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Comment by guywithahat | Hacker News Reader

Honestly probably for the better. I can’t imagine what it would be like to accidentally throw away hundreds of millions of dollars, but he wasn’t going to succeed. He was going to spend the rest of his life begging for money to dig up and search for a hard drive, and then not being able to find it.

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Someone in Hollywood is going to remake Holes with this exact plot.

If they give it a budget of $75M, maybe they’ll make $765M in revenue from the movie.

Not that the guy would see any of that money either though.

Yes probably. I wonder if in future places that process a lot of e-waste or e-waste donations would try to access any still-functioning hard drives or smartphones (if they haven't been wiped).

[EDIT: to scan for the most common crypto wallets]

digital archeology

Hmmm maybe I should re-read A Fire Upon the Deep.

But to what end? Backup everything in case the owner comes looking later? The contents of a drive won't in general become the property of the recycling facility, since much of it will be constrained by licences or copyright.

No, just to scan for the most common crypto wallets/ contact managers/ login credentials, like some malware spearphishing attacks these days.

So if I recycle a copy of the key to my bank account, then the contents of that account become property of the recycler and my own copy becomes valueless if they elect to drain it out?

And this is supposed to be legal, somehow?

Don't strawman what I wrote: we were talking about crypto not bank accounts. Also, you know a lot of e-waste gets shipped to LDCs? (supposedly wiped and/or destroyed)

The potential for somebody somewhere in the e-recycling chain to harvest data is clear.

Which is exactly why one of the perks of working in modestly-scaled corporate IT is getting to destroy the storage devices before they get taken for recycling. Wiping keys is quick and effective, but can't match a sledge hammer for unadulterated joy.

A found crypto wallet is really just a copy of credentials that provide access to things described in a ledger, and where that ledger is stored elsewhere. It's not very dissimilar to a found copy of a bank account's credentials.

The proposal here was for a business practice that would harvest and exploit these credentials. The main question was of the legality of this business practice.

There is no strawman here.

edit:

I'm just going to leave this here, and dip out of this nonsensical doubletalk clusterfucked horseshit.

> Yes probably. I wonder if in future places that process a lot of e-waste or e-waste donations would try to access any still-functioning hard drives or smartphones (if they haven't been wiped).

> [EDIT: to scan for the most common crypto wallets]

It was absolutely a strawman for two reasons a) because I never said the digital credentials became property of the recycler, or was legal. You insinuated I did. That's moreover irrelevant because e-waste is often shipped outside of the US or EU, leaves their jurisdiction, ends up in LDCs, and goes through multiple intermediaries ( think like the Toyota "ISIS truck" case).

The other part of the strawman is b) nobody said anything about a "proposal for a business practice", you invented that, honestly no idea why. It's the opposite of what I meant: that individuals at any point in that chain could do questionable stuff.

We can conjecture all we want about the legal basis of accessing digital media that has been donated and shipped abroad to be recycled/landfilled, esp. in an untraceable way to countries without much rule of law; there are tons of reasons why this is unlikely to see the inside of a courtroom in a hurry.

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