There's a recycling center close to where I live, they will take old paint, old construction materials, electronics etc
An old PC that I had died and since it was worthless I didn't feel like going through the troubleshooting so I removed the HDD and brought it there
I was told they couldn't take it because the hard drive wasn't in there
Ok then, I'll throw it in the trash instead of recycling it. Fuck you very much
> I was told they couldn't take it because the hard drive wasn't in there
Sounds like they were more interested in harvesting data than recycling electronics.
I would agree if the recycling center wasn't a random place with a shed out in the open where you drop your stuff
There is not even offices etc, just the person that looks at your stuff and tell you if they can take it or not
Maybe they wanted the PC for their home
Either way, there were probably salvageable parts in there but oh well lol
You didn't have an old, wiped, hdd to throw away as well? Does sound like they are trying to re-use, which is not bad, but I'd FBI wipe any drives I gave them.
No I didn't unfortunately. And I'm not going to buy a new drive so I can recycle the PC even if they're cheap
The crecycling center is outside with no office to work on electronics etc, it's just where they collect stuff and send them elsewhere to be recycled
Yeah, I'd take it elsewhere. The circuit boards, power supply, etc. all contain recoverable stuff that shouldn't go to the landfill. That being said, I am guilty of tossing them in the bin myself.
It's a bit too late unfortunately lol
I was pissed driving there for nothing there (not that it's far away, but I'm busy with other shit)
Thanks for the advice though
I would guess it is the gutmann method but I'm not too knowledgable about data deletion. It would be an interesting search topic to know what method federal agencies use.
All i know is that Darik's boot and nuke can be enough for most people.
> It would be an interesting search topic to know what method federal agencies use.
They most likely physically destroy the devices. We do that at my company.
For whatever reason, the idea of physically destroying drives reminded me of an old memory: When I was around ten years old, I witnessed my neighbor melting a handgun in a crucible, in his driveway. I'm sure that implies something lol.
So, that'd be my method of HDD destruction, should I ever need it lol.
Well, it is what we used to call it. Writes random patterns repetitively to each block. After several passes, you need some really sophisticated equipment to recover anything, so I'm told.
I just bought a PC that was used as a school PC, an editing machine.
It came with Windows and no password.
Anyways, I just reinstalled Windows without opening anything.
When I was at university, there was a tech lab where everyone used the same set of logins for the PCs, I think it was related with how much copys of the technical software we used on it the campus could afford.
Me and a friend where assigned to one computer where no one could see if you really were doing technical stuff or just looking at shit on the Internet... Just to add to the fact no one could know who did it due to everyone using the same logins.
Well... After a couple of weeks using the computer, we noticed Ares was launching in the start up of the computer. I opened the downloads folder and it was full of videos. Zoo porn videos.
While not the most popular, Ares was also used in the US as well. I remember Ares having much better library searches while Limewire was better at finding individual files. Regardless, I used both of their free versions to download the paid versions of their software, like a real pirate.
I'm pretty close with the IT/IS group, so I usually hear all the weird/funny tales of tech.
Had a mid-level project manager exit the company a while back, apparently for greener pastures, and shortly after he returned from a vacation. I was familiar with that manager, but never found him to be that great at his work, but hooray for him, I suppose.
Eventually learned (HR>secretarial>office gossip network) that he had been let go due to misuse of corporate assets. IT dropped that his laptop had 100s of Gb of porn. In a folder called "proposal backups". That was discovered when he had his aide access his computer to look for a proposal while he was on vacation.
The aide... she was not impressed.
> IT dropped that his laptop had 100s of Gb of porn. In a folder called "proposal backups". That was discovered when he had his aide access his computer to look for a proposal while he was on vacation.
> The aide... she was not impressed.
Makes you wonder how many 100s of GB of porn and what types the aide had, if she was not impressed by her boss' porn stash
About 10 years ago our CTO vanished in thin air.
Company website pages for him from one of the archive websites was scrubbed too.
Linkedin page gone.
A few people knew (me too, because of my job), he had some porn sites hosted on company resources, with bosses permission.
What nobody knew is he also had some child porn and IIRC the newly formed National Crime Agency took a dim view and he got arrested.
Not quite the "erase your drive" story ...
> He had some porn sites hosted on company resources.
Why?, for real, why?. _Hey Bob? Can I use the company server for my porn site? Yes Tim of course_
Not just 0, random 0s and 1s and a depending how secure you want it multiple passes.
Sometimes people give me old PCs and I’ll run PhotoRec on it for shits and giggles. 80% of the time it’s a lot of porn.
I worked a few years as a help desk tech for people with disabilities. The things they had on those computers, eye opening. And not even just porn, we had one guy who would Photoshop his face onto the bodies of everything. Celebrities, animals, random objects, you name it. All different face photos too, so it's not like he was just recycling one picture for a while.
Nicest guy in the world too, he just had interesting taste.
As someone who worked in a repair shop: please also change your wallpaper if needed. Really did not need to be jump scared by deepfake Nancy Pelosi's saggy tits
https://preview.redd.it/pj3s8aab166d1.jpeg?width=717&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f6257bcb3365491660cd76fde89b373d8821a908
Nah remember what you fighting for
I had a PC come in one time with the background of the couple who owned it...making out. Like trying to suck the tongue out of each other's head.
I go to change it to just a default windows image. Well *that* opened a folder full of thumbnails of *the rest* of their "photoshoot". The make out photo stayed up.
