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Technology

Picking Up the Pieces 529

Posted by michael from the all-the-king's-men dept.
ravenousbugblatter writes "The New York Times online ran an article yesterday titled Picking up the pieces that talks about new technology that can recover information from shredded documents. Not only can companies scan strip-shredded paper and recover the information, they can do the same with cross-shredded paper. It comes at a price though - one company charges $8,000-$10,000 to "reconstruct" the information in a cubic foot of cross-shredded material. How's it done? The shreds are glued onto a piece of paper and then scanned. Software then looks for matches (in one case using the pattern of ink at the edges of the pieces) and suggests possible combinations to the operator that can be accepted or rejected."
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Picking Up the Pieces More

Picking Up the Pieces

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  • Shredding is for wimps. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:34AM (#6471015)
    That's why I always dissolve my old paper in concentrated sulfuric acid.

    • Re:Shredding is for wimps. (Score:5, Funny)

      by vasqzr ( 619165 ) <`vasqzr' `at' `netscape.net'> on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:36AM (#6471034)

      I eat my shredded paper in a bowl with milk.

      mmmm, fiber
    • In the Canadian Forces it was regular practice in the field to simply burn any document that had a classicifaction higher than Protected A (pretty much Confidential and above). I've had to do it more than once. Of course, burning isn't enough, you then need to pulverise the ashes since you can often still read from the burnt paper.

      It wouldn't phase me it we found out the NSA has a method of determining the contents of a document by reading the smoke that is generated as it burns ;-)

      • Re:Shredding is for wimps. (Score:5, Funny)

        by VikingBerserker ( 546589 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @01:24PM (#6472193)
        Actually, we in the intelligence community prefer to scan the target's cerebellum as he/she is in the process of reading the document. Not only do we get the document in question, but we also learn its pertinence at the same time. Once in a while we get a bonus, like a nice new recipe for Poutine.

      • Re:Shredding is for wimps. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @01:29PM (#6472232) Homepage
        Not just in the field. One of my duties when I was in Signal Corps, posted to the Diefenbunker, was to take the bags of already shredded classified waste out to the incinerator and burn them. And stir the ashes.

  • Still a good idea... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ajiva ( 156759 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:34AM (#6471018)
    Shredding your financial statements is still a good idea. It keeps people from going through your trash and getting financial information. Everyone should at least get a straight line shredder and shred everything that they don't use.

    • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by plalonde2 ( 527372 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:38AM (#6471066)
      Have you done the risk analysis on this?

      What is the realistic likelyhood of someone pulling your financial information from your trash? It's substantially more effecient to just throw your statements out to the street on trash day under your coffee grinds.

      This tendancy towards living in fear scares me.

      • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by preric ( 689159 )
        While I can see your point, the fact that shredders are so cheap ($20-50) and quick (4-10 sheets at a time) makes it fairly easy to give yourself a more secure feeling.

      • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by eXtro ( 258933 )
        I don't think you understand risk analysis at all. Risk analysis implies that you take a look at the potential loss, probability of the occurence and the cost of preventing it. For 50 bucks or so I got myself a cross cut shredder, it's a cheap price for additional piece of mind. It also cuts down on the overall volume that the junk mail I receive takes up. I still get the same amount but it ends up taking up less room in my recycle box.

        The risk is zero. The mathematical expectation (probability v.s. poten

        • I've had:

          * Two offers of employment stolen (FedEX said they were signed for yet I didn't get the actual offers - somebody knows how much I make, my address, my occupation etc)
          * Silly little amazon.com thank you gift stolen (the box was found in the women's restroom)

          This is what I know of and it happened within 2 years.

          OK, great, but what does that have to do with shredding your documents? NOTHING, because neither of those things were ever in your posession to begin with, and document shredding

      • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Chazmyrr ( 145612 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:56AM (#6471297)
        Given that a substantial number of people I know or work with have been fraud victims, I'd say the likelihood is significant. The question is whether or not the one-time cost of a $40 shredder is justified. The potential time and hassle of tracking down and closing fraudulent accounts amounts to far more than $40. If you don't value your time at all, then don't buy a shredder.

        • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:59AM (#6471332) Homepage

          Sure, because it takes no time to sort your documents into shred and no-shred, shred them, then empty the shredder into the trash, rather than just lobbing everything in there.

          In a society that gives out credit card numbers as easily as names, it never ceases to amaze me the number of people that assume that their card number has been swiped from their trash rather than from any one of the other zillion places that it lives.

          • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by IIH ( 33751 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @01:47PM (#6472383)
            Sure, because it takes no time to sort your documents into shred and no-shred, shred them, then empty the shredder into the trash, rather than just lobbing everything in there.

            For the same reason that all email should be encrypted to the same level, you should shred everything, not just items that you consider condifential. Otherwise you're doing some of the work of the attacker for him, by sorting out the data into important and not-important.

        • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Lumpy ( 12016 )
          I'd say the likelihood is significant. The question is whether or not the one-time cost of a $40 shredder is justified.

          Sorry but you can cross shred and burn it and I can still gain your credit card numbers easily.

          All I have to do is go through the trash of the resturants you frequent.

          I could get 30-40 good CC numbers easily that way.

          Stores and resturants are really fricking lazy when it comes to that. be as paranoid as you want, unless you live in a bubble and never give out your info to anyone... yo

      • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:5, Funny)

        by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:17PM (#6471507) Homepage
        It's substantially more effecient to just throw your statements out to the street on trash day under your coffee grinds.
        Coffee grinds? Bah! As a parent, I have two words for you:
        diaper pail
        If someone gets my credit card statement, they damn well deserve it.

        --

      • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:4, Funny)

        by killmenow ( 184444 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:19PM (#6471522)
        I don't care about risk analysis. If there's a chance at all, (as others have pointed out) you can get a shredder for ~ 20 USD. I told my aunt to buy me a crosscut shredder for Christmas or something so got it free.

        Besides, the cost and the risk are not the point (for me). I just freaking love the feeling I get when I run solicitations through it. Jesus I love that scrunchy crunchy grinding noise it makes.

        I swear my blood pressure gets a few points closer to normal every time I shred something. Paper shredders: they do a body good!

      • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Copid ( 137416 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:22PM (#6471546)
        I would agree with you, but it depends on where you live. If you're a college student living in on-campus apartments, you should shred your documents. I've seen people dumpster diving for financial information in such areas. The campus police had a hard time staying on top of the problem where I lived. College students are good targets because their trash is frequenly mostly paper, they have to put their SSN on just about everything (at least, they used to), and their trash is almost inevitably full of credit card statements and other financial detritus. Combine that with big, shared dumpsters full of bags like that and you have a prime target. Sure, somebody probably isn't going to grab your specific garbage can in the suburbs, but the likelihood of being a target in some areas is quite high.

      • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by putaro ( 235078 )
        Forget about people dumpster diving - trash cans get spilled and bags get ripped. Do you want your bank statement blowing down the street?
    • I have one at home and use it to shred all the parts of correspondence that contains personal information.

      I've had someone use my personal details to "buy" something in a store before (albeit with some pretty out of date info) and I'm not going to make it easy for someone to try that again.

      The name and address portion of any envelope, all old bills, bank statements, etc get shredded and then those shredded segments get burned on an occassional bonfire.

      It's a little bit of work for a lot of peace of mind.

    • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Cyno ( 85911 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:57AM (#6471307) Journal
      I'm not paranoid enough to shred my financial documents. But I'll happily encrypt all my data.

      I don't trust you. Its not that I don't trust some criminal who might be after my money. I don't trust YOU. My neighbor, my friend, my fellow citizen. Because I watched you vote.

    • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nic-o-demus ( 169477 ) <[moc.edirtne] [ta] [rekcewj]> on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:13PM (#6471475) Journal
      I was working at an office in Manila for a while and one day some other guys in the office noticed a man at a table down the street a ways selling papers. When they stopped and looked at the papers, they discovered they were from our office- they had been pulled from the trash and he was selling them for something like 10 pesos a sheet (though it didn't look like he was making much of a killing). Not that they were particularly sensitive, but some of the papers had contact information on them, so we began shredding everything that had names on it.

      When I got back home to the states, I was a product development manager, and one of the first things I did was buy a nice shredder for my company. At first everyone laughed- they said I was being paranoid, but it was mostly out of habit. Pretty soon everyone was using it, though. I realized after a while that deep down I hadn't really bought the shredder because I was worried about privacy or anything, but because it's addictive. Sometimes there were lines in front of the shredder. People were shredding notes from the morning's staff meetings. People were shredding poems that they had just printed off the Internet. If anyone were to pay $8,000 to recover one of our documents, the truth is that they'll likely find a page of Holy Grail script. ("Aha! Just as we suspected! This document proves they're doing research on swallows.")

      The lesson is, shred lots of junk while you're at it. It's fun for you, bad for whoever's trying to look at your stuff, and probably fun for the guy with the glue getting paid to recover stuff.

    • Re:Still a good idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wideBlueSkies ( 618979 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @01:00PM (#6471926) Journal
      Ihave no confidence in straight line shredders.

      After doing some reading about how easy it was to put documents back together after they'd been shredded I did a little bit of testing.

      The unit tested was a Fellowes DM-3. I think I paid $50 for this thing at Staples a few years ago.

      Out of a waste basket that had about 50 shredded items in it, I was able to put 2 documents back together before I quit.... the first 2 I tried.

      It's ridiculously easy. Advertisements usually come artwork on them... it was trivial to match up one of those. I just found all the strands that were (in this case) predominantly blue and orange, and arranged them. Easy.

      In the second case, I went for something more like plain paper, a greyscale bank statement. The type of paper.. slightly grey, and the bank logo helped me identify those strands. After a few minutes, there were my transactions and balance. Not cool.

      Part of what made this so easy is that the shredder doesn't seperate the strands after shredding. They just kind of fall on the pile more or less in linear order.

      I've heard that bi-directional shredders are better, I haven't gotten around to buying one yet.

  • Question... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stoney27 ( 36372 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:35AM (#6471029) Homepage
    Ok I havn't read the story, yet but one quesion comes to mind. How do they handle double sided printing? And if they can't, more the reason to print double sided, besides saving paper.

    -S
    • I suppose you could just attach the strips to a transparency before scanning them.

    • How do they handle double sided printing?

      I'd imagine that you could stick it to transparency sheets and scan both sides...

    • Re:Question... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by plalonde2 ( 527372 )
      Double sided printing should increase the accuracy: Now each strip has about 4 edges of information to help sort them by, even if you do have to account for flipping the strip over.

    • Re:Question... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rindeee ( 530084 )
      How would duplexing make any difference at all? It is still using the same method, and in reality if you are aware of duplex printing (which would be obvious) it could reduce the number of combinations that would have to be tried (if piece X goes here, then it already knows that the other side of piece X goes here too).

  • A la Oswald Cobblepot: "All it takes is a little bit of tape, and a whole lot of patience."

    Christopher Walken (Max Schreck, IIRC), was right; when you're done shredding the eviden... er, papers, burn them.

  • If people only knew... (Score:5, Funny)

    by creative_name ( 459764 ) <pauls@nospaM.ou.edu> on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:36AM (#6471038)
    ...they were shelling out $8,000-$10,000 for some dude to sit in a room with a couple of cases of crazy glue and a knack for deciphering ink blots...

    Crap! my secret's out.
  • Guess it's time to fire up the incinerators... Let's see you stitch scan after a chemical change...

    • Who's paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:54AM (#6471254) Homepage Journal
      Papers that have been burned are usually readable, as long as the ashes aren't totall crumbled into particles. The burnt ink will have a different shade of grey than the burnt paper. It takes work, but you can reconstruct paperwork quite well from burnt papers. In many cases even easier than shredded paper, as the fragments are larger.

      If burnt until the ashes turns white again, it's even easier -- then the text will often stand out in black on white again, and be directly readable by a human eye.

      What I think would be a good solution would be a shredder with a built-in printer -- it will print random text over the sheet before shredding it, to make the text unreadable even if reassembled.
      If anyone hasn't patented it, it's too late now - I hereby declare the idea public domain and knowledge.

      Regards,
      --
      *Art
      • What I think would be a good solution would be a shredder with a built-in printer
        You mean a shrinter [thinkgeek.com]?

      • Re:Who's paranoid? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Sherloqq ( 577391 )
        What I think would be a good solution would be a shredder with a built-in printer -- it will print random text over the sheet before shredding it, to make the text unreadable even if reassembled.

        You're not off the hook just yet. Sure, you up the level of difficulty, but deciphering is still possible. Here's how:

        Each writing utensil out there (printers, pens, pencils) have different chemical components in the material they use to write, e.g. the chemical composition of an HP toner for a LaserJet II might

  • This is why (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pizen ( 178182 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:37AM (#6471042)
    This is why sensitive information should be incinerated after it has been cross-shredded.
    • Which must lead to the question: How long before it's possible to reliably decipher burnt, cross-shredded documents?
      • How long before it's possible to reliably decipher burnt, cross-shredded documents?

        Not long at all. Intact burnt documents can be recovered already, since the inks used have a different chemical composition from the bare paper. Of course, the solution to this is to cross shred your document, burn the pieces, then mash up the ashes until it is dust.
      • If you use mil-spec document distruction, pretty much never. In the Army, we used a shredder that produced bits that were 1x2mm. Hard to put together dust.

        If that shredder was down (it jammed a lot, the teeth had to be very close together), we burned the docs, mixed the ashes with water and flushed the dirty water.

    • Re:This is why (Score:5, Insightful)

      by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:47AM (#6471176)
      Why bother cross-shredding it first?

      • Re:This is why (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Pluribus ( 690506 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:07PM (#6471397) Journal
        At a government agency that I used to work for, all documents were cross shredded then eventually dumped into a what amounted to a big blender (slurry tank) that mixed the little paper sheddings with water/bleaches/detergants to make a fine paper pulp, this was then pressed into bales sold to paper recyclers. (This agency was the largest recycler in the state :-) )
    • That's why I eat all my sensitive documents after I'm done with 'em. Is someone is willing to sift through the septic tank to recreate the original document, at that point they're welcome to it.

  • New proverb: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by naner42 ( 687673 ) <naner.naner@org> on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:37AM (#6471043)
    Never put all your shreds in one waste-basket.

  • I wonder if it can be put to work on that "Baked Bean" jigsaw puzzle that I saw a few years ago...

    As an aside, does anyone know how many pieces there are in a cubic foot of multi-shredded paper? I'd imagine millions...
  • I mean, isnt shredding a type of encrypton? And isnt this reverse engineering?

    I think ive mispelled every word in here.
    • It's not encryption, but it sure as heck qualifies as "copy protection". But if I'm not mistaken, the DMCA only applies to mechanisms that are digital in nature. Shredding is definitely analog.
    • That, itself, is a form of encryption. So, anyone who attempts to understand your post, with its spelling mistakes and all, is violating the DMCMACMACA... The methodology would be using your brain and common sense logic, so please report to the nearest brain-wiping center promptly.

  • This was seen done... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HaloZero ( 610207 ) <protodeka@@@gmail...com> on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:38AM (#6471060) Homepage
    ...on a really good television show that had far too short a life.

    The Lone Gunmen [thelonegunemen.com] - Those three 'nerds' from the X-Files; Frohicke, Langly, and Byers. Great guys. Great show.

    There was one episode in which a rather critical clue was found in a shredded document; Langly and Frohicke were seen pressing the strips of paper between two pieces of contact paper and then scanning the sheet. A program therein sorted the strips, and matched them up. Voila, un-shredded document.

    Great idea. Really.

