Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!pardo
From: pardo@june.cs.washington.edu (David Keppel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: EMERGENCY!!!!!!!!!PLEASE HELP ME IF YOU CAN
Message-ID: <4740@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 88 20:22:23 GMT
References: <12951@brl-adm.ARPA> <4470002@hpindda.HP.COM> <10820@cgl.ucsf.EDU>
Reply-To: pardo@uw-june.UUCP (David Keppel)
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 22

seibel@socrates.ucsf.edu.UUCP (George Seibel%Kollman) writes:
->>[... some poor guy formats a disk with important data ...]
->>
->>vandys@hpindda.HP.COM (Andy Valencia) writes:
->>> ...
->>>will indeed do it for the latter.  For the former, you could hire
->>>a group of physicists to do small-signal analysis of each track.
->>>Otherwise you're hosed.
->>>
->>I once read about a company that did this - they could read data off of
->>tapes that had been overwritten, even multiple times, if I recall.  Charged
->>a lot of money for it, too.   Interesting security hole - better burn those
->>old tapes.

Turns out dynamic RAMs can be read once (destructively) after they
are turned off.  For this reason, (among others) all the computer
equipment that goes into "the vaults" IS destroyed.  This causes
some problems, though, when you need to debug something in the vault,
since you can't take it out, you have to take in all the test
equipment, and then you can't take the test equipment out again...

	;-D on  ( National insecurity: TV )  Pardo