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Killing Data on Old Drives

The same weekend I read "Hard Drives Exposed" by Tom Spring [News and Trends, May], I went to a local computer sale. My buddy bought a 10GB hard drive for $22. Not only did it have confidential information, it also had working versions of Windows Me and Microsoft Office. I guess you hit the nail on the head.

Paul Lenzen, Watertown, Minnesota

Your sidebar "Data Killing 101" recommends using software to destroy data. My approach: After taking apart my old hard drive as much as possible, I pounded away at it with a hammer for about 5 minutes. Yes, this is a crude and barbaric way to dispose of an old drive, but I feel that it is better to be safe than sorry.

Angelo Salerno Jr., Jersey City, New Jersey

California's new privacy law, SB1386, takes effect this summer. It requires every entity doing business in California to report real or "potential" security breaches involving identifiable names, associated Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, and so on. Destroying the hard drive--simply by drilling a few holes through the disk--is both cost-effective and prudent.

Stephen Richard Levine, Westlake Village, California

You don't mention using computer manufacturers' software restoration discs to sanitize old hard disks. Aren't these discs acceptable for data killing?

George Bollman, via the Internet

As noted in your report, simply doing a high-level reformat is largely useless. However, what about running the fdisk command from the command prompt? Would running fdisk, followed by high-level reformatting (without changing partition arrangements), do the trick?

Scott Ochiltree, via the Internet

Editor's response: Drilling holes could still leave recoverable data on the disk. Simply restoring a system to its original state won't stymie a determined data sleuth (it also leaves the operating system intact). Even using the fdisk utility and reformatting is insufficient. The safest approach: Use a wiping program that overwrites the disk with multiple passes. See the June Answer Line ("Wipe Your Drive Clean of All Its Sensitive Data") for details.

Cracking Down on Spam

As I see it, most e-mail programs work in reverse of what they should be doing ["Natural-Born Spam Killers," May]. That is, when you install an e-mail program in your machine, it should not let any information in unless you give it an e-mail address to accept. If you type in only five addresses, mail from those addresses is all you should get. The millions of dollars we spend for antispam programs would come to an end. Wouldn't that be great!

Paul Jennings, Loris, South Carolina

News reports say AOL, MSN, and Yahoo are cracking down on spammers. But these Net services all miss one key point: Spammers often create a fraudulent free e-mail address through them, spam thousands, and then kill the address, knowing that it will soon be blocked by most recipients. A simple way to curb this practice is to place temporary limits on the e-mail accounts. For the first six months of an account's existence, limit the total number of e-mail messages sent out to something reasonable--say, 100 a day (obviously, incoming mail shouldn't be affected). After six months, the limit should be lifted. At the least, spammers would have to wait six months before they could use a fraudulent address.

Tim Danner, Allentown, Pennsylvania

I feel that your evaluation of MailWasher Pro 3 does the program a grave injustice. Filters have sometimes deleted messages I wanted. My ISP has spam-fighting software on its servers, yet I kept getting more spam. But 11 months ago I heard about MailWasher. It's fantastic. Before MailWasher, I got as many as ten spam messages a day. Now I sometimes go for weeks without getting any.

Mark Eby, El Paso, Texas

Help on the Cheap

On April 1 (an auspicious date), I activated my cable modem. My installer noted that I had half, or less, of the expected bandwidth. I spent the next several days e-mailing my PC vendor and trying various fixes and downloads, to no avail.

Then PC World [May] arrived. In "Cheap Tweaks," an item suggested analyzing the TCP/IP setting through SpeedGuide.net, and if needed, downloading and optimizing the setting with the site's optimizer.

I followed the advice and achieved a bandwidth of over 500 kbps. Thanks to PC World I went from severe aggravation to elation in about 15 minutes.

Thomas T. McGranahan Sr., via the Internet

Your "Cheap Tweaks" item on adding foreign punctuation came at the right time. Our company just released one of our applications to our global community in Europe. I was finding it difficult to correspond with users via e-mail, because I needed many of those special marks, especially for names. I felt I was spelling names incorrectly if I didn't use the right marks, but they were difficult to get to. Your little paragraph helps immensely.

However, I had no luck searching Word help for "foreign punctuation" (perhaps you did not use Word 2000).

David C. Everett, via the Internet

Editor's response: The list of shortcuts is only in Word 2002 and 2003, a point omitted during the editing process. Go to "Foreign-punctuation keyboard shortcuts" to download the list.

--Dennis O'Reilly

Tweaks We Need

Harry McCracken's May Up Front editorial ["Cheap Tweaks Tech Firms Should Make"] declares, "Software should not install anything in a user's system tray without asking permission. Period." Amen!

But software should not install anything in a user's system tray, on a user's desktop, or in a user's Quick Launch bar without asking permission. And if permission is withheld, it shouldn't install itself anyway.

T. R. Valentine, Plano, Illinois

The problem isn't that companies are indifferent to these tweaks; it's a matter of who would pay for them. The mantra for all companies is: Cut costs and make profits. For example, to consumers, long file names would be a nice, simple convenience; but for a software company, it may require reengineering a huge library of program and data files. There is little return on such a task, so why pursue it?

Jason McMahon, Dolgeville, New York

Keeping Track of Patches

Despite what the patch history item says [Bugs and Fixes, May], there are two simple ways to obtain the information. The first one: Go to Windows Explorer at C:\Windows. The first item should be a listing of Microsoft fixes installed.

Or go online to Microsoft Windows Update; one option is a button to see download history, including dates and titles, and whether a download was successful.

Charles G. Voelker, via the Internet

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