When discarding storage, I do a random pass (even if the drive has always been part of an encrypted-at-rest arrangement, if only for the sake of habit), then a zero sweep, then it gets a filesystem created and filled with many copies of a few cat photos/videos¹² to give anyone running something like photorec a treat, then the partition table is emptied.
--------
[1] With filenames to suggest a bumper collection of photo/video backups from several people's phones/cameras, with some porn accidentally mixed in.
[2] If I'm in an evil mood the “treat” filesystem is filled with shock images and Rick Astley instead.
I wrote some stuff in Turbo Pascal for DOS to do something like this (albeit it didn't email files-- it just dumped them into a directory on the disk). My parents had two phone lines so making test calls from a real phone was easy. I just had to go around the house and turn off the ringers on all the phones so I wouldn't wake anybody doing test calls in the wee morning hours.
I didn't understand the sample format so all my playback was via the phone handset. I was in over my head, at that time, when it came to grokking audio codecs.
My grand vision was to make some kind of voice-based bulletin board system.
TellMe was one: Call the number, ask it questions, get answers. Part of my normal commute for a time involved calling TellMe to get the weather for the day on a Nokia dumb phone once I got settled into the drive.
Goog411 was another one. You could call Google, ask it questions, and get summaries of search results along with answers for a distinct questions (a lot like LLMs do today). I distinctly recall standing in the supermarket looking at large and inexpensive hunk of meat that was labelled as a "Boston Butt Roast", and calling Goog411 to find some common uses for it. (It did give me confidence to buy it, and we did cook it and eat it. It was lovely.)
These things worked well for that brief moment in time when cellular calling minutes were either plentiful or unlimited, when smartphones didn't commonly exist, and when mobile data was ludicrously expensive.
We hand some log droughts here about 10 years ago where you were not allowed to water the lawn at all.
I would have expected a single dominate weed to take over, but instead, if I let the grass grow for 6-8 weeks in summer I get this amazing field of different knee length plants. And it alive with bee's and butterflies.
I'm glad your organization hasn't had a PHI breach. I'll see your anecdata and raise you mine:
The two biggest hospital providers in my geography have both had breaches in the last 5 years, both involving exfiltration of PHI (and one involving ransomware). (My family's data was in both, too!)
I have a background in IT security and systems administration (including working as a contractor for healthcare providers). Since medical records have become "electronic" I've assumed medical data is de facto public.
If there was a diagnosis or treatment I felt others knowing about would compromise me I would avoid bringing it up to a medical professional or seeking treatment. I'm certain there are people who avoid mental health services, for example, for exactly that reason.
> Since medical records have become "electronic" I've assumed medical data is de facto public.
> If there was a diagnosis or treatment I felt others knowing about would compromise me I would avoid bringing it up to a medical professional or seeking treatment. I'm certain there are people who avoid mental health services, for example, for exactly that reason.
I'm very sorry you feel this way and I hope you can find a way to have more trust in your doctors. I assure you data privacy is incredibly important and not something we screw around with. Breaches happen, but it's not the rule.
I wonder how it changes the calculus when medical data is leaked into the public domain then hoovered-up by data brokers.
Is a law being broken by a data broker if a credible case can be made that the data was publicly available?
I would think the leaking party would be subject to action, but does the "taint" of the data being private somehow get "washed away" if it becomes publicly available? Asked another way, is a party who consumes illegally-leaked but publicly available data also on the hook for privacy regulations.
In the off chance anybody from Rode sees this: This makes me want to purchase your gear. Don't change it.
It's funny this comes up now. Tomorrow I'm dragging my Zoom R20 recorder on-site to use as an overly-featured USB audio interface for a single-mic live stream. If I'd know this about Rode a week ago I'd have purchased one of these and could have left my R20 hooked-up in the home studio!
Funny you mention that, because my first thought when reading that he submitted a report to the vendor was that they'd "fix" the problem by requiring firmware uploads to be signed (in which case it's "secure" because only their service techs have access to the private key, IOW, security by sternly worded written policy).
I’m guilty of using my Zoom R16 in a similar fashion; as USB audio interface most of the time for a couple of inputs.
The only thing that is a little sad about it is that for example the faders do nothing when the R16 is in USB audio interface mode.
It does however like to randomly turn on reverb and one other effect after power cycling. Which I sometimes forget and then wonder for half a second why the audio is sounding weird :P So there is some extra functionality that is available even in USB audio interface mode, although in this case not desirable for me to have enabled within it. If I want to add reverb or other effects when using the R16 as USB audio interface, I prefer to do so in the DAW. I would have liked to be able to use the faders though.
I'm running my R20 in USB interface / stereo mix mode and the faders do work. I didn't think about trying to apply any effects. I'll play with that, for fun, but I'd definitely add them in the DAW as well. (I really only use my R20 for multitrack recording and do all my effects in the DAW. I like it, and it can do a ton standalone, but my workflow really just needed a multitrack recorder and I could have probably spent a lot less. It just looked like fun...)
reply