info backup" one.
I have two old, broken, hard drives with a piece of paper saying "have you backed up your data today?" on one. I think it was a joke I saw on r/DataHoaders.
This is nothing new - if you ever worked with computers, in a retail setting This is normal everyday life.
It's computer archaeology in a way, but the article would've been better if it covered the source code/discovery of e-waste lately for video game consoles.
> “We all have SSDs in our laptops now. These are hard to wipe because they come with firmware that stops the same sector being written over multiple times. This means the data you want to wipe isn’t completely removed, or at the very least, can be recovered by someone sufficiently motivated,” he says.
Is that really true? The idea you need a million passes always struck me as dubious.
It's just an ATA Secure Erase command away.