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December 18, 2015
How to Destroy a Hard Drive‑Permanently
This time last week FBI divers were searching Seccombe Lake, a freshwater lake about three kilometers from the Inland Regional Center, the site of December 2 shooting that left 14 dead and 22 injured. Reports indicated that shooters Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook had ditched their laptop hard drive, which may contain e-mails and other evidence, in the murky water around the time of the attack.
Although the search has concluded, investigators have not confirmed whether or not a drive was recovered. But if one was, data-forensics experts say there is a good chance stored information will still be easily accessible, and that there would have been more effective ways to destroy the drive.
A hard drive works almost exactly like a record player. Data is stored in blocks of 1s and 0s on an aluminum, ceramic or glass platter, which looks a lot like a CD. The platter is centered on a spindle, which controls its rotation; a head uses an electric current to read and write data. An actuator and other electronic components control the entire operation.
Water might short out the electronics, but that’s about it. “The data's still on the platters, regardless if they got wet or not,” explains Russell Chozick, vice president of Flashback Data, a data-recovery firm in Austin, Texas. As long as the platters are not allowed to dry out, which he says could leave hard-to-clean residue behind, forensics experts should be able to recover data with relative ease.
Modern solid-state drives (SSDs) and flash memory can be more susceptible to drowning, Chozick says. Many of them have onboard encryption, which means the drive’s circuit board is necessary to decode anything stored on the memory chip. At the same time, SSDs only represent about one third of the current PC hard drive market, so conventional spinning drives are still mostly the primary concern.
So, what’s better than water? Despite what television and fretful IT guys have taught us, bringing magnets close to the hard drive might not effectively corrupt the data, either. You’d first have to get past the steel sheathing that protects platters in most drives, explains Gleb Budman, CEO and co-founder of Backblaze, a cloud storage company that builds its servers out of consumer-grade hard drives. “Given a good enough magnet, and a close enough proximity, it's certainly a valid attack,” he says, “But if you want guarantee, shredding the platter is the safer way to go.”
Indeed, opening up the drive—a task easily achieved with a screwdriver and hammer in a few minutes—and using brute force on the platter is the best way to destroy it in short order. “Laptop hard drives have glass platters,” Chozick says. “If you throw those hard enough, the glass will shatter, and no one's going to recover that.” (Painstaking recovery is possible in some cases; investigators worked to piece together data from Adam Lanza’s smashed drive after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, for instance, but the process is both lengthy and expensive.)
Aluminum platters, often found in desktops, take a little more work, however. A giant scratch, for example, can prevent the drive from initializing and stymie conventional data-recovery efforts. The same goes for a small—or large—crack in the platter. But advanced forensics labs, Budman says, might be able to read between those blemishes. “They don't even necessarily make [the drives] spin; they can look at each individual block on the platter,” he says, which can allow experts to recover enough 0s and 1s to read.
Drilling holes in the platter, on the other hand, generates heat that can easily cause universal damage. “You're potentially distorting the platter itself. You're doing things that might cause all of the rest of the platter to change slightly,” Budman says. “And it doesn't need to change a lot in order for the data to be completely invalid.”
When in doubt, he advises using simple chemistry: acid. “You let the acid peel away everything's that's of value on the platters,” Budman says.
Of course, there are less aggressive ways to wipe clean a drive. Both Windows and Mac OS X include utilities that securely erase drives by overwriting existing contents with random 0s and 1s. Budman recommends doing this twice on newer drives and seven times on older ones, as some advanced forensics labs might be able to find “ghosts” of the overwritten data.
For covering tracks, though, Chozick cautions that a hard drive full of gibberish is still a big red flag. “For litigation, if your drive is being called in question and it's been zeroed out, obviously we know that there's been some spoliation of data. And we can tell that to a jury, and they don't like it so much.” he says.
Fossil Friday
Whose teeth are these? If you think you know the answer, write it on a postcard or on a cast of a giant anteater skull, and mail it to NCSE, PO Box 9477, Berkeley CA 94709-0477. Or just leave a comment below.
Bone Suggests “Red Deer Cave People” A Mysterious Species Of Human
Photo credit:
Artist’s reconstruction of a Red Deer Cave man. Peter Schouten, Author provided
It’s been an exciting year for human evolution with several discoveries dramatically rewriting major episodes of our ancient past.
