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PC keyboard hides an interesting secret
- bdcravens 4y ago> The one glaring issue here, is that this machine’s hard drive has not been cleaned out. I bought it from a computer recycling company so I would have expected the hard drive to been erased. But a quick skim of the drive and I can find documents, emails and unfortunately even porn. This is probably pretty common, and there's so much opportunity for abuse. I can only assume that for all of the security out there, a trip to thrift stores and garage sales would keep your average identity thief busy for very little money.
- h2odragon 4y agoPeople throw their PCs away. Many places gather "e-waste" in special piles for recycling. Just digging through that pile will get you more than you wanted.
- sushiburps 4y agoAt the height of bitcoin I wonder if the value of e-waste magnetic storage should have technically been higher due to the possibility of salvaging a lost wallet. Like ore mining, but for data.
- harvey9 4y agoLike this "Newport man's plea to find £210m hard drive in tip" https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-55658942 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-55658942
- notjulianjaynes 4y agoI have not exploited this but can say with certainty that it would be an effective means of getting things like online banking credentials. But I imagine a venn diagram of people who have a local wallet and those who wipe or destroy their drive before recycling an old computer is extremely close to a circle.
- fortran77 4y agoNot that I ever have anything untoward on my computers, but this is why I sledgehammer all my PC drives before recycling them. (My biggest fear is there's enough information to get access to a bank account, or otherwise impersonate me.) Today, I use whole-disk-encryption on everything, but I still wonder if there's ever a hidden partition or unallocated space with something on it, and it's not worth worrying about it.
- makapuf 4y agoThis seems unneeded waste, maybe 10 random complete writes (or/and usage of paranoid safe deletion utilities) would be sufficient to erase the disk effectively?
- fortran77 4y agoThat requires connecting the drive to a working computer and hours of time. Compared to several quick blows. The metals in the drive can still be recycled even if the glass platters are shattered.
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoSince when are the platters glass?
- fortran77 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_platter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_platter
- roughly 4y agoHuh, TIL. And a link from there to explain why: https://books.google.com/books?id=BjoEAAAAMBAJ&dq=hard+disk+glass&pg=PT7 https://books.google.com/books?id=BjoEAAAAMBAJ&dq=hard+disk+...
- 4y ago
- indymike 4y agoWhen I need to destroy a hard drive, I use 1TBSP of Thermite (or stump remover if you go to the local ag supply store). Of course, the drive isn't very useful after, but it's so much fun.
- amelius 4y agoModern, more powerful, more compact, equivalent: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/ By the way, people say it's a great learning tool for kids but when I search for "kid using pi400" on youtube there are zero results.
- gaudat 4y agoI think that is something YouTube rolled out a year or two ago to isolate adult YouTube from kids. You know sometimes a video gets marked with a YT kids banner and comments are disabled and recommendations on the side bar replaced with generic videos.
- tgv 4y agoIs it more powerful? Well, more memory, better video, but in terms of OP/s? But I don't think it's such a great thing for kids per se. It depends on the experimentation environment they get. The hardware is almost irrelevant. Something as direct as a Commodore 64 looks more appealing to me than VSCode on a Raspberry.
- bombcar 4y agoUnless they’re following a particular course based on a specific thing like a Pi they’ll probably be better off with some older repurposed hardware, an old desktop PC with some sort of Linux perhaps. The Pi shines when you’re interfacing with relays and sensors and stuff, for software alone a PC or laptop will be fine.
- amiga-workbench 4y agoIts a Pentium 4, its going to spend half of its clock cycles with a stalled pipeline.
- squarefoot 4y agoUnobtanium as everything Raspberry Pi today. So Why not this one which is roughly the same thing but is available for purchase in hundreds? http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/orange-pi-800.html http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontro... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyRGnLPBe8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyRGnLPBe8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS7qhKF8wGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS7qhKF8wGE I know the Raspberry Pi has that huge community behind, but alternatives like this one can spark the interest of kids who need incentives to grow, and this one offers well above the minimum necessary without serving them the whole dinner ready to eat. When I cut my teeth with M68k asm in the early 90s all I had was a terrible book poorly translated in Italian whose code examples were written half in German and half in English, a local BBS and no Internet; they can do a lot more with today's tools without any need of a huge community.