  • Impressive (Score:5, Funny)

    by jhines0042 ( 184217 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:38AM (#6471061) Journal
    But I guess thats why the government always burns sensitive papers.

    Although... I remembering hearing about a set of government instructions that once said:

    1) Destroy all copies of this document once you have read it.
    2) But make a copy first for your records.

    • Re:Impressive (Score:5, Informative)

      by panda ( 10044 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:56AM (#6471290) Homepage Journal
      Actually, at the NSA (and CIA, too IIANM), they shred documents with a cross-cut shredder, then dump it all into a mulching vat where the documents are slowly dissolved and made into a greyish goo which can be used to make brown paper. I don't recall if they actually make the paper at the end or how they dispose of the goo, if they don't make paper from it.

      If you're really paranoid about getting rid of data, mulching and consequently making paper, is much better than burning because burning leaves shriveled bits behind that can be analyzed to gain some notion of what was on the paper to begin with. Yes, I have seen most of a burned document recovered using chemical and laser analysis of the charred remnants. You would be surprised at what actually survives an attempted or accidental destruction by fire. Also, you can get better quality paper and more destruction of data by using high-powered jets to spray the ink out of the paper. (one company was advertising just such a method for cleaning paper to get better quality recycled paper. I forget just what they proposed doing with the ink.)

      No, I'm not a spook. I don't work for the above agencies, but I have had some short term experience in document recovery and archival preservation, plus most of what you want to know about effective document recovery can be found in non-classified sources (books and the 'Net).

      No, I'm not going googling for you. Do your own legwork, ya lazy bums! :-)
  • ..how much they charge for putting together the pieces of my broken career? Andy Rooney

  • Hm... social engineering! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Monkeylaser ( 674360 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:39AM (#6471072)
    I don't know about you guys, but this could conceivably make corporate espionage that much easier.

    Companies had better get more thorough in destroying their documentation if their information can still be gleaned after shredding.

    An evil thought occured to me. What sort of things could you glean from microsoft's trash using one of these programs. Any of the open-source crowd on here brave enough to find out? Could make for some amusing reading, those company memos.

    • Hire a shreadding service.. they bring a truck around and you just shread into a huge hopper.. since they do several different compnaies a day... all the shreads are mixed together. No way they could put Company A's documents together when B, C, D, E and F are also in the same hopper.

  • $10,000? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lildogie ( 54998 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:41AM (#6471106)
    How long can it take someone working full-time to do the job by hand?

    Four cubic feet a year would equal a teacher's salary.

  • Change is coming (Score:3, Interesting)

    by INMCM ( 209310 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:41AM (#6471107) Homepage
    Sounds like the folks in the Giant Black Marker Business stand to make a lot of money then. Ever tried to recover info from a page that's been "Blacked Out"? It's pretty mcuh impossible. It's not a good way to do things when you have 3 million pages of whatever to destroy, but surely technology will soon give us the More Giant Black Marker and privacy/corruption can continue.
    • Sounds like the folks in the Giant Black Marker Business stand to make a lot of money then. Ever tried to recover info from a page that's been "Blacked Out"? It's pretty mcuh impossible.

      Only one that's been photocopied. Almost any pen, pencil, or toner looks different from marker ink- this includes typewriter ribbon material. Looking at the paper at an angle would easily reveal the underlying text, which is why you get (bad) copies of blacked-out material.

    • Re:Change is coming (Score:4, Insightful)

      by multipartmixed ( 163409 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:56AM (#6471296) Homepage
      GBM would be relatively easy to "undo" with access to an appropriate lab. GBM ink is soaked into the paper; laser printing/photocopy ink is melted onto it.

      It might be as simple as finding something which will react with toner to make it fluoresce under UV.
  • the output from my cross cut shredder is dumped into the barbeque pit and burned. When they can recontruct pages from carbon ash I'll start to get worried.

