Meet Bustadrive, a home-made hard disk destroyer

Friday, August 14th, 2009

If your job involves having to destroy hard disks and make sure that their data is impossible to recover, you’ll know that it can be an expensive business: properly disposing of each hard disk can cost between £5 and £10 and, when you’re managing the IT affairs of potentially large businesses, these costs can mount up.

One IT Manager has had enough, though, and taken the matter into this own hands by creating the Bustadrive, a machine that uses a powerful “hydraulic punch” to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable.

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The Government wants to track our cars… but should we care?

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

I’m not generally the type of person to be worried by CCTV cameras and the concept of Big Brother watching my every move (my every move is very dull), but even I was a little perturbed to read an article in this morning’s Guardian suggesting that the UK Government “is backing a project to install a ‘communication box’ in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe”. (Click here if you want to hear the author of the report discussing the story.)

Now it turns out this is a slightly over-dramatic first sentence to the Guardian article. (more…)

Computers – not the apocalypse – are the interesting bit

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

The Large Hadron Collider booted up for the first time today – a machine that cost a staggering £5 billion to build, required collaboration between thousands of physicists and engineers from 85 countries and is itself so large that it spans two countries. It’s awe inspiring as a whole, but even the computer geekery behind it alone is impressive. So why is everyone missing the point?

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Protecting your data, the hard way

Friday, June 13th, 2008

With all the critical media coverage of high-profile data losses in recent months (much of it here on PC Pro), it’s no wonder that people are thinking more and more about their own data security. It makes sense to be paranoid, to a certain extent, but it’s easy to go too far. (more…)