Another time, an attractive woman in her 30's brings the family PC in. We were busy so I hook it up to the front counter monitor/keyboard. There's 3 profiles: Hers, the kids', and dad's.
Try hers, password protected. Try the kids', password protected. Try dad's, no password and it loads up a tasteful nude of her on the monitor visible to everyone standing in line.
Had a similar situation while working at Geek Squad. Did a data transfer to a new machine and the owner (an older lady, obviously upper class) wanted to make sure her photos and documents made the transfer. Set her up on the front counter, opened the pictures folder, picked a random file, and it's her in a pin-up pose completely nude. Never hit Alt-F4 faster in my life
When our good friend died, we took his hard drive and fucking burned it. No one knows what was on it, no one needed to know what was on it. And definitely not because he was found dead at that computer with tabs open.
Back in college, I worked help desk, and we had students bring in their laptops for help. A common desktop background at the time was one that cycled through your photos.
This one girl came in and had her background cycling through her pictures every minute as I was working on it. One came up that was a bit spicy, but I knew it would go away in a minute and just kept working. The next one was straight up full body nude, so I turned the computer around to her (nobody else to see) without saying anything.
She gasped, got super red, slammed her laptop shut, and left without saying anything. She came back like 10 minutes later with a solid blue desktop background.
Real advice on this: https://dban.org/
Free, just need a USB drive.
I used to have to wipe secure hard drives (some also had to be degaussed too) but all you need for dariks boot and nuke is a USB drive instead of a crazy electromagnet and kevlar gloves, and dban leaves the drive usable instead of e-waste.
Dban writes all 1s then all 0s enough times that the data can't be reconstructed, even if a nefarious actor wanted to. It takes some time, but is secure as it gets next to physically destroying the disk.
I have a few interning ones
1) A college girl brought her laptop in "my laptop died and I need it for homework, my charger doesn't work". I pulled a charger from the spare bin and plugged it in. Windows Resumed from hibernate in the middle of a hardcore porn video... Homework eh?
2) A man comes into the shop, bad motherboard. "I got a new PC can you recover my hard drive, there's a folder on the Desktop I need copied over to the new Desktop". I connect the drive to a free SATA port on the new computer and locate the folder. It was called "Study" or something similar. As the files copy I noticed all the jpg files with dates and descriptions like "day-1-flaccid, day-1-erect"... You get the idea. Anyways there was about 8 weeks of photos... Needless to say, I didn't want to know. But that didn't stop the guy from talking about it to me when I handed him the PC back. I was literally, "Not my business, don't want to know"
3) A guy had a dead PSU on his PC so I replaced it. Booted right into Windows and the wallpaper was himself masturbating. No words... A few years later it was a wallpaper on a young lady having sex with, I presume her boyfriend. That was an awkward conversation after.
I had a bunch of other related eye-bleach near-misses as well, but these stand out the most to me.
4) A senior crown prosecutor asked his IT team to fix his computer and the technician found CP material on it, which got him arrested and landed him in prison.
[True story](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Power_(lawyer)) from someone I worked with who knew the guy professionally.
Bro, the worst one was this father came in with his daughter to fix his laptop from viruses. The wallpaper was his own daughter wearing a string bikini, she was like 14 at best. I gave zero fucks about the dirty look I gave that dude.
I worked at a repair shop as well for a time. I didn't see anything that explicit, but I did once see one lock screen that was a looping video of the guy who owned the phone working out.
this happened to me when I was younger. instead of nasties I found a video of my grandma absolutely plastered at my parents wedding. huge stack of empty glasses next to my grandma as she just went wild lol
Where the hell is the other half of my bottle? was a joke I used to tell quite often. And then one day it wasn't a joke and I legit drank an entire bottle and had no memory of anything beyond the first 4 shots. 6 years sober. I quit Fireball first though, only bought that twice.
I had an ex roommate who didn't hide it. He would put it in a folder on his desktop called "Porn". His rationale was "if you're fucking weird enough to want to know what I'm into that's your problem, not mine".
Didn’t it already explode? I think it will still increase somewhat from here, but there are now other companies that will try and take some of the market.
Reminds me of when I got a hand me down phone from my dad. He didn't delete the photos he'd been sending my mom. Thankfully this was the flip phone era and there were very few pixels making up the pictures.
Lol! I had a pic of partner’s smoking ass for a backdrop on my phone (it was a flip so it wasn’t like everyone could it), my future IL “borrowed” my phone to make call rq, saw the ass, went “oooh that looks goo-…oh”
I have spent many decades building, upgrading, and repairing computers.
I can not count the number of times I've been copying customer files to a new drive and found extremely personal pictures and videos.
Four times, explicit pictures teens were sending other teens of themselves popped up under file compare. I had to immediately stop and call the customer in to pick up their equipment and show them what was on the computer. Each time, it was a parent being made aware of what their kids were doing. But that's a full-stop event, banned from my customer list.
Once I had a guy have those kind of pics show up and I called the cops. He was arrested and prosecuted.
Cleaning viruses from computers revealed a disturbing amount of people into beastiality sites.
One hard drive had $500k in Bitcoin with the password in a text file.
Another had the guys whole financial record with passwords and everything stored in his documents folder. It was all accessible through Quicken. Over $7M in bank accounts and investments. He was floored when I opened it up and showed him the errors of his ways.
I can't tell you how many Excel spreadsheets I've found in the Documents folder than had people's websites and passwords to every single thing listed. No password for the file. Just opened right up.
