NeXT
Veteran Member
This is a sticky issue that always comes up from time to time. It has some justified pros and cons to it.
The issues is what to do with personal information you find on a machine you have received. The contents can be anything from old manuscripts to QuickTax files from the 90's to emails and company X internal information.
Now of course the easiest thing as the receiver would be to delete the data or format the entire drive and start over, of for the seller to format or even physically remove the drive. While either might be an ideal solution, just in case you run the extreme risk of rendering the machine unusable. The Internet is getting close to 25 years old. While clusters of drivers and system specific data has slowly migrated into private collections some data has never been successfully archived, in part to scrapers honoring robots.txt, that vile little textfile that has has been nothing but problems.
To the point, it makes people paranoid. Data can be lost and simply to assume "grandma's secret recipes" are safe you could be taking the hopes of other machine owners with it. Nobody wants it.
Anyways, while the US military has phased the concept out now the idea of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell seems to work really well for situations like this (on software, not people).
Don't Ask If a machine comes up somewhere which might of belonged originally to a certain person or organization, don't ask the seller or the buyer if there is any interesting data left on the drive. Just that extra push or even the notion that a hard drive might be present ins something might make them remove or destroy its contents. Again, there's the real possibility you will take the last software for that series machine with it.
Don't tell
If you receive a machine and there's just about any kind of personal information on it, don't brag about what you found. Don't even mention that you found something. Let them just assume it contains a valid OS install and perhaps an application or two. You shouldn't need to be reporting on everything you find on the machine unless you find something especially interesting, something either historical or something just so absurd that mentioning it might ring a bell with some programmer from yonder, possibly work done by another forum member sometime in the past. A great example is a friend who stumbled upon by accident what seems to be the source files (or a copy of) used to render the lightcycle scene from TRON.
Just telling people what you found also has the potential to add paranoia. What if there was some guy on some other forum talking about the stuff they found on a machine you discarded? What would you do to ease your mind that this won't happen. You's destroy or otherwise format the drive, again potentially destroying data that is still needed.
I briefly used 68KMLA as a test subject on this concept. It didn't work well, then again it's 68KMLA so you're one case of inbreeding short of qualifying as an Amibay or BetaArchive member, so it's more something that a forum as a whole would need to enforce, else it's more incentive to be ignorant assholes and KEEP TALKING ABOUT THE DAMN STUFF THEY FIND. ffs.
The issues is what to do with personal information you find on a machine you have received. The contents can be anything from old manuscripts to QuickTax files from the 90's to emails and company X internal information.
Now of course the easiest thing as the receiver would be to delete the data or format the entire drive and start over, of for the seller to format or even physically remove the drive. While either might be an ideal solution, just in case you run the extreme risk of rendering the machine unusable. The Internet is getting close to 25 years old. While clusters of drivers and system specific data has slowly migrated into private collections some data has never been successfully archived, in part to scrapers honoring robots.txt, that vile little textfile that has has been nothing but problems.
To the point, it makes people paranoid. Data can be lost and simply to assume "grandma's secret recipes" are safe you could be taking the hopes of other machine owners with it. Nobody wants it.
Anyways, while the US military has phased the concept out now the idea of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell seems to work really well for situations like this (on software, not people).
Don't Ask If a machine comes up somewhere which might of belonged originally to a certain person or organization, don't ask the seller or the buyer if there is any interesting data left on the drive. Just that extra push or even the notion that a hard drive might be present ins something might make them remove or destroy its contents. Again, there's the real possibility you will take the last software for that series machine with it.
Don't tell
If you receive a machine and there's just about any kind of personal information on it, don't brag about what you found. Don't even mention that you found something. Let them just assume it contains a valid OS install and perhaps an application or two. You shouldn't need to be reporting on everything you find on the machine unless you find something especially interesting, something either historical or something just so absurd that mentioning it might ring a bell with some programmer from yonder, possibly work done by another forum member sometime in the past. A great example is a friend who stumbled upon by accident what seems to be the source files (or a copy of) used to render the lightcycle scene from TRON.
Just telling people what you found also has the potential to add paranoia. What if there was some guy on some other forum talking about the stuff they found on a machine you discarded? What would you do to ease your mind that this won't happen. You's destroy or otherwise format the drive, again potentially destroying data that is still needed.
I briefly used 68KMLA as a test subject on this concept. It didn't work well, then again it's 68KMLA so you're one case of inbreeding short of qualifying as an Amibay or BetaArchive member, so it's more something that a forum as a whole would need to enforce, else it's more incentive to be ignorant assholes and KEEP TALKING ABOUT THE DAMN STUFF THEY FIND. ffs.
Last edited: