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Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

hey Computer Reuse people ! here in the San Francisco Bay Area, multiple, talented and hardworking, committed and professional, no-profit orgs for re-use and refurbishment financially failed, painfully, despite years of effort. It coincided with the move of the masses to phones, away from the desktop. Secondly, relentless obstructionism and outright dirty tricks from the major vendors. Third, falling prices on high-spec new equipment.

There are literally warehouses with desktop computers in good condition, stacked to the ceiling, with locked doors and teenage gamers from poor areas loitering outside. Its ridiculously dysfunctional.

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A few companies I subcontract for pay a service to take and destroy perfectly good computers. I've seen i5-8400 machines get dragged away, never to see the light of day again.

Are they paid to actually destroy them? Or just to dispose of them how they see fit? A massive amount of those get bought by the pallet, and after they have their drives wiped/replaced get sold on Ebay.

Depending on the company, their threat model, and the role the device filled, they will require more than just a drive wipe.

This can range from just crushing drives all the way to running a hydraulic punch through any non-volatile storage on circuit boards (including flash used for UEFI). This is common enough that most manufacturers will provide a guide to all the non-volatile storage in a product: Statement or Letter of Volatility.

I've gotten some great deals on high-end networking equipment (e.g. Juniper, Arista) by buying boxes that had the SSDs removed & crushed. It's a little annoying to track down replacements, but doable.

I work with a vendor and they pay me for old laptops, and I get a letter of attestation all data has been destroyed. Since they are giving me money I presume they sell the equipment.

> It coincided with the move of the masses to phones, away from the desktop.

In Cambridge, MA, on around 100 occasions I found a desktop PC that had set out beside the trash on the curb. But I think I recall only one laptop, and never a smartphone.

I wondered whether smaller devices were too easy to put in a drawer, sell online, take with you when you move from your college town apartment, or simply put into the trash can. (I don't think it was only that laptops and smartphones were more likely to be grabbed by a passerby before I saw them, because I was diligent enough that I still should've seen more of them if they were there.)

I remember being in a Microcenter in Cambridge after the school year ended, and this guy came in with a stack of PowerBooks he had pulled out of dumpsters around Harvard, Northeastern, BU, etc. He triaged them one by one and bought whichever parts he thought would fix them.

I was in high school, had no money, and would have killed for a salvaged PowerBook. I wanted him to teach me his ways.

capitalism bruh

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