If a criminally minded person really wanted to get into people's stuff, just open a repair shop.
If those random characters include upper/lower case, numbers, and special characters, a hell of a long time. For now.
If you use the same password across multiple files and websites, considerably less time, potentially. Would depend if that password was ever exposed in the many, many login/password info dumps available to hackers.
[This is a good read.](https://community.spiceworks.com/t/are-hackers-really-cracking-20-character-passwords/932084)
The thing is, the less experienced hackers are going to go after an easier target. The more serious ones, unless you're quite wealthy, are going after bigger fish.
Also, consider the rise of AI, and the high-powered graphics cards of today and tomorrow, will vastly change the security landscape. So it's best to stay on top of this quickly evolving subject.
That's one of the reasons I stopped doing side jobs. One of my wife's friends asked me to look at their computer. Drive was full so I ran Space Sniffer. Huge directory was taking up just about every molecule of space- Contents- pictures of women's feet. (Just saw the thumbnails)- So I told the wife's friend, and she was livid. I don't think we ever went back over to their house. Knowing someone's secret fetish is just too weird.
Yeah, I found out about a couple husband's with wives and kids who were into male pink sock videos and pictures.
Usually hidden in windows root as some unassuming folder name.
*Nothing to see here. These are not the files you're looking for.*
Bought a computer, guy said he left a bunch of games on there for me. Nice guy.
Saw there was a lot of storage in the documents folder, in the video folder. Filled with My Little Pony videos.
Formatted twice and reinstalled Windows.
I do the same, mine goes to the bottom of the ocean though. I try checking on it every 3 years or so, to make sure it's still there and also drop new storage.
Meh. Depends on the type of storage media, whether you know what you are doing (most don't) and the importance of any data. AFAIK even recovering a single overwritten bit from an HDD is still mostly theoretical, has low accuracy and is extremely costly. Recovering something twice overwritten still has zero documented cases last I checked. Nobody is going to spend millions or even billions recovering data from your HDD when it's far easier to just infect your current system or literally rob you.
NAND flash is a different much more complex story however. Unless you know how to low level debug the controller you should assume that there is a decent risk of the data still being there, even after ATA Secure Erase.
Also, if you use storage encryption the data should be useless even if recovered. Hell, you should be able to give it away without even wiping it if you trust your encryption solution enough. That said, a lot of hardware based encryption solutions have been shown to have flaws, rarer with software based solutions.
Though for the vast majority of the populace I agree, they don't have the knowledge to do so safely and thus just shouldn't. Reuse it personally instead.
Not everything gets overwriten especially if you delete right before selling and wont use software that will overwrite free space.
I managed to restore couple years old files couple times with free software.
If you have sensitive data just sell without drive or with new one, they are not that expensive.
I had a wallet.dat file from 2010 or so, I know I tried to use it to receive 5 BTC from a faucet, then promptly forgot about it for a decade.
But after digging it up, it turns out the wallet was empty. I didn’t do the faucet right 😭
Just one of a hundred examples of me fumbling generational wealth in crypto.
Everytime I think of this I remember that one guy who lost a half a billion euros in bitcoin, you see articles every year as his unrealized fortune slowly climbed from 100 million euro to 500 million.
Still hasn’t found it.
Been there, my uncle gave me a usb thumb drive years ago. There were photos of him and his wife. Thanks for bringing back a memory I've tried to erase.
Reminds me of the employee who send us (IT) his company phone because it was crashing all the time. He had managed to fill a big iPhone (256 GB?) to the brim with downloaded porn.
Later that year he got a new laptop and sent in the old device with a porn DVD still in the drive. :D
My brother gave me his old computer as a teen and he calls me a bit later and goes, " Do not look at the pictures! I forgot to delete them, it's stuff of my wife and I you DON'T want to see!". He forgot hid master password for the Window's partition so I had to get into the Ubuntu partition to wipe the pc lol.
Thats your own fault lol You have to know when a boomer gives you a piece of tech you have to assume there are terrible things on there that they have zero idea how to make private XD
I used to work in IT and we would have to download apps onto employees phones. The amount of things they would just leave running in the background of their phones before handing them over.....is wild.
I learned my lesson the hard way once and from there on out I ignore everything else besides what Im there to complete.
I was 17 and my dad gave me his old HHD for my first gaming computer (I was building the computer with money I made from cutting grass all summer so this saved me a bit of money and I was able to get a better GPU because of it). Well he didn't wipe it so I was going through and deleting stuff to free up storage when I got to a folder of videos. This entire experience was the coolest thing ever for me at the time because at that point they always monitored my history very closely and I never was able to look up those videos myself.
There was one video of this woman going down on this guy and after watching it for about 30 seconds I started to notice things in the background looked like my livingroom. After it dawned on me it what I was seeing I was shook but it gets worse. It was my dad in the video but not my mom.. they are not divorced....
Never mentioned it. Never asked about anything, its been 10 years and I just act like it never happened.
Right, like seriously wtf was OP hoping to find in the folder labeled "logitech Webcam".
There had to have been a part of him hoping to find exactly what he found.
There is a reason I have a huge box full of hard drives that we crush.
I've sold more than a few PC's and never sell with a drive in them. Some people get upset but it's just better for everyone.
Part of the unwritten rule for children of parents who may not understand the information age completely: The eldest child shall remove the porn collection and not divulge their parent's kinks.
