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Comment by codeonfire | Hacker News Reader

If someone asks you to wipe data that is not yours, you need to do it otherwise no one will trust you. This guy is oblivious:

"Carmack had me promise more than a decade ago that I'd wipe the drives if I ever passed them along, and I'd hate to lose any priceless data that's on them."

Second,

Junk is junk, throw it away or recycle.

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Presumably, if Carmack didn't want him to have the data, he would have deleted it before giving/selling him the gear 10+ years ago.

What he's asking here is: "I have these old NeXT boxes I want to get rid of. I promised I wouldn't give the data to anyone else, so I want to copy it somewhere safe before wiping the disks"

Don MacAskill is anything but oblivious.

...no. What Carmack said is "I don't want this data going any further than you". So he's archiving the data himself before passing the machines on. No trust violated.

Junk is junk, throw it away or recycle.

Surely he IS recycling it?

Furthermore while he's asking about sharing it with the world, he's making it clear that whether or not he does so is up to Carmack.

But he wants to keep his own private copy of the data. Then recycle the Next Cubes. For archival purposes.

Here's the problem with your logic. What possible purpose would "archiving" it have other than eventual distribution to others? If the guy lives up to his promise no one will ever see or use it, ever, so there is none.

My motivations are three-fold:

A) I want to peek inside myself without having to boot them up. NeXTStep isn't really the most efficient way for me to poke around.

B) I don't know if John might change his mind or not, but I want to be prepared in case he does. I'm a history buff, and I believe this stuff is useful.

C) I don't know for how much longer these machines & disks might stay working.

Agreed that if John says "never", then once I die, the data needs to die as well. But hopefully I still have some years left on me. :)

What are you going on about? Could you elaborate? You make no sense.

I think I made it pretty clear. One person gave another person some hardware and asked him to wipe the data off of it, which he doesn't plan to do. The hardware is over a decade old and should be recycled. What part are you confused about?

That's some seriously deceptive rephrasing of his original account.

> asked him to wipe the data off of it

If he passed it along. That means he's been given permission to keep the data.

Did you even read any of the other responses that were given to you?

Reuse is better than recycling.

One could argue that Carmack's request was relevant more than a decade ago, and maybe it would be fine with Carmack if the person who inherited the drives released the data in 20 or 50 years (for historical purposes).

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