- skhr0680 4y agoThe original owner must have liked using filters in Photoshop. I can’t think of another reason someone would pair a CPU like that with modest(for 2002) 512MB RAM and 40GB HDD
- stereolambda 4y agoNot sure about today, but there was a time PCs were sold on overspecced CPUs. The consumer would look at the clock speed and think he is getting a "fast" computer. The vendor would pocket the savings on putting in weaker everything else.
- anthk 4y agoAMD Athlon 2000, 1666 MHZ, just 256MB RAM, and a Geforce2 MX of 32MB. People with a Radeon 9700 64MB, 512MB of RAM and a PIII 1GHZ did it better.
- macintux 4y agoReminds me of the Coleco Adam, which was a computer combined with a printer. My college roommate owned one, which I took shameless advantage of.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoMy dad's first computer before the C64 (portable!). I vaguely remember playing a space shooter game on it.
- jonstewart 4y agoMy first computer! And: sort of. There was a separate box for the CPU, but the power switch was located on the daisywheel printer. The word processor was in ROM, it had a slot for playing Coleco game cartridges, with two game controllers, and then there was its tape deck. It came with tapes for Buck Rogers and the BASIC interpreter. Once BASIC had been loaded, then you could swap in your own tapes for saving and restoring programs. It generally took a couple of minutes to use the tape drive.
- bigjimmyk3 4y agoI can think of a pretty obvious reason why the hard drive wasn't wiped: they didn't know it was there. A normal person processing a pile of donations would probably look at this and think "huh a strangely heavy keyboard," then move on to the next item.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zirgs 4y agoBut why would you donate your hw without wiping it?
- StanislavPetrov 4y agoMaybe the previous owner was deceased and it was gathered in an estate sale? Or left in a storage locker which the owner missed a payment on? There are many reasons!
- Gordonjcp 4y agoThat was my first thought. Maybe there are personal photos or messages that someone would like a copy of on it.
- HPsquared 4y agoModern version of this would be nice, using WiFi Direct and a VNC server for using phone as a screen.
- weinzierl 4y agoThese keyboard PCs were quite popular in the late 90s. I think because many home computers came in that format and manufacturers worried that clunky PCs would not be accepted. Turned out that wasn't the case.
- mxmlnkn 4y agoI know the graphs but I still find it amazing to see that this 20+ years old system runs with approximately the same CPU core frequency as today's hardware. The amount of RAM wouldn't suffice today, though.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoIt does half the work per clock cycle because of the marketing driven design.
- opless 4y agoTitle missing the word “this”
- Kwpolska 4y agoThe layout with the Windows sticker photo being the largest and the most prominent made me think that “this is a keyboard with a Windows license”. Back in the day, this was a thing, at least in Poland, with people selling OEM licenses of Windows attached to mice and keyboards and claiming they were legitimate (which I doubt, but I also doubt Microsoft cared).
- NaN1352 4y agoThat’s so cool. Like an Amiga, but with Intel Inside ;) I would not have been impressed by the constant churning of the HDD though (just a guess).
- kazinator 4y ago> The built-in speakers are pretty much what you would expect from 2002, pretty much no bass to them, very much akin to average laptop speakers at the time. Average laptop speakers have no bass today; I have no idea what this person is on about.
- brokenmachine 4y agoMost consumers have zero idea about speakers, or the physics necessary for accurate sound reproduction, so they believe the marketing. That's why sites go to pains comparing the speakers on flatscreen TVs when they're all terrible, I mean they're tiny speakers aimed out of the rear or underside of the TV. Hell, people can even be led to believe that 9.1 audio can come out of a small soundbar, and they'll buy the 9.1 soundbar over the inferior 7.1 one...