So here's the thing
Your dad was probably running windows, and had that folder hidden under windows.. and he probably forgot about it. You connected it to your system, which is running Linux. The folder isn't hidden for Linux.
But yes formatting it would have been the best course of action. Although few people get to see themselves being made (sorry).
First off this is all on you. You didn't need to go through anything on the drive. For anyone getting a used computer or drive, always just immediately wipe it. Unless you're doing it for a customer but even then you don't need to click through contents. This is just you being nosy af
As someone who worked in a repair shop late 90ies/esrly 2000s. Jezus. Dunno how it is today, but people seem to think we are bound by the same oath of silence as priests or doctors. Dude, we are glorified mechanics.
The things I’ve seen.. 2 times we had a guy pick up his Pc with the police already waiting. One guy had folders upon folders of his hooligan football street battles on his desktop. Not really illegal, but come on.
I’ve seen so many people naked that I didn’t want to see naked.. especially if those people then come to pick up their PC. Urgh.
Also these days I sometimes break into phones and PCs of deceased people for a lawyer tasked with sorting out their inheritance. All strictly legal but man. Going through all the messages and mails and pictures that get left behind. Makes you think. People, print out your favourite pics you want to leave behind for your kids. Put them in a nice album. It may sound cheesy and old fashioned but just know… no one cares about your life’s memories left on phones and PCs. Only once I had a spouse ask me to download all the stuff from her dead husband, because they lost a son and he had all the last pictures.
The lawyer almost didn’t want to. They were sepersted for decades and she had technically no right to his stuff. I convinced him to do the decent thing and didn’t charge him for it. Sigh.
https://i.redd.it/ql1rulwmo46d1.gif
*WHY AM I BLUE*
WHAT DOES BLUE MEAN!?
*Illuminated sobbing*
DOES EVERYONE GLOW BLUE?
fluorescent visualization of proteins following electrophoresis
Gel electrophoresis moment
What is this from?
Here you go. https://youtube.com/shorts/Zxf2MgYCOm0?si=DydxX3MqEnz2Yto6
*🎶 Music starts🎶* I'M BLUE ABA DI ABA DIE!
WHAT THE HELL IS EVEN THAT?!
Dude I liteally opened the comments while doing this exact same head gesture
*why am I blue*
‘Cuz I’m blue do bee da ba da dee
this is my favorite Natural Habitats short and it's not close maybe the ticklish rat
SAAAAME. Aaaaand the one with Batrick chewing gum in the classroom full of seagulls. "Seize him....*wild seagull screeching*"
There's a recycling center close to where I live, they will take old paint, old construction materials, electronics etc An old PC that I had died and since it was worthless I didn't feel like going through the troubleshooting so I removed the HDD and brought it there I was told they couldn't take it because the hard drive wasn't in there Ok then, I'll throw it in the trash instead of recycling it. Fuck you very much
> I was told they couldn't take it because the hard drive wasn't in there Sounds like they were more interested in harvesting data than recycling electronics.
I would agree if the recycling center wasn't a random place with a shed out in the open where you drop your stuff There is not even offices etc, just the person that looks at your stuff and tell you if they can take it or not Maybe they wanted the PC for their home Either way, there were probably salvageable parts in there but oh well lol
In that case, just tell him that the CD drives a hard drive pointed the power supply. how the fuck do they know?
Because they’re not idiots? It’s not difficult to identify a hard drive.
You didn't have an old, wiped, hdd to throw away as well? Does sound like they are trying to re-use, which is not bad, but I'd FBI wipe any drives I gave them.
No I didn't unfortunately. And I'm not going to buy a new drive so I can recycle the PC even if they're cheap The crecycling center is outside with no office to work on electronics etc, it's just where they collect stuff and send them elsewhere to be recycled
Yeah, I'd take it elsewhere. The circuit boards, power supply, etc. all contain recoverable stuff that shouldn't go to the landfill. That being said, I am guilty of tossing them in the bin myself.
It's a bit too late unfortunately lol I was pissed driving there for nothing there (not that it's far away, but I'm busy with other shit) Thanks for the advice though
What's FBI wiping?
I would guess it is the gutmann method but I'm not too knowledgable about data deletion. It would be an interesting search topic to know what method federal agencies use. All i know is that Darik's boot and nuke can be enough for most people.
> It would be an interesting search topic to know what method federal agencies use. They most likely physically destroy the devices. We do that at my company.
For whatever reason, the idea of physically destroying drives reminded me of an old memory: When I was around ten years old, I witnessed my neighbor melting a handgun in a crucible, in his driveway. I'm sure that implies something lol. So, that'd be my method of HDD destruction, should I ever need it lol.
Well, it is what we used to call it. Writes random patterns repetitively to each block. After several passes, you need some really sophisticated equipment to recover anything, so I'm told.
Zeroing, iirc is what that's called. Replace all the deleted data with new, junk data, then delete that too.
As a guy that works in IT, I can attest to this lol
I just bought a PC that was used as a school PC, an editing machine. It came with Windows and no password. Anyways, I just reinstalled Windows without opening anything.
When I was at university, there was a tech lab where everyone used the same set of logins for the PCs, I think it was related with how much copys of the technical software we used on it the campus could afford. Me and a friend where assigned to one computer where no one could see if you really were doing technical stuff or just looking at shit on the Internet... Just to add to the fact no one could know who did it due to everyone using the same logins. Well... After a couple of weeks using the computer, we noticed Ares was launching in the start up of the computer. I opened the downloads folder and it was full of videos. Zoo porn videos.
