August 10, 200520 yr So on one of my frequent trips to my local used electronics store, I came upon a 20GB laptop hard drive. My girlfriend's MP3 player uses these drives, her 30gig died, and she is using my 3.5 gig, so I thought the 20 would be a nice upgrade. I get it home, plug it in to my "ide-2-usb" interface, it doesn't spin up. I figure, at this point, I have essentially nothing to lose, so I open up the drive, tweak the arm a bit, and lo and behold it works. As it comes up on my machine, I see loads and loads of corporate files. I tracked these folks down, and it turns out they're a social security, retirement, and healthcare consultant firm based in Pittsburgh. There's all sorts of highly confidental material on here, like HIPPA files, internal memos, that kind of thing. Plus, this drive seemed to be used almost exclusively by two of their Vice Presidents. Naturally, I send them an e-mail, and give them a call on Monday. I'm transfered to their tech guy, who seems quite freaked by the whole thing. He says that if I would just wipe the drive, we'd be OK. So I do. It crashes in the middle of the wipe, I figure, whatever. I get an e-mail today (Tuesday) from one of their vice presidents saying, in effect, "Um, actually, we DO need that drive back for record keeping purposes. We know that you have wiped it, and that it has crashed again, but we still need it. Tell us how much you want for it." So I'm shipping it back to them, total cost to me: about $35. I figure $75 is a good price for them, especially considering the fines they would face if the government found out they had messed up like that with confidential records. I have only theories about how the drive could have traveled 2,000 odd miles from Pittsburgh to Tucson.. something that I'll probably wonder about for quite a while.
August 10, 200520 yr This would have been the best moment ever in history to switch over to the dark side.
August 10, 200520 yr Author This would have been the best moment ever in history to switch over to the dark side. /me starts sending one of the VPs pictures of their childeren sleeping... Yes, those were on the drive too.
August 10, 200520 yr Similar thing happened to me once.. My mom bought this little set of drawers at a sale somewhere.. We get it home and open it up, and discover what we thought was a library card catalog, is actually files from some insurance company. Has all kinds of client info, including social security numbers and etc.. We were on the news, and I beleive turned the thing into the police...
August 10, 200520 yr Newspapers would probably pay you far more than $75 for the rights to the story ^_^ Mercifull <3 Suzi "We don't want players to be able to buy their way to success in RuneScape. If we let players start doing this, it devalues RuneScape for others. We feel your status in real-life shouldn't affect your ability to be successful in RuneScape" Jagex 01/04/01 - 02/03/12
August 10, 200520 yr Mate gave me a HDD from one of his own boxes a while ago. Threw it in to format it and turned out to have about 4 years of data from his old work. I just shrugged and attacked it with Partition Magic :rofl:
August 10, 200520 yr I say you send them to the cleaners :P Hold out for more money! This is how much you all raised for charity. Thank you.
August 10, 200520 yr I say you send them to the cleaners :P Hold out for more money! This man speaks the truth. They could get in serious trouble for allowing that sort of material to be released into the public domain. Blackmail for the win! Kirk and Lars I could handle. At the same time.
August 10, 200520 yr I dont know how anyone can be so reckless as to just throw a harddrive away! ~Dan64AuSince 27 Aug 2002
August 10, 200520 yr Both very weird and a very good opportunity to make some cold hard cash. Shame on you for not realising! That is pretty weird though, but with buying second hand hard drives you can never be sure what you're getting. My friend bought a pc once from his dad's friend, and the guy had wiped the hard drive. What he didn't realise is that somehow he left access to his email account on the computer (not sure exactely how it happened, was a long time ago) - needless to say it put me off pornography for a bit *barfs* Try and sell your paper to the story. Er, story to the paper. my backspace key is broken and cant be bothered to reach for the mouse lol so ignore that. pretty odd stuff though :P
August 10, 200520 yr Hey, i'll give you $80 for it, then blackmail them for about...$200+. You havvvee to make some money off of that, I woulda pushed as much as I could get. They needed the files, so its their loss either way. Imagine threatening to post all the info on the internet. Lmao.
August 11, 200520 yr I have often thought about buying $10,000-$15,000 worth of harddrives for the sole purpose of blackmail. I could probably make a few grand from the blackmail not to mention I would still have $10,000-$15,000 worth of hardware to sell on afterwards. Fortunatly I cant be bothered putting this plan into action. ~Dan64AuSince 27 Aug 2002
August 11, 200520 yr Serious, wanna do a private auction on eBay for it? I'll pay $100 plus delivery to the UK. This is how much you all raised for charity. Thank you.
August 11, 200520 yr ... I have this sudden desire to buy second-hand harddrives. Preferably odd ones that might have been st... I mean... I never said that last! -This message was deviously brought to you by:
August 11, 200520 yr Blackmail is illegal, selling story to papers is not Mercifull <3 Suzi "We don't want players to be able to buy their way to success in RuneScape. If we let players start doing this, it devalues RuneScape for others. We feel your status in real-life shouldn't affect your ability to be successful in RuneScape" Jagex 01/04/01 - 02/03/12
August 11, 200520 yr Author Yeah, I prefer to AVOID blackmail/extortion, that kind of thing. And I've already shipped it to them. I might get some highly paid tech work out of this, (like, $80 an hour) and I'd rather make a few grand legally, than by extorting it from some folks who just happened to mess up. I would imagine that this kind of thing happens fairly regularly, so I don't know how good a newspaper story it would make. Without the drive, or contents of the drive, I don't think the story would be terribly verifiable either. I do like what one of the people on my work's forums suggested though $75...are you kidding? This is America! ya gotta add on: Effort tax, $8,750. Footstep charge, $60 for every footstep taken with HDD on the mind. AASCWIO pittance, $500. Post office line tax, $6,000. RIAA might sue me tax, $120,000. Your clients would sue you for a lot more than $75 tax, $750,000. Gratuity, $9,000 etc. etc.
August 11, 200520 yr I might get some highly paid tech work out of this, (like, $80 an hour) and I'd rather make a few grand legally, than by extorting it from some folks who just happened to mess up. Then let me! My offer still stands. This is how much you all raised for charity. Thank you.
August 11, 200520 yr $80 an hour lol, thats more than a consultant. You'd never get that purely because you found an old HDD :P Mercifull <3 Suzi "We don't want players to be able to buy their way to success in RuneScape. If we let players start doing this, it devalues RuneScape for others. We feel your status in real-life shouldn't affect your ability to be successful in RuneScape" Jagex 01/04/01 - 02/03/12
August 12, 200520 yr Author $80 an hour lol, thats more than a consultant. You'd never get that purely because you found an old HDD :P Ah, but data recovery is another matter entirely. I regularly get $40-$50 an hour doing network and hardware support for companies around town, so I'm sure I can charge at least $80 for basic data recovery stuff like I did on this particular disk. Basically just have to get it to spin up for long enough to make a ghost image of it, and you're good to go. :D
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