Showing Impressive Tech Savvy, IceT Smashes PowerBook With Hammer
3:09 pm, August 9th, 2009, Leander Kahney
Displaying an impressive level of tech savvy, Ice-T took a claw hammer to an old PowerBook he’s getting rid of.
In this 4-minute video, you can watch Ice-T smash his old PowerBook to bits. At first, it seems the former rapper is getting revenge on a glitchy machine.
“This Mac gave me a lot of hell,” he says. “It’s kinda like payback.”
But as the video goes on, it’s clear Ice-T is trying to remove and destroy the hard drive, which he’s afraid might fall into the wrong hands.
“I’m gonna get this hard drive out of here, make sure none of my secrets are in here, if somebody should find this computer,” he says.
In the comments, Ice-T takes a lot of flak for destroying the machine (and a bunch of racist garbage). The geniuses on YouTube rip him for not taking the machine to an eWaste facility and releasing toxins into the environment.
While the toxins criticism might be on target, Ice-T was right to destroy the hard drive first. Data is incredibly easy to pull off old hard drives, whether the drive has been erased or not, even in multiple passes. There are plenty of cases of identity theft from old machines. And just weeks ago, journalism students were able to buy a drive full of government secrets from a dump in Ghana.
As the actor knows, the one sure-fire way to destroy all data on a hard drive is to destroy the hard drive. “There’s probably a better way to do it, but i just said, ‘fuck it,’” the Law & Order actor says.
In fact, if recycling an old laptop, it’s a good idea to drill several holes into the case and right through the hard drive before taking it to an eWaste facility (Only if the drive can’t be easily removed obviously, which is the case with many older PowerBooks and iBooks).
Posted by Leander Kahney in Hardware, How-To, Macbook | Comment on this article
> In fact, if recycling an old laptop, it’s a good idea to drill several holes into the
> case and right through the hard drive before taking it to an eWaste facility
Well, that’s not exactly “recycling” then is it? Ice’s old MacBook is newer than a machine I was using up until about 9 months ago: it could have been “recycled” and possibly used by someone who needed it. (The video output was probably still working, even if the LCD screen wasn’t working.)
Drilling holes in it at random spots takes a possibly useful tool and makes it…useless.
Darcy McGee, on August 9th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
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Darcy, first off, that laptop was not a macbook, it was about 6 years old (by his admission) and would get little practical use since Apple has dropped PPC support. second, recycling it via selling would still require a full hard drive replacement since the point was that any reasonably savvy person can install a data recovery program and pull out even deleted files if he/she wants to do the work. destroying the drive is the only way to be sure private info is safe.
and you can still take the thing to an ewaste center that will pulverize the metal etc to be reused as something else. heck maybe they will make bricks out of it to crave new laptops.
Lucas, on August 9th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Watching him struggle with this “sturdy” mac, I’d say he would have been faster disassembling it the usual way. Also, I don’t think he actually destroyed the hard drive… all the time he’s talking about the hard drive, but what he’s actually working on is the dvd drive. He did hammer the hard drive a little, but it’s definitely not destroyed.
And I don’t think throwing the parts in the trash can counts as recycling.
MMNW, on August 10th, 2009 at 1:29 am
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