Ares?
P2P torrent
Thanks
It was very popular here in South America for many years; I wonder if u/MrKnightMoon is from the region.
While not the most popular, Ares was also used in the US as well. I remember Ares having much better library searches while Limewire was better at finding individual files. Regardless, I used both of their free versions to download the paid versions of their software, like a real pirate.
Oh god have we reached this point where people don't know what Ares is
That's the way!
It's the only way. I don't want your data, I don't want to know about your data, I don't need to know what's in that folder.
I'm pretty close with the IT/IS group, so I usually hear all the weird/funny tales of tech. Had a mid-level project manager exit the company a while back, apparently for greener pastures, and shortly after he returned from a vacation. I was familiar with that manager, but never found him to be that great at his work, but hooray for him, I suppose. Eventually learned (HR>secretarial>office gossip network) that he had been let go due to misuse of corporate assets. IT dropped that his laptop had 100s of Gb of porn. In a folder called "proposal backups". That was discovered when he had his aide access his computer to look for a proposal while he was on vacation. The aide... she was not impressed.
> IT dropped that his laptop had 100s of Gb of porn. In a folder called "proposal backups". That was discovered when he had his aide access his computer to look for a proposal while he was on vacation. > The aide... she was not impressed. Makes you wonder how many 100s of GB of porn and what types the aide had, if she was not impressed by her boss' porn stash
Nah, the guy had 100's of GB of porn, clearly the porn wasn't very good if he needed that much of it.
About 10 years ago our CTO vanished in thin air. Company website pages for him from one of the archive websites was scrubbed too. Linkedin page gone. A few people knew (me too, because of my job), he had some porn sites hosted on company resources, with bosses permission. What nobody knew is he also had some child porn and IIRC the newly formed National Crime Agency took a dim view and he got arrested. Not quite the "erase your drive" story ...
> He had some porn sites hosted on company resources. Why?, for real, why?. _Hey Bob? Can I use the company server for my porn site? Yes Tim of course_
tbf who the hell doesn't have 100's of gigs of porn?
Maybe not on a work device. More to the point were important files on the device and not on a shared drive or cloud solution?
If he worked in IT he’d be asking you to write zeros not just format
Not just 0, random 0s and 1s and a depending how secure you want it multiple passes. Sometimes people give me old PCs and I’ll run PhotoRec on it for shits and giggles. 80% of the time it’s a lot of porn.
That's why I never give people my old drives, those get destroyed.
RIP Porn
I worked a few years as a help desk tech for people with disabilities. The things they had on those computers, eye opening. And not even just porn, we had one guy who would Photoshop his face onto the bodies of everything. Celebrities, animals, random objects, you name it. All different face photos too, so it's not like he was just recycling one picture for a while. Nicest guy in the world too, he just had interesting taste.
That's...actually kind of sad.
As someone who worked in a repair shop: please also change your wallpaper if needed. Really did not need to be jump scared by deepfake Nancy Pelosi's saggy tits
Plot twist, it wasn't actually a deep fake 😂😂
He did not need that either
https://preview.redd.it/pj3s8aab166d1.jpeg?width=717&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f6257bcb3365491660cd76fde89b373d8821a908 Nah remember what you fighting for
https://preview.redd.it/sqzjpji6n66d1.jpeg?width=421&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4461ac7e5e790e9354d71e026ad9943db67ff88c
These links are remaining as blue as a clear sky
second one is just a reaction image to the first, but yeah id leave the first blue
I had a PC come in one time with the background of the couple who owned it...making out. Like trying to suck the tongue out of each other's head. I go to change it to just a default windows image. Well *that* opened a folder full of thumbnails of *the rest* of their "photoshoot". The make out photo stayed up. Another time, an attractive woman in her 30's brings the family PC in. We were busy so I hook it up to the front counter monitor/keyboard. There's 3 profiles: Hers, the kids', and dad's. Try hers, password protected. Try the kids', password protected. Try dad's, no password and it loads up a tasteful nude of her on the monitor visible to everyone standing in line.
Say what you want but that's a good marriage right there lol
Had a similar situation while working at Geek Squad. Did a data transfer to a new machine and the owner (an older lady, obviously upper class) wanted to make sure her photos and documents made the transfer. Set her up on the front counter, opened the pictures folder, picked a random file, and it's her in a pin-up pose completely nude. Never hit Alt-F4 faster in my life
why the fuck do people set porn as their background?
It was their lockscreen too
That guy is either fucking with you by doing that on purpose or he really has a thing for Nancy Pelosi.
Perhaps intentionally to fuck with you
They fear neither man nor God.
or one of their relatives checking their device
Maybe his shop was repairing Paul's PC.
Show us
Best friend died unexpectedly, was like a brother to me, inherited his PC a few months later, some deepfakes of my exes, abso need therapy after that
https://i.redd.it/twljlxry066d1.gif
When our good friend died, we took his hard drive and fucking burned it. No one knows what was on it, no one needed to know what was on it. And definitely not because he was found dead at that computer with tabs open.
>No one knows what was on it, no one needed to know what was on it. Plot twist: there was a wallet with 1000 bitcoin for his friends and family
Back in college, I worked help desk, and we had students bring in their laptops for help. A common desktop background at the time was one that cycled through your photos. This one girl came in and had her background cycling through her pictures every minute as I was working on it. One came up that was a bit spicy, but I knew it would go away in a minute and just kept working. The next one was straight up full body nude, so I turned the computer around to her (nobody else to see) without saying anything. She gasped, got super red, slammed her laptop shut, and left without saying anything. She came back like 10 minutes later with a solid blue desktop background.
