shellylh

Hope you (and your family if they are with you) are safe Marc!

Picture of the room without the white chair. It used to be where the small table is.

I (with the help of my grad student and her husband who has a truck) moved a love seat that we had at the house into my office. Now I have a place for napping (and sleeping if I get stuck overnight there again). It's a great couch for napping (it has low poofy arms that make a perfect pillow) and I'm short so I fit perfectly. The big white chair that used to be in front of the speaker in the living room is where the couch used to be so now there is nothing obstructing the speaker. Tim was right, the room doesn't look as nice - oh well.

I definitely would plan on reformatting it.

It's not very hard to get at the SSD. Unfortunately, it's not a standard SSD that I can buy at amazon and put back in. I suppose apple would charge me a lot to replace it. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Display+Mid+2014+SSD+Replacement/27849 Damn, even from ifixit, they are charging $314.95 for a new replacement drive. Edit: I guess Dusty already pointed this out.

Why would writing over the drive twice work if writing over it once didn't? Just curious. I think I made him encrypt the drive when he first got it. If this is true, I assume it would be difficult for someone to recover the data (well, except his password is pretty easy for a computer to guess probably - would it help for me to change his main password?).

By the way, can anyone explain why encryption doesn't work. If encryption does keep people from getting to your information, why do it? I would think it would be as good as reforming the HD.

Yeah but I don't think it is that easy to get to the hard drive in the MBP.

It would be much better for a random person to try to reconstruct the data because he has letters of recommendation for students who are current grad studetns, postdocs and former students (these are exactly the people who are going to have access to the computer). While it is unlikely they would do this, graduate students in math have been known to spend endless hours doing something just because they can (and some have backgrounds in computer science).

I realized that I have to erase the hard drive on Tim's most recent computer (2014 MBP) which has a SSD drive. The problem is that I have to give the laptop back to the department and I believe they are going to use the laptop. I think it needs to include the SSD and even if not, I am not sure how easy it is to get the SSD out of the computer. Is there a way to securely erase an SSD without physically destroying it? I have read that encrypting doesn't work nor does writing over with zeros.

Finished Catastrophe Season 1 - it was pretty funny.

I had already checked the BIOS settings and it didn't have USB as an option like the other tablet. I just put the older harddrive in the newer tablet pc and did it that way, they weren't very hard to get to.

Is Jeni's back in business again?

Barf.

Thanks Jacob and Mark. Ran into an annoying problem: my older 2005 tablet pc won't boot from a USB drive and doesn't have CD drive. That is annoying. Guess I'll switch the HDs in the two of them and use the newer computer to wipe it.

How do you write all 1s to the drive?

This is not really the right thread but I thought some people here would know the answer. I am erasing the drives of some old (2005 and 2008) Windows tablet pcs so that I can recycle them. I am using a live usb boot of linux to erase the hard drive. I first tried sudo wipe /dev/sda but that said it was going to take 4 weeks and 1 day, not a good solution. Then I tried sudo wipe -q -Q 1 /dev/sda and that was still going to take over 19 hours. So I am thinking just writing over it with zeros using dd. sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda Will that be secure enough? Perhaps I can run it 2-3 times. I could also use random data (but maybe that will take too long) sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda Any better options?

Happy birthday Todd!!!

OK I didn't know that. I guess Firefox is not? That may explain why my mom always has a bunch of shit Malware on her Mac whenever I see her. I forced her to start using Chrome so that is probably a good start. I guess I actually want to use a VM, not a sanboxed browser. It seems a bit more secure.

I sometimes find myself searching website that may have malware, etc (not porn, for example, I was just searching about viruses because of a problem with my dad's computer). Given the increasing amount of malware out there, I thought it might be useful to be browsing in a virtual machine. Is parallels still good or is there something better out there. For a related question, is there a way to sandbox a single browser?

Yeah, it was pretty easy to find once I knew about it.

Yeah, it was pretty easy to find once I knew about it.

I haven't paid attention to the news today. Guess I missed something.

Yeah, it is a 32-bit. I don't think he will mind though. He doesn't use it for much. I'm guessing he would not have a good time with the drivers. I wish I were still there to do this. I am wondering if he would just let me buy he a new desktop (I tried this Christmas and he said no). This seems decent and Dell doesn't put bloatware on the computer. http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-3647-small-desktop/pd?oc=fdcwst315bw10&model_id=inspiron-3647-small-desktop Unfortunately, it does come with Windows 10 (which he probably won't like since he probably won't be able to run Microsoft Office 2000 on). Now that I think about it, I doubt Windows 8.1 is compatible with Office 2000.