On Tue, 3 Sep 2013, Rohan McLeod <rhn@jeack.com.au> wrote:
Erik (Who once fed pure oxygen through a steel pipe into his operating
crucible furnace,
causing the steel pipe to burn back reasonably rapidly toward him,
leaving a trail of molten steel. (Don't tell Daniel.))
Urban myth has it that a development with the steel pipe packed with steel rods; and a suitably large supply of oxygen, was used by bank robbers to cut not just through the side of the safe, but the stone /brick walls which enclosed it ! ...not sure what length of pipe was used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_lance The Wikipedia page explains how this works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_point But to destroy data you only need to heat it above it's Curie point, such high temperatures aren't required. Any sort of camp fire or gas stove should do the job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermate As for Thermite, the only special thing about it is that it can be used for welding. It's designed to produce a clean stream of molten metal with slag that floats on top. The Wikipedia page links to the Thermate page which notes it's military application in cutting tank armor etc. Thermate is basically gunpowder with a reactive metal to replace charcoal. The Wikipedia page about Thermite also suggests that thermate is better for document destruction. Seriously though if the people who want to steal your data won't be stopped by writing /dev/zero over the disk then this is the wrong place to ask for advice. As an aside, cat should write to a disk device node in a minimum size of one page for the CPU in question so it's performance should be almost the same as using dd with the bs=1m option. I say should because I submitted a patch to make it do so about 10 years ago, I recall that the patch was accepted and I hope it hasn't been backed out. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/