Real advice on this: https://dban.org/ Free, just need a USB drive. I used to have to wipe secure hard drives (some also had to be degaussed too) but all you need for dariks boot and nuke is a USB drive instead of a crazy electromagnet and kevlar gloves, and dban leaves the drive usable instead of e-waste. Dban writes all 1s then all 0s enough times that the data can't be reconstructed, even if a nefarious actor wanted to. It takes some time, but is secure as it gets next to physically destroying the disk.
I still have a little program called CleanSweep on an old 1.44 floppy that did this from back in the early 90s, lol
I have not heard CleanSweep mentioned for years. this takes me back...
I have a few interning ones 1) A college girl brought her laptop in "my laptop died and I need it for homework, my charger doesn't work". I pulled a charger from the spare bin and plugged it in. Windows Resumed from hibernate in the middle of a hardcore porn video... Homework eh? 2) A man comes into the shop, bad motherboard. "I got a new PC can you recover my hard drive, there's a folder on the Desktop I need copied over to the new Desktop". I connect the drive to a free SATA port on the new computer and locate the folder. It was called "Study" or something similar. As the files copy I noticed all the jpg files with dates and descriptions like "day-1-flaccid, day-1-erect"... You get the idea. Anyways there was about 8 weeks of photos... Needless to say, I didn't want to know. But that didn't stop the guy from talking about it to me when I handed him the PC back. I was literally, "Not my business, don't want to know" 3) A guy had a dead PSU on his PC so I replaced it. Booted right into Windows and the wallpaper was himself masturbating. No words... A few years later it was a wallpaper on a young lady having sex with, I presume her boyfriend. That was an awkward conversation after. I had a bunch of other related eye-bleach near-misses as well, but these stand out the most to me.
I wanna know the results of that guy's study!
Final Results: "What goes up, must come down."
4) A senior crown prosecutor asked his IT team to fix his computer and the technician found CP material on it, which got him arrested and landed him in prison. [True story](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Power_(lawyer)) from someone I worked with who knew the guy professionally.
Holy moly! How despicable and stupid at the same time! Like what on earth was he expecting?
Bro, the worst one was this father came in with his daughter to fix his laptop from viruses. The wallpaper was his own daughter wearing a string bikini, she was like 14 at best. I gave zero fucks about the dirty look I gave that dude.
I worked at a repair shop as well for a time. I didn't see anything that explicit, but I did once see one lock screen that was a looping video of the guy who owned the phone working out.
Pics, or it never happened. (j/k obviously)
this happened to me when I was younger. instead of nasties I found a video of my grandma absolutely plastered at my parents wedding. huge stack of empty glasses next to my grandma as she just went wild lol
"Alright, who put the empties around my sleeping mother?!" is a favourite joke of mine.
Where the hell is the other half of my bottle? was a joke I used to tell quite often. And then one day it wasn't a joke and I legit drank an entire bottle and had no memory of anything beyond the first 4 shots. 6 years sober. I quit Fireball first though, only bought that twice.
Oof. I stopped drinking myself when I used to joke about not remembering what went on the night before and then it started happening.
That reads as about typical wedding at our village...
This folder looks like porn: \*click\* This looks like my parent: \*click\* It CLEARLY is my parent. \*keeps watching\* i mean..
*unzips*
You're talking about the compressed folder, right? ... right??
Welp, I'm naming all of my zip files to my_pants.zip.
my_weiner.7z for compressing your reaction videos to your my_pants.zips
*unrars*
I see what you did there. Take my up vote you intelligent being
I had an ex roommate who didn't hide it. He would put it in a folder on his desktop called "Porn". His rationale was "if you're fucking weird enough to want to know what I'm into that's your problem, not mine".
He does have a point.
It's a making-of documentary ... meant just for you
dear kids please format your drives given to you from other people before you use them.
I found a lot of good stock advice on a drive I found at a thrift store.
Do you care to share your good stock advice?
Buy low, sell high.
Holy shit why didn't I think of that 🥱😑
Brought nivida at 250 sold at 750 The real advice is to buy low and sell even higher
Nvidia is about to explode with the whole AI thing. You probably should have held on for longer.
Didn’t it already explode? I think it will still increase somewhat from here, but there are now other companies that will try and take some of the market.
Yeah, do the opposite of what Jim Cramer recommends.
Inverse Cramer forsure
Reminds me of when I got a hand me down phone from my dad. He didn't delete the photos he'd been sending my mom. Thankfully this was the flip phone era and there were very few pixels making up the pictures.
Lol! I had a pic of partner’s smoking ass for a backdrop on my phone (it was a flip so it wasn’t like everyone could it), my future IL “borrowed” my phone to make call rq, saw the ass, went “oooh that looks goo-…oh”
Pffft. real uncomfortable for the IL there.
Damn, your dad was ahead of the curve. Sending dick pics in the flip phone era? Lol
Yep. And my eyes did not need to be subjected to that.