Is Virgin Birth Possible? Yes (Unless You Are A Mammal)
Photo credit:
A very different nativity scene. Frank/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
Christmas seems an appropriate time to ask whether it’s biologically possible to have a virgin birth. And you may be surprised to hear that it is possible – just not for humans, or any other mammals.
Experiments with mice and other mammals show an egg must be fertilised with a sperm to kick off development of any kind. Just stimulating a mammal egg with chemicals or electricity doesn’t trigger it to divide normally.
Explainer: What Is The “Flesh-Eating” Disease That’s Spreading Across Syria?
Photo credit:
The Leishmania parasite. Shutterstock
As if years of war, terrorism and oppression weren’t harrowing enough for the people of Syria, the country is experiencing an epidemic of a so-called flesh-eating disease. Outbreaks of the disease, known as leishmaniasis, have been reported repeatedly over the past year.
Anti-Evolution Legislation Shows Descent With Modification
“Creationism evolves and sometimes those new strategies succeed.”
Nicholas Matzke, an evolutionary biologist currently on a fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra.
“So I think a lot of people, it might not have been on their radar, that we have two states that have a statewide policy that encourages teachers to introduce sort-of false criticisms of evolution…and it also more explicitly tries to prevent administrators from doing anything about it.”
Those states are Tennessee and Louisiana. Matzke used to work for the National Center for Science Education, the NCSE, which tracks these legislative efforts to get religiously motivated creationism and its thinly disguised offshoots like Intelligent Design into public school classrooms.
Matzke and the NCSE were involved in the Kitzmiller versus Dover case in Pennsylvania in which the judge found the inclusion of Intelligent Design in the biology curriculum to be a violation of the First Amendment. December 20th marks the 10th anniversary of that decision. But dozens of similar bills that do not explicitly mention creationism or intelligent design have been proposed since.
“Over the years I’d kept in touch with NCSE people and we had always talked about, you know, these bills look like they’re just being copied and modified, we should do a phylogeny at some point—do an evolutionary analysis of them…so it had gotten up to being about 60 bills…I took all those bills, lined up all those texts, coded all the characteristics, all the variations between these texts, and then ran them through the standard phylogenetic analyses that we use for DNA. We use them for dinosaurs, they get used to study virus evolution. Those same programs can be used on texts that have been copied and modified.”
Matzke’s tongue in cheek, or rather panda’s thumb in a creationist’s eye, analysis is in the journal Science. [Nicholas J. Matzke, The evolution of antievolution policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover]
It reveals a high degree of relatedness among the bills—that is, legislators make slight alterations in bills either from their own state or other states in the hopes that this time the particular wording will get the bill passed.
“With the phylogenetic analysis we can tell when do these steps happen and how influential are they on future antievolution legislation…so it’s worth alerting people to the fact that these bills exist and alerting people to how these strategies change through time.”
—Steve Mirsky
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
Large Hadron Collider Sees Tantalizing Hints Of A New Particle That Could Revolutionize Physics
Photo credit:
Atlas November.
At the start of December a rumour swirled around the internet and physics lab coffee rooms that researchers at the Large Hadron Collider had spotted a new particle. After a three-year drought that followed the discovery of the Higgs boson, could this be the first sign of new physics that particle physicists have all been desperately hoping for?
How Noise Pollution Is Changing Animal Behaviour
Photo credit:
Noise all around us … #bang #vroom #drr #pip-pip! Diego Cervo/www.shutterstock.com
Noise pollution, generally an unintended byproduct of urbanisation, transport and industry, is a key characteristic of human development and population growth. In some cases, it is produced intentionally, for example when seismic surveys are being carried out using powerful airgun arrays to explore and map the seafloor, or active sonar, which uses sound waves to detect objects in the ocean.
New Material Could Dramatically Reduce The Cost Of Smartphones
Photo credit:
The new metal compound is up to 95 percent cheaper than the current market-leading material. Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock
When it comes to smartphones, tablet computers and television displays, one construction material dominates them all: Indium tin oxide (ITO). It has been used for the last 60 years, and is a key component for more than 90 percent of all such displays. But a potential competitor to ITO has just been discovered, one that is both highly transparent and extremely conductive. Its workings are detailed in the journal Nature Materials.
December 17, 2015
And, But, Therefore: Randy Olson and the Art of Science Storytelling, Part 3
In parts 1 and 2, I looked at Randy Olson’s new book, Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story, and saw a number of positive examples of how science storytelling can be done well to communicate science. But the techniques of dramatic storytelling are also available to creationists and science-deniers. Today we’ll examine cases where narrative techniques are used with malicious intent.
