me
" who among us has not taken an angle grinder to an errant machine?"
Though I have administered some cruel and unusual punishment to the odd computer over the years - the worst being from a keyboard.
The remains of computer hardware which had contained the Guardian's London trove of Snowden documents – and which was destroyed on the rather spiteful demands of GCHQ personnel – have gone on display at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum. While the frankly unremarkable remnants of a MacBook Air are uninteresting in and of …
It's not hardware that annoys me, its software. Now we get everything digitally, there are no more CDs to frisbee across the room in frustration.
Its a good thing iTunes never had a physical manifestation when I was using it in the past - an angle grinder would have been the least of its worries.
We either follow Duchamp down a navel gazey road of contrived construct and pretension which in itself makes a mockery of the commercial art world, or we go with context.
If it was (say) Damien Hurst destroying a laptop, it would be pretentious bollocks, but if it was destroyed out of seeming spite for having held leaked secrets (as if sedition rubs off on electronic components) within the wider picture of the public becoming alarmed and educated about how their own governments spy on them...
This one is about the context. The art isn't the item you're seeing, or how it's arranged, it's what it represents by the fact that someone has thought it worthy of exhibition.
This one is about the context. The art isn't the item you're seeing, or how it's arranged, it's what it represents by the fact that someone has thought it worthy of exhibition.
In fact that is a pretty good definition of art right there. I mean art as different from illustration or commercial art. Have an upvote!
I guess this starts to blur the lines from traditonal (Turner, DeVinchi etc) art, through modern (Herst etc) art into political statement.
but when you get statements like this "... enables us to focus on often difficult-to-grasp questions about who owns our digital data and the right to privacy .."
For myself (YMMV) it just seems to more of a political point than art.
As an exhibit - better suited for a museum of computing, as a "famous computer" because the bits of themselves are only factual.
Now if someone had reused the pieces to represent the act of destruction, or the overbearing state, by for example laying them out to spell "1984" then that might be a bit arty.
*"...The brute force needed to eradicate the data from the individual computer parts, down to the heat sink unit..."*
Shit! —all these years, I've been forgetting to securely wipe the heatsink, when disposing of old computers.
...
[Cue some obscure smart-arse boffin to spoil an already feeble joke, by demonstating the ability to reconstruct data, using the pattern of thermal stresses in the molecular structure of a heatsink]
Hmm, I wonder what would actually be a suitable domestic means to properly destroy data, and by that I mean something that survives the experience (sticking things in microwaves or blenders tends to damage the appliance as well). The grinder would indeed do the job, but that's not an average household tool (well, unless the resident cooking skills resemble mine :).
Maybe 3 hours in the oven at 200C?
This post has been deleted by its author
I am a big fan of the sand-filled dead-weight hammer. Beat a drive until the chips start falling off and you know the platters are toast, the heads are (at a minimum) out of alignment, and the controller board is shot.
This tool can also be used to render a heat sink completely unreadable.
"Beat a drive until the chips start falling off and you know the platters are toast, the heads are (at a minimum) out of alignment, and the controller board is shot."
Easier just to unscrew the back, pull out the discs, and bend them 180 degrees in the middle using a vice. You would probably get even better results putting them in HCl but I can't be bothered. For laptop drives, just bend the whole drive in the middle and fold it back. I do this when disposing of drives that have had customer data on, just to comply with the DPA.
You can also recover the magnets, which are useful for various bits of DIY.
"Maybe 3 hours in the oven at 200C?" Not only would this probably stink, it could well be toxic. Ages ago a friend came up with the following idea for a piece of 'art': Bake a loaf of bread with the dough placed on top of a manual typewriter; then shellac the thing. You have no fucking idea the horrible wretchedness of baked typewriter. None.
This post has been deleted by its author
From what I understand, it was the Guardian staff who actually destroyed the machine, as instructed by the GCHQ staff. Presumably the angle grinder is back in the shed of some Guardian staff member.
Which leads me to wonder, who came up with this "secure wipe" procedure? Did it develop as some kind of "we can be more unreasonably pedantic than you" game between the spooks and jurnos?
My first thought of the destroyed Macbook was the fact that the Telegraph accused the G of pandering to Apple in order to obtain advertising funding, so that destroyed Macbook in my mind, as art, has happened after a fall in Apple advertising revenue.
A bit more arty effort by the V & A would have an even more thought provoking stance.
Privacy is also about the battle for advertising budgets.
Because the government vandalism in a vain attempt to silence Snowden certainly wasn't science.
As for Clegg...Labour 2 points ahead in his seat. Come on lads, one more push! Let's demonstrate that actions (or inactions) like abandoning all the principles your party is supposed to hold for a fancy (if meaningless) title and a company car - have consequences.
I *have* however engaged in shotput exercises once or twice with harddrives. And a certain brand of CD-RW drives.
As for final destruction of data on (departed/departing) media - beyond a digital wipe (shred -zun 10 /dev/(volgroup)/(volume) ) I have a 16lb horseshoe magnet from a dredger that a friend of my father's once worked on. I've found it to be *spectacularly* effective at wiping the spindle, and in some cases even wiping firmware off drives. It is also capable of pulling screws, nails and other small metal bits from behind and underneath large wooden sheds with less than 2cm of clearance -- apparently it has about 3 feet of range for this option. It could also make an effective weapon, as I required two stitches after it fell on my head from a shelf.....
Beer, since its effectively Friday on a Thursday and I'm chasing down network ports in the DC.