Wait a minute there's a public archive of Compuserve data noone has any clue what it is? What if it's PII? It wasn't that long ago to make this a non-issue.
Verizon, if you're out there - please get a handle on this breach before my lawyers call you.
Yeah, someone should have scrubbed these. But it's hard for me to get too worked up.
Don't type anything on a keyboard today that you don't want to see on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow. I learned that lesson at 300 baud, long before I had ever heard of CompuServe, but that didn't stop me from forgetting it a time or two when I got my CS account. So if there's anything in this archive that would embarrass you, well, at least you're in good company.
Neither did anyone else, which means it isn't going to matter in the long run for anyone who is just starting out today. If everybody has skeletons in their closet, no one does. And everybody pretty much does.
Remember that one of the two major parties in the US has willfully abandoned any pretense at moral authority by supporting Trump. The only threat Beto faces in that regard comes from his own party. The correct reaction would be for him to own his juvenile fiction, not apologize for it.
If anyone finds data for 72167,7570, send a copy back to me.
Quite literally the transition of physical paper => digital forums => internet (pre-crawlers/pre-archive) => where the data could have been lost before it had a chance to be "modernized".
A big company might be vulnerable to class action from a bunch of people who are tech-savvy and affluent enough to have been using Compu$erve.
I've acquired over 100 used computers, and, once I saw how common leaving data on them was, I began always very promptly DBAN-ing any disks, and wiping SSDs. If it has a non-SATA interface, I destroy the medium. Similar with some kind of wipe of smartphones.
Besides wiping the disk/device seeming a responsible and considerate thing to do, it avoids remote yet severe liabilities.
A secure erase should wipe all blocks (and since it is done by the firmware, physical blocks, not logical ones), but there have been instances of buggy drives that don't actually do it properly.
Some SSDs also transparently encrypt all data written, and the key is replaced on a wipe command. Even if they don't wipe the data fully, it's now unusable, if the encryption works correctly.
Quite old SSDs might not support any of this.
Unfortunately, you can't trust the SSD firmware developers to have their shit together [1].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/crucial-samsung-solid-stat...
Imagine if CompuServe still existed, but they had undergone 100% employee turnover in recent years. They'd still be liable, right?
It seems to me that when Verizon bought CompuServe, they calculated that its assets minus its liabilities totaled less than the purchase price and hence it was a good deal. If we treat leakable data as a legal liability, it should send the right financial signal - eg, maybe as a company you don't want to collect much.