Creationists love to tell the following story: Evolution is wrong, and scientists know evolution is wrong, but scientists are either too cowardly to challenge establishment thinking, or they are part of a grand conspiracy to promote materialistic thinking as a way to undermine religion. Only brave creationists, this narrative goes, have the courage to stand up to the evolution orthodoxy. They imagine themselves modern-day Galileos, boldly speaking truth to power.
This story makes for a compelling narrative. But it is dead wrong.
Climate change deniers spin a related yarn. Climate scientists, this story goes, know that there are problems with the standard thinking about global warming, but they are too afraid of the reaction of their peers and the loss of grant funding to speak out. According to this denialist narrative, climate scientists continue to publish papers linking CO2 and climate change not because they think this linkage is real, but because they are forced to do so in order to maintain their careers.
Again, this story is engaging. But it is a fiction.
One of the worst examples of using narrative fiction to attack climate science is Michael Crichton’s 2004 novel State of Fear. Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and Prey, has the ironic distinction of being an anti-science science fiction writer. Not only did Crichton reject climate science, but he also declined to accept second-hand smoke as a health hazard, refused to acknowledge DDT as an environmental problem, wanted to shut down the EPA, and for good measure thought the SETI radio telescope project was “unquestionably a religion,” while environmentalism he dubbed “the religion of choice for urban atheists.” Crichton estimated that “environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s.”
In Crichton’s books, scientists are often villains or dupes responsible for unleashing technologically-created terrors into the world. In The Andromeda Strain, for example, a returning satellite brings with it a deadly microorganism that proceeds to kill humans with ease. The clear message is that space exploration puts our species at risk; better not to explore, just stay home. In his novel Jurassic Park, DNA extraction and genetic experimentation are used to recreate dinosaurs, with predictably chewy results for the humans involved. The message is that it’s better not to tamper with nature, lest you be punished. In Prey, Crichton takes nanotechnology to task, spinning a tale of out-of-control, self-reproducing micro-machines that kill people and threaten to swarm the planet. The message here: again, technological advances lead to disaster. Crichton’s anti-science books spin consistent narratives of science as a danger to humanity, of scientists as irresponsible or blinded by hubris, of research as something to be feared rather than embraced. His works say to the reader: don’t explore, don’t research, don’t trust science or scientists. This is a profoundly anti-scientific message.
But of all Crichton’s books, State of Fear is the most troubling. Although ostensibly a work of fiction, Crichton scatters the book with footnotes and lists real scientific works in an appendix. But, as with the books of Bjorn Lomborg, just because a citation is given does not mean the source is used correctly or even supports the argument. What does Crichton argue? Well, essentially this: 1) climate science is a fraud, and 2) environmentalists will resort to mass murder to promote this fraud.
In the rather implausible plot of this novel, environmental terrorists try to create a tsunami in order to destroy California’s coasts in order to create fear about natural disasters resulting from climate change. Huh? Yep, you read that correctly. The plot really is that convoluted. But what matters is how the narrative of the book provides a platform for Crichton’s didactic dialogues exposing alleged “problems” in climate science. The whole book really just provides an excuse for Crichton to lecture the reader during pauses in the action. It’s a convenient ruse—the reader is in Crichton’s world, with no immediate way to know that it’s a very selective reading of the science, and the dramatic narrative brings the reader along in a way that, say, studying an IPCC report cover-to-cover might not.
It’s really a shame that Crichton, who was trained as a medical doctor, did not write thrillers about how medical science has improved life and reduced suffering. When Crichton said, “I am not so pleased with the impact of science,” it’s hard to understand what he’s referring to. Vaccines? Antibiotics? Birth control? Anesthesia? He’s not pleased with how these medical advances have improved the quality and length of life for so many people? Think of the thrillers involving real science—Jenner or Salk struggling to create their vaccines, NASA inventing spaceships from scratch on a tight deadline—that Crichton could have written instead of his paranoid, fact-free attacks on science.
As we have seen, the narrative form can be used with ill-intent by creationists and climate denialists. But that should not dissuade those on the side of science from using storytelling as a way to bring the wonders of science to the larger public; in fact, we need to learn and embrace how to do this well. In Houston, We Have a Narrative, Randy Olson says, “Narrative pervades all aspects of human culture.” But for too long, scientists have not taken this into account when they try to tell the story of what they do. That should change.
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