The ROT13 thing was funny once. It is now just irritating.

Please stop being such stupid unfunny fuckwits. Allowed HTML
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Slow Down Cowboy!

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Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there.

The ROT13 thing was funny once. It is now just irritating.

Please stop being such stupid unfunny fuckwits.

It's only a requirement in the US, and it doesn't use GPS. GPS would be a waste of time for this, because it would either need to be on all the time and thereby kill your battery in an hour, or only enabled in response to an emergency call and need a good ten minutes to get a lock from cold.

Why would GPS be "mandatory" on a phone? It's only in the past two or three years that GPS receivers have got small and low-power enough to fit to phones, without requiring a battery the size of a brick.

If you want to locate a phone, GPS is close to useless.

Great idea! Then not only are you giving away your location but you're transmitting your message in the clear, for anyone to eavesdrop on!

I can't help but think you've missed the point a little...

Surely if you're worried about being seen doing illegal things, you keep the illegal things private or don't do them at all?

Aha, the trick is, only the ones actually carry information - that's when the bit is actually holding a voltage. So, you can compress out all the zeros and get a roughly 2:1 saving on space!

The only downside is that for decompressing, the codebook is necessarily rather large, in fact the same size as your original data. But the compression works well and it's fast!

Wear a kilt. Be louche as fuck. "Yeah, you just keep moving your hand up there until you meet 'resistance', that's right... Yeah, back down there, boy, I didn't tell you to stop."

The "somebody else's problem" is good, but it's expensive.

All you need to do is configure one of the "scrap" machines as a PXE boot server, find a switch from somewhere, and then get your trainee to do all the plugging in and unplugging.

"Here you go, it's a vitally important job, and a big responsibility. Now do this pallet, and when you're done, do this pallet, and then when you've done *that* do this pallet. Then I'll teach you how to drive the forklift..."

Oh yeah, I mean if you have a process that says that then I guess there's no way round it. However, it's a pointless waste of time that just adds to the ever-growing pile of e-waste that isn't really being dealt with properly.

I know from personal experience that at least one organisation that deals with confidential medical information simply hooks a pallet of decomissioned machines up to power and a switch, PXE boots the whole lot into DBAN, and calls it a day at that. "Good Enough".

Now would be a good time, too, because they've just changed the page layouts again and people are moaning about it.

If you want to get customers to jump ship (and yes, you are a paying customer; you pay with information like geotagging restaurants and shops you visit) then bring along a better product right at the point where people are starting to dislike what they already use, and make the transition quick and painless. "Hi, sign up for Placescroll and import all your facebook data *for free*!" and give them the option to upload their saved-off facebook.zip file to prepopulate their friends lists, messages, posts etc.

Years ago I started blocking US dynamic IP ranges from port 25 because of the amount of spam from compromised machines. I started mapping the attempts to send spam using an intelligent guess based on the hostnames (most ISPs have a clue to the city in their reverse DNS) and GeoIP lookup. Now, I'm sure it's an artifact and not a "real" effect, but there seemed to be a strong correlation between red states and compromised machines sending spam.
I'd love to see the results of a more rigorous investigation.

I'm in the UK. The licensing authorities here take people trespassing on mobile phone frequencies pretty seriously - and pretty much anywhere else that you've paid for a licence. Furthermore, certain technically-qualified people are legally able to confiscate or shut down equipment that is causing interference.

It doesn't matter if you're the police, if you're jamming something you get your toys taken away.

You're missing the point.

If you write 1s and 0s to a disk then overwrite them then *theoretically* it is possible to look at the data coming off the disk, and work out that a 1 that's a little higher than normal was previously a 1, a 0 that's a little higher was previously a 1 and so on.

But this only works with extremely old drives.

With modern drives, the signal written by the heads on disk is quite complex and consists of a mixture of signals with rapidly changing amplitude and phase. It's not as simple as on or off. How do you tell the difference between a really strong residual "1" and a really faint residual "7"? You can't, pretty much.

The military do not have some big magic machine that can extract data from overwritten hard disk tracks. It's not possible to do this, on any drive that's younger than the Internet.

So with a bad sector, you might be able to recover a couple of bytes of the old data. Maybe.

Bear in mind that the most likely reason for the drive to map out a sector is because it can no longer find the address marks to tell where the sector starts. If that's the case then no amount of vendor-specific commands will fix that...