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Technology Stocks : Zitel-ZITL What's Happening -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Deep Digm who wrote (12950)	11/24/1997 7:56:00 PM
From: Marconi	Respond to of 18263

Deep-Digm: <mostly off subject> Regarding the physical destruction of disk drives for secured databases, that destruction has to be quite complete. Fragmenting the drives will not quite do it--it can corrupt part of the information, but it is still recoverable. I spent some time a few years ago with a professor at MIT that had one of the few (outside of Japan) state of the art high resolution Japanese scanning electron microscopes. Using spin detection techniques, it could image the most feeble and tiny magnetic domains approaching molecular scale. A data bit looks like a mountain in the image from this instrument. The residual domains left in an erased disk, even if chipped, could be read, pieced together like broken pottery by computer algorithms and reconstructed to a fairly good degree the ratio of the amount of data on the surface of a fragment of a disk drive platter compared to the perimeter bits is important--unless the fragments are very tiny there remains a large ratio of detectable magnetic fields). I believe you can also measure strength of field too, so old erasures could be read as superpositions of diminishing intensity of previous data tracks. I had interests in how disk drive platters could be imaged for readily comparing drive performance from fly height characteristics compared to the actual map of data on a disk drive surface, interplaying with the characteristics of the platter mechanics. Zitel would certainly have to leave any drives or electronics on site, and they would physically need to be pulverized to a high degree so that even if recovered physically as a bag of debris, the possibility of reassembling the platters from the fragments must be physically impossible. I certainly do not know to what degree the Feds maintain custody of potentially valuable debris. A quick run through a high temperature incinerator could render fragments useless, if the EPA did not object.... BTW, the Japanese very much like to mine MIT for information--they are very systematic at it, but also fairly unoriginal in their uses of it. They are thorough though, and not many US companies rise to that muster. The Japanese endowed MIT with the instrument, but of course withheld the state of the art instrumentation from non-Japanese interests for 1 to 2 years, because the MIT professor was a world class authority and was doing work that was useful to them; and to others similarly. And I woud think he taught them a thing or two they had not thought about.... For the rest of the world, the best they can get is some aged instrumentation that is dated in its capabilites compared to the Japanese lab versions. The ability to use technology to eavesdrop or analyze formerly private areas has pretty well gone to the point there is no such thing as privacy in this brave new world, at least to approaching the molecular level, if an interest wishes to breach it. The tempest qualifications are a basic start IMO--and the ruthless enforcement of such policies is quite necessary. Best regards, MDR