"I have a copy of an unleaked source in a safe deposit box in an undisclosed credit union in my former home state of VA on an LTO-5 tape. I cannot leak it, as it's off an Origin 300 that was incorrectly wiped and came from a US DoD auction."
If that's true, that seems...very sloppy. I bought some lower end SGI hardware from a government contractor surplus auction years back, and they trashed all the hard drives before they went to auction. They didn't just wipe them. Nothing had drives installed, and they even trashed all the drive caddies, so you had to track down new caddies to get the damn things working.
Yeah, that is sadly a thing. My first ever VAXstation came with the drive ripped out, and mounting bracket, and cable. The drive is easy to replace, but the rest was pure unobtanium.
We need to kill the myth that physically damaging a hard disk is "secure destruction" when an overwrite with zeros is more secure.
I assumed this was a leak, due to the lack of license, and, indeed, a discussion on Reddit says it's a leak (and that the reported version is wrong). https://www.reddit.com/r/IRIX/comments/132hsko/irix_source_c...
Another interesting bit from that discussion:
"I have a copy of an unleaked source in a safe deposit box in an undisclosed credit union in my former home state of VA on an LTO-5 tape. I cannot leak it, as it's off an Origin 300 that was incorrectly wiped and came from a US DoD auction."
If that's true, that seems...very sloppy. I bought some lower end SGI hardware from a government contractor surplus auction years back, and they trashed all the hard drives before they went to auction. They didn't just wipe them. Nothing had drives installed, and they even trashed all the drive caddies, so you had to track down new caddies to get the damn things working.
> hey even trashed all the drive caddies
Yeah, that is sadly a thing. My first ever VAXstation came with the drive ripped out, and mounting bracket, and cable. The drive is easy to replace, but the rest was pure unobtanium.
We need to kill the myth that physically damaging a hard disk is "secure destruction" when an overwrite with zeros is more secure.