[Cryptography] Magnetic media destruction question

[Jon Callas]

> On Jan 12, 2026, at 03:45, Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:
> 
> | [State of the art on reassembling shredded documents]
> Vernon Vinge predicted this in his (highly recommended) 2006 novel Rainbow’s End.  One element of the story involves a decision to save space and money by digitizing the paper books, magazines, and other records in libraries.  The method is destructive to the originals:  Books are tossed into the maw of a machine the finely shreds them, then sends the shreds flying down a kind of wind tunnel, whose sides are covered in lamps and cameras.  Software then reconstructs the books in digital form.  Apparently we could now pretty much build such a thing.

Or you could just go to <https://1dollarscan.com/>, where they will do this for you right now for a dollar a page!

I also know of a company, <https://www.ripcord.com/>, that a business that scans all someone's old paper documents and puts them up in cloud storage for a significant savings to the customer over warehousing the actual paper. The value of the old paper is enough to fund the initial scanning. They will also shred your disk drives, too, and put those up in the cloud.

> 
> Interesting (if likely of no practical use) challenge:  Come up with some combination of paper/ink/font choice that frustrates this kind of technology. I’m thinking of an analogue to the VanEck-resistant screen fonts that were developed back in CRT days.

Those stank. I was so glad to be able to get rid of them. They were "resistant" in the same way that lots of watches are water resistant. No human really wants to read text in that font, and the Van Eck resistance was really just making it blurry or low-contrast. The best Van Eck resistance is using the same color for foreground and background. It's 100% effective.

	Jon