Re: [ARSCLIST] destruction of CDs

[David Lennick <dlennick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Funny thing..last night on NUMB3RS, someone had a student repair her CD player 
and he ended up frying a CD. This afternoon I found what looked like a 
partially melted CD on my lawn.

Hmmmm!

dl

Mal Rockwell wrote:
> Tin snips work well for cutting them up.
> But something more permanent, like burning them, is probably a major
> environmental hazard. I know I wouldn't want to be breathing anywhere
> around them while they're on fire!
> It'd be nice if a random signal could be burned over existing data, thus
> making it unreadable, but I don't think that can be done easily.
> Still, if you just want to throw them away where do you throw them?
> Now to read other contributors answers...
> Mal
>
> *******
>
> Trey Bunn wrote:
>
> > This may be an odd question considering that it's pretty much the
> > opposite of what most of us normally do, but I was wondering if anyone
> > had any tips on how to destroy a CD-R.  Say, for example, you had a CD
> > (data or audio) with sensitive material on it that you didn't want to
> > just throw in the trash and hope that no one ever found it and played
> > it.  Yes, I know that ending up in a landfill wouldn't do it any good,
> > but that wouldn't necessarily make it unplayable.  I'm reminded of a
> > huge lot of cassettes that my brother and I found in a dump around
> > 1980 that we took home to record over, and we found that they were
> > recordings of some kind of courtroom cases, probably stuff we never
> > should have heard.  We were too young to be interested in them and
> > just recorded over them (I still have some of those same tapes, and
> > yes, they still play), but still, whoever just chucked them in the
> > trash was being rather sloppy, I'd think.
> >
> > So anyway, back to the CD problem.  Last night I tried to break one in
> > half, thinking that since it was plastic, it would snap in two if bent
> > hard enough, but no.  The thing was nearly impossible to break.  I
> > tried using a cabinet door for leverage, but that still didn't bend it
> > enough to break.  I did manage to warp the surface and the inner gold
> > layer enough that its data probably wouldn't be recoverable, but the
> > more trouble it gave me, the more I began to wonder if any of you guys
> > out there had a specific procedure in place for getting rid of CDs
> > other than just chucking them.  I also tried cutting it in half with
> > some needle-nose pliers and taking a lighter to the writeable surface,
> > and while this did some damage, it still wasn't what I'd consider the
> > data equivalent of using a paper shredder.  Certainly not efficient or
> > easy, either.
> >
> > Any thoughts?  And no, before anyone thinks I have a CD full of super
> > secret scary government files or something, don't worry.  It was just
> > a back-up of personal correspondence and journal entries that I didn't
> > need anymore (I made a more updated back-up).  I know this isn't
> > specifically a recorded sound-related question, but it could be, you
> > know, if one were to have a recording on CD-R like the ones I
> > described above.
>