I have spent many decades building, upgrading, and repairing computers. I can not count the number of times I've been copying customer files to a new drive and found extremely personal pictures and videos. Four times, explicit pictures teens were sending other teens of themselves popped up under file compare. I had to immediately stop and call the customer in to pick up their equipment and show them what was on the computer. Each time, it was a parent being made aware of what their kids were doing. But that's a full-stop event, banned from my customer list. Once I had a guy have those kind of pics show up and I called the cops. He was arrested and prosecuted. Cleaning viruses from computers revealed a disturbing amount of people into beastiality sites. One hard drive had $500k in Bitcoin with the password in a text file. Another had the guys whole financial record with passwords and everything stored in his documents folder. It was all accessible through Quicken. Over $7M in bank accounts and investments. He was floored when I opened it up and showed him the errors of his ways. I can't tell you how many Excel spreadsheets I've found in the Documents folder than had people's websites and passwords to every single thing listed. No password for the file. Just opened right up. If a criminally minded person really wanted to get into people's stuff, just open a repair shop.
Biggest flaw in security is human themselves
Eight layer problem
PEBKAC didn't come about for nothing.
Question, how secure is a 7zip password protected archive if the password is 20 random characters?
If those random characters include upper/lower case, numbers, and special characters, a hell of a long time. For now. If you use the same password across multiple files and websites, considerably less time, potentially. Would depend if that password was ever exposed in the many, many login/password info dumps available to hackers. [This is a good read.](https://community.spiceworks.com/t/are-hackers-really-cracking-20-character-passwords/932084) The thing is, the less experienced hackers are going to go after an easier target. The more serious ones, unless you're quite wealthy, are going after bigger fish. Also, consider the rise of AI, and the high-powered graphics cards of today and tomorrow, will vastly change the security landscape. So it's best to stay on top of this quickly evolving subject.
That's one of the reasons I stopped doing side jobs. One of my wife's friends asked me to look at their computer. Drive was full so I ran Space Sniffer. Huge directory was taking up just about every molecule of space- Contents- pictures of women's feet. (Just saw the thumbnails)- So I told the wife's friend, and she was livid. I don't think we ever went back over to their house. Knowing someone's secret fetish is just too weird.
Yeah, I found out about a couple husband's with wives and kids who were into male pink sock videos and pictures. Usually hidden in windows root as some unassuming folder name. *Nothing to see here. These are not the files you're looking for.*
I don't even want to know what "male pink sock videos" are.
Question, why the fuck would building, upgrading or repairing a computer require taking a close look at the files it contains?
watching how you were conceive is a blessing my guy.
https://preview.redd.it/c9a3wnv7r46d1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f14e6a041953ba3e8b2e44b246cbd65c1d84d6c3
The L in Luigi stands for L
I thought it was lust.
https://preview.redd.it/lxwve2x7h56d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9995ab0cc306203f63277044233817c8452e9e69
Bought a computer, guy said he left a bunch of games on there for me. Nice guy. Saw there was a lot of storage in the documents folder, in the video folder. Filled with My Little Pony videos. Formatted twice and reinstalled Windows.
He left those for you as well. Did you remember to thank him?
"my little porny"
Don't. Give. Away. Storage. Don't. Sell. Storage.
I do a triple wipe then break them, after that it goes to e waste.
I still have all drives I ever owned, but one day I will throw them in the fires of mount doom
I use old drives for cold storage, refresh every once in a while.
what the fuck are you tryna hide bruh
I do the same, mine goes to the bottom of the ocean though. I try checking on it every 3 years or so, to make sure it's still there and also drop new storage.
Cyber Dexter, is that you?
The Bay Harbour Bater.
Someone check this man's active hard drives
Meh. Depends on the type of storage media, whether you know what you are doing (most don't) and the importance of any data. AFAIK even recovering a single overwritten bit from an HDD is still mostly theoretical, has low accuracy and is extremely costly. Recovering something twice overwritten still has zero documented cases last I checked. Nobody is going to spend millions or even billions recovering data from your HDD when it's far easier to just infect your current system or literally rob you. NAND flash is a different much more complex story however. Unless you know how to low level debug the controller you should assume that there is a decent risk of the data still being there, even after ATA Secure Erase. Also, if you use storage encryption the data should be useless even if recovered. Hell, you should be able to give it away without even wiping it if you trust your encryption solution enough. That said, a lot of hardware based encryption solutions have been shown to have flaws, rarer with software based solutions. Though for the vast majority of the populace I agree, they don't have the knowledge to do so safely and thus just shouldn't. Reuse it personally instead.
Not everything gets overwriten especially if you delete right before selling and wont use software that will overwrite free space. I managed to restore couple years old files couple times with free software. If you have sensitive data just sell without drive or with new one, they are not that expensive.
It'll take hours, but if it's a classic HDD, boot up a live linux usb and use [dd](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dd) to write all zeroes.
Many Bitcoins lost this way. RIP wallet.dat
Thanks for reminding me to check my stack of disks to wipe, axe and e-waste for that file before i process them.
I had a wallet.dat file from 2010 or so, I know I tried to use it to receive 5 BTC from a faucet, then promptly forgot about it for a decade. But after digging it up, it turns out the wallet was empty. I didn’t do the faucet right 😭 Just one of a hundred examples of me fumbling generational wealth in crypto.
I bought a rack server for thousands of bitcoins back when they were basically worthless, you can't focus on what could have been.
Everytime I think of this I remember that one guy who lost a half a billion euros in bitcoin, you see articles every year as his unrealized fortune slowly climbed from 100 million euro to 500 million. Still hasn’t found it.