    If it was important enough to shred it's important enough to burn

  • You know they'll have a way to go when they put back the pieces from a New York Deli reciept reading: "2 Kosher ham and cheese on Rye. manZlick"

  • When I was... (Score:5, Informative)

    by stubear ( 130454 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:44AM (#6471146)
    ...in the Air Force we shredded documents on a regular basis. The shredder basically turned the paper into a fine powder. We had to put the resulting powder into black bags "for fear of information being weened from unathorized viewing of the dust through the clear bags the shredded used". I always thought the computer required to piece these documents together would be enormous and would take centuries to simply match one letter from one document. The thousands of documents shredded at one time would take thousands lifetimes and by then the information would be beyond useless.

    • Re:When I was... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Salgak1 ( 20136 ) <salgak@s[ ]keasy.net ['pea' in gap]> on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:58AM (#6471317) Homepage
      I was in the USAF as well. We also had the "powdering" shredder, but OUR SOP was to shred docs, place in the black plastic bag, stop by the Field Maintenance Squadron, sign for a 1-2 gallon container of JP-4, then call Civil Engineering and the Security Police Squadron. We'd all meet at a remote location on base, I'd empty the bags into a steel drum, followed by the JP-4, CE would throw in a radio-controlled incediary thingie, and we'd all retreat 50 yards or so, the cop would make a radio call, and the CE guy pressed the trigger. Big fireball, pillar of flame for 5 minutes, and then walk back up, stir the ash, another gallon of JP-4, and repeat.

      I don't even want to THINK what they had to do with the TOP SECRET and Compartmented waste. . .

      • Re:When I was... (Score:5, Funny)

        by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:09PM (#6471422) Homepage
        I was in the USAF as well. We also had the "powdering" shredder, but OUR SOP was to shred docs, place in the black plastic bag, stop by the Field Maintenance Squadron, sign for a 1-2 gallon container of JP-4, then call Civil Engineering and the Security Police Squadron. We'd all meet at a remote location on base, I'd empty the bags into a steel drum, followed by the JP-4, CE would throw in a radio-controlled incediary thingie, and we'd all retreat 50 yards or so, the cop would make a radio call, and the CE guy pressed the trigger. Big fireball, pillar of flame for 5 minutes, and then walk back up, stir the ash, another gallon of JP-4, and repeat.
        One has to wonder how much this was dictated by security requirements, and how much is was just because you could.

        --


      • I also work in a USAF research lab. Powdering shredders are cool, but only permitted for low level stuff.

        I don't even want to THINK what they had to do with the TOP SECRET and Compartmented waste. . .

        Antimatter.

  • Memory holes. (Score:5, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:45AM (#6471158)
    For this reason, I don't throw away shredded papers. I had memory holes installed in my home, a la 1984, and whenever I throw away a paper, all I do is throw it in the memory hole and a vacuum sucks it away and into a furnace that burns the paper until it nothing but dust. I mix it with dirt, soil and fertilizer, and then I spread it all over my yard. The plants love it.
  • Thats why there are burn bags, baby! Heck, we've got a central chute in the building thats just for those.

    Sheesh, you've obviously never worked at a place that disposed of copiers via sledge hammers and acid baths.

  • Document FLAMER! (Score:4, Funny)

    by WPIDalamar ( 122110 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:49AM (#6471199) Homepage
    Excellent! Since shredding isn't secure anymore, when are we going to get personal paper INCINERATORS. Put paper in... press button... KAZAAM, 4 foot flames shoot out of the bin.

  • Try all new "Fire(tm)". Fire cleans and disinfects, all in one easy step! Documents can be rendered completely secure as well!
  • After the Islamic revolution and the takeover of the us embassy, there was a massive collection of shreaded documents ( not cross shreaded) left in the embassy. They took the time to reconsitute all of them... By Hand!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • In related news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by chad_r ( 79875 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:52AM (#6471237)
    ... Arthur Andersen accountants and Enron executives were reported to have pooped their pants upon hearing this.

  • $8-$10K/ft^3 ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jkujawa ( 56195 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:53AM (#6471246) Homepage
    ... this means, for me at least, anyone who attempts to put my shredded documents back together will lose more than they'll be able to gain from me.

