If you don't like what a business has done to you (or not done), the one thing you can do to show them your displeasure is to vote with your feet. And then tell everyone you did and why. It's a hard fact that 95% of customers that receive bad service never complain to the vendor, they just leave and tell everyone what happened. That means that for every one of us complaining to Instagram and Facebook, there are 19 others that are leaving and telling their friends about the crappy service they got.

I deleted my Instagram account yesterday since I hardly used it and I wasn't about to let any of my pictures be used by ANYONE without my permission. I've also curtailed my Facebook use drastically, deleting them from my Mac and phone since I realized all the "appointments" that were cropping up on my WORK calendar were coming from them.

Plus a solid list of posts calling it a fraud and thief. Not to mention lots of misspellings of common swear words. Kind of embarrassing when you can't spell the 7 Dirty Words.

Look something up before you open your mouth. Steve was writing programs for the PC before you were born and was one of the first people to trace a trojan back to IRC and actually TALK to the guy who wrote it. SpinRite was the first program for fixing disk drives at the hardware layer and probably still is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Gibson_%28computer_programmer%29

http://www.grc.com/intro.htm

I was recently working on a prototype system, building the scripts AND teaching how at the same time, when we ran into a crunch where all of the leads were in the same room trying to fix something. Moving to a quiet room would have taken too much time, plus I needed immediate feedback from the other leads, so I pulled out my noise cancelling headphones, plugged them into my iPhone and fired up "Dark Side of the Moon". That let me tune the rest of them out and calm me so I could concentrate enough to get my part finished.

Music (whatever makes you feel good and calms you) is excellent for focusing on a problem OR taking your mind off of it until you can rationally think about it again.

(The first think I thought when I read it, especially when I read what the Aussie DoD said.)

Do what somebody above suggested, zero the drive and run Spinrite on it. If it fails, send it back to Newegg telling them that it not only still had customer data on it, but if failed testing.

Or see if you can identify the company it came from and send them the disk, telling them where you got it from. If it's a big company, go through their website and find their compliance officer's office or equivalent. This is entirely up to you, but *don't* boot it. Depending upon how security conscious they are, it just might dial home.

At first I thought this would be a good article on getting clients to back up more, but after reading it a couple of times and double-checking my thinking by reading the comments, it's pretty obvious that the author knows nothing beyond a statistic he/she read about backups. Poking holes in his logic:

1. Tape backup currently does not have the capacity and speed to keep up with the size of modern filesystems. Solution? Create an offsite backup scheme where data is deduplicated at the source and only the deltas (changes) are transferred to the backup site. That way the backup site can chug merrily away backing things up without causing issue with the workload.

2. 99% of data recovery occurs at the file level. A user accidentally deletes a file, overwrites it, or the file is corrupted. Windows Volume Shadow Copy service was created for this specific purpose so a user can recover without bothering the admin. If you don't have Windows, every major SAN/NAS vendor uses snapshots to do the same thing. Next is disk level recovery using RAID.
      Actual total, catastrophic failure is very rare. I like to tell clients to prepare for being hit by a meteorite, but PEBCAK errors are far more likely and more dangerous.

3. WTF is a "Windows Write Driver"? At first I thought this was some wondrous new feature of Windows 7 that defragmented on the fly, but no, the author is talking about Data Consistency Points. According to the article, when an OS (only Windows exists to him it seems) writes to a SAN it just blasts the data straight to disk and bypasses the cache. What he doesn't realize is that the write goes to memory cache (usually two), where it is checked against itself for consistency (is everything here?) and THEN it's written to disk. Writing straight to disk NEVER occurs, even on a desktop. There is always cache and consistency checking somewhere along the way.
      Data consistency checking came about in the sixties and is used by every single storage vendor today. EMC, NetApp, whoever; they all do it.

Not sure if this has been posted, but the "Google Chef" they're talking about is Charlie Ayers. Here's a little on him from Wikipedia:

Charlie Ayers is the former executive chef for Google. His work there was widely publicized in the media, and David Vise's corporate history The Google Story contains an entire chapter about him called "Charlie's Place." By the time he left Google in 2006, Ayers and his team of five chefs and 150 employees were serving 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10 cafes across the company's headquarters campus in Mountain View, CA. Ayers reportedly earned $26 million (USD) from his Google stock options.

Ayers began his professional career in New Jersey working for Hilton Hotels, at their Meadowlands and Parsippany locations in New Jersey. Later he left Hilton to attend culinary school in Providence, RI at Johnson & Wales University. He cooked at several restaurants in the Providence and Boston areas, before moving to California and serving as a chef for the Grateful Dead.

Following his time working for Google, he started Calafia Café / Calafia Market a Go Go. The first restaurant opened 20 January 2009 in the Palo Alto, CA Town & Country Village shopping center.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers

This guy isn't just a cook, he's the equivalent of either a Vice President or Senior VP in terms of corporate structure. Damn straight he deserves his options.

And I doubt that Zynga has someone like him. They're equating one of their longtime employees to the guy who runs the snack bar in the building.

No nothing new at all, BUT did you watch his film? His point isn't that it's occurring but that the majority of people (and I understand the irony) don't know it's not real. Photojournalists and reporters get fired and blacklisted for creating news, so why isn't it happening here? They get paid by the piece and these are clearly faked.

TWO YEARS AGO British police were warned by Scotland Yard that taking pictures is not illegal and shouldn't be construed as a suspicious activity in and of itself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/15/yates-police-terrorism-powers-photography

"Unless there is a very good reason, people taking photographs should not be stopped," wrote Yates, who is Britain's senior counter-terrorism officer.

The fact is that it was the mall who stopped the man (for flimsy and absurd reasoning) and the cop was simply being a jerk. The mall is getting it's peepee spanked by his Facebook page and will pay through economic damage caused by their stupid actions. And (I can't believe I'm saying this) it is unfortunate the man can't sue because of it.

I had two clients in the electronic data discovery business and both laughed when I asked about zeroing a drive. According to them, all they do is alter the track pattern and they can pick up the data very easily. They said to physically destroy it with a sledgehammer.

“No, it’s not an X-ray,” she told Abbott. “It is 10,000 times safer than your cell phone and uses the same type of radio waves as a sonogram.” - Sabrina Birge, an airport security officer.

Since when did sonograms use radio waves?

It's actually quite the slap in the face to all the Dell customers who bought storage from them because it was made by EMC. I wonder if Joe Tucci is having a "Come to Jebus" meeting with Michael Dell.

And Dell-NetApp would be very interesting. Kind of like watching a train wreck itself in slow-mo.

The problem I have with the article is that he completely blows his credibility with that one simple statement about it being insecure by the virtue of it being open source. Everything else he's pretty much spot on.