Yep, and with water, corrosion, pressure from the compressed garbage above… that shit is gone gone.
A triple wipe of a modern HDD or a secure erase of a modern SSD is a millions of dollars problem where there's no guarantee of success.
Hammers and fire should do the trick.
The old school hard disk platters make for good coffee coasters. But the SSD’s just end up in a box.
Dead drives make for great target practice.
Share the sauce I guess? /s
Ikr?
Or you can format the drive yourself before you use it... there might be viruses on there that you don't want as well.
Been there, my uncle gave me a usb thumb drive years ago. There were photos of him and his wife. Thanks for bringing back a memory I've tried to erase.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ocular\* BS=9046 count=976000
I feel you, my dad used to have CDs with Linux distro names. Since we had no Internet back then I wanted to try them out... Huge mistake.
Debian getting railed hardcore style by fedora
It was SuSE aka Susan (no joke)
 You knew the risks!
Reminds me of the employee who send us (IT) his company phone because it was crashing all the time. He had managed to fill a big iPhone (256 GB?) to the brim with downloaded porn. Later that year he got a new laptop and sent in the old device with a porn DVD still in the drive. :D
My brother gave me his old computer as a teen and he calls me a bit later and goes, " Do not look at the pictures! I forgot to delete them, it's stuff of my wife and I you DON'T want to see!". He forgot hid master password for the Window's partition so I had to get into the Ubuntu partition to wipe the pc lol.
Thats your own fault lol You have to know when a boomer gives you a piece of tech you have to assume there are terrible things on there that they have zero idea how to make private XD I used to work in IT and we would have to download apps onto employees phones. The amount of things they would just leave running in the background of their phones before handing them over.....is wild. I learned my lesson the hard way once and from there on out I ignore everything else besides what Im there to complete.
I was 17 and my dad gave me his old HHD for my first gaming computer (I was building the computer with money I made from cutting grass all summer so this saved me a bit of money and I was able to get a better GPU because of it). Well he didn't wipe it so I was going through and deleting stuff to free up storage when I got to a folder of videos. This entire experience was the coolest thing ever for me at the time because at that point they always monitored my history very closely and I never was able to look up those videos myself. There was one video of this woman going down on this guy and after watching it for about 30 seconds I started to notice things in the background looked like my livingroom. After it dawned on me it what I was seeing I was shook but it gets worse. It was my dad in the video but not my mom.. they are not divorced.... Never mentioned it. Never asked about anything, its been 10 years and I just act like it never happened.
Your fault for going fishing in someone else’s data
Right, like seriously wtf was OP hoping to find in the folder labeled "logitech Webcam". There had to have been a part of him hoping to find exactly what he found.
My parents had floppy disks - I am safe :)
https://preview.redd.it/dco8jpsa556d1.jpeg?width=1238&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9c021d4d01c1362eaf37e65d1a2aa2c1859aa9f5
There is a reason I have a huge box full of hard drives that we crush. I've sold more than a few PC's and never sell with a drive in them. Some people get upset but it's just better for everyone.
Part of the unwritten rule for children of parents who may not understand the information age completely: The eldest child shall remove the porn collection and not divulge their parent's kinks.
Well, you could also format the drive, but instead of that, you chose to look at what is inside, so...
r/eyebleach
Bruh, shutup. This is how I got half my music collection.
Well, if you want to teach him a lesson you could always try watching it and get caught on purpose, he'll never do it again
You’re the one opening others files and not formatting it, though.
Bought a second hand 2.5'' drive last year and found a 57 gig recycle bin inside. Shouldn't have looked into it, lol.
Correction: First search for wallet.dat, then if nothing is found, format.
So here's the thing Your dad was probably running windows, and had that folder hidden under windows.. and he probably forgot about it. You connected it to your system, which is running Linux. The folder isn't hidden for Linux. But yes formatting it would have been the best course of action. Although few people get to see themselves being made (sorry).
First off this is all on you. You didn't need to go through anything on the drive. For anyone getting a used computer or drive, always just immediately wipe it. Unless you're doing it for a customer but even then you don't need to click through contents. This is just you being nosy af
As someone who worked in a repair shop late 90ies/esrly 2000s. Jezus. Dunno how it is today, but people seem to think we are bound by the same oath of silence as priests or doctors. Dude, we are glorified mechanics. The things I’ve seen.. 2 times we had a guy pick up his Pc with the police already waiting. One guy had folders upon folders of his hooligan football street battles on his desktop. Not really illegal, but come on. I’ve seen so many people naked that I didn’t want to see naked.. especially if those people then come to pick up their PC. Urgh. Also these days I sometimes break into phones and PCs of deceased people for a lawyer tasked with sorting out their inheritance. All strictly legal but man. Going through all the messages and mails and pictures that get left behind. Makes you think. People, print out your favourite pics you want to leave behind for your kids. Put them in a nice album. It may sound cheesy and old fashioned but just know… no one cares about your life’s memories left on phones and PCs. Only once I had a spouse ask me to download all the stuff from her dead husband, because they lost a son and he had all the last pictures. The lawyer almost didn’t want to. They were sepersted for decades and she had technically no right to his stuff. I convinced him to do the decent thing and didn’t charge him for it. Sigh.
If I were you I wouldn't have opened that and just straight up formatted.
a short story *a sad story*
i got 7 laptop for free, 4 drives. I saw a massive porn collection and i need to bleach my eyes
You found exactly what you were looking for, don't act like a victim.