    Which is the name of the game in cryptography, too -- it's pointless to attempt to decrypt a communication the content of which is less valuable than what you'll spend building a machine to decode it.

    Of course, if I were a terrorist, I'd burn my documents after shredding them. No way to reconstruct that. Yet.

  • Burn it. (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:56AM (#6471287) Journal
    Make sure it's burnt thoroughly then stir the ashes and flush em.

    That should work.

    For harddisks, I hear thermite, some pots and a big bucket of sand works - the bucket of sand is to stop the molten stuff from going through the drive, the bucket and the floor.

  • Like cryptography... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:57AM (#6471312)
    The idea is make it harder than it's worth to get the information. Having said that, it is very difficult to estimate how hard something is.

  • What we have... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by charlie763 ( 529636 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:15PM (#6471492)
    I'm in the NJ National Guard and the shredder we use puts out shreddings that I don't think could be put back together using this system. When the paper gets shredded it gets curled up on the eges, but since the slices are so small the curled edges overlap and make small rolled up strings. In the curling process the ink on the surface of the paper gets so worn out that flattening them and gluing to another piece of paper would not make the document readable.

  • Hats off to Sneakers (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ridgelift ( 228977 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:34PM (#6471664)
    It would make for a very boring movie:

    Computer: Scanning complete. Attempting to reconstruct document.
    Computer: "SETEC ASTRONOMY". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue

    Operator: N

    Computer: "MY SOCRATES NOTE". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue

    Operator: N

    Computer: "COOTYS RAT SEMEN". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue

    Operator: N

    Computer: "TOO MANY SECRETS". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue

    Operator: Okay Mother, I think we've got it.
    Uh....naah. It just doesn't do it for me.

  • $10k to solve jig-saw puzzles?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by jabber01 ( 225154 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:34PM (#6471665)
    I want THAT job!

  • they should look at the fibers at the edges (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hqm ( 49964 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @12:40PM (#6471721)
    Instead of looking at what's printed on the shreds, they should just scan the edges of each shred with a microscope. The orientation of the fibers at the edge would form a signature which could be matched to other shreds like a fingerprint. It would require higher res scanning, but I bet it would give almost perfect results.

  • Real Military shedders (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shatten ( 7242 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @01:38PM (#6472306) Homepage
    The goverment has known and use this fact for over 20 years. The real shredders turn the paper into a very fine powder. If you want references go back to gulf war I. There was the report of a fire on the ship, well that was the shredding room. Turns out when you have an airborn powder a single spark will cause an explosion. (cross refrence grain elevators)

    Have fun,

  • My Observations (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jafiwam ( 310805 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @02:13PM (#6472621) Homepage Journal
    The whole point, is to destroy data to the level of your needs (i.e. risk). Obviously, if you are the NSA or a medical records place you need good shredding, but the whole point (of my linear shredder) is to make it more work for someone to get my data, than it is the neighbor's data. Then the dumpster diving bums will skip me. (You could could regularly start a gasoline fire in your dumpster I suppose, but the cops tend to frown on that activity.)

    So I shred and add to the dumpster, with confidence that someone else's stuff is a lot easier to get to than mine.

    I should have got a cross cut simply because it fits more pages per canister of waste, the ribbons do not fall and compact nicely like the little chips do.

    There are "dusters" which pull the paper apart into dust-like fuzz instead of cleanly cutting them, those gotta be pretty close to being like burning + stirring, as the letters would be disassembled as well as the words and phrases.

    I am not really looking for a perfect system, just to do an easy and simple way of reducing of the many ways data can leak out.

    [Complaining that shredders are usless because the waitress can get the number is silly, that's like saying you won't patch IIS because someone could always walk by the machine and reboot it with a floppy disk in the drive. Chances are you'll get probes via the web server more often than someone tries to reboot the box while standing there... It's all about risk reduction, do a little bit where the return is best until you reach your ideal risk/work level.]

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