Trash picked Computer

[cadenm1223]

Hey guys! I was wondering if any of you guys know where I can get trash picked computers? I live in york pennsylvania so if anyone knows any spots where people throw out computers, then message me.

[Crunchy Dragon]

There's a wonderful guide by my good friend @CUDAcores89 on exactly this:

Basically head over to Google or whatever, look for scrapyards near you that take electronics, go see if they'll let you buy scrap from them.

[Bitter]

Just please be responsible with any personal or sensitive data left on the computers. I dumpster picked a computer from my old college (if you can call it a college) and it had on it hundreds of full resumes that had DOB, address, references, relations, school transcripts, SS numbers, so on and so forth. Literally everything you'd want or need to steal the identities of hundreds of people was sitting next to a dumpster behind a school for the taking. I put a rock hammer through that hard drive a couple times and tossed it into the recycling bin as soon as I realized what was on it. I've picked a few other PC's from the trash and ran into similar situations, if I'm planning to keep the HDD I wipe it with something like eraser but I usually just destroy the drive.

 

Also, please when you're throwing out a computer take the HDD out and physically render it inoperative however you'd like. Puncturing the case an platters will usually suffice.

[corrado33]

Universities are your best bet. They get rid of crap all the time. Else, go to your local dump and see if they let you look around. 

[Axeoasis]

26 minutes ago, corrado33 said:

Universities are your best bet. They get rid of crap all the time. Else, go to your local dump and see if they let you look around. 

This, as well as businesses, particularly call centers and offices. They tend to put their older, outdated workstation PC's up for grabs all the time for a decent price. You normally won't see them below the $150 range but for the parts, they tend to be a pretty good deal.

[Bitter]

Sometimes you can piece together a good system from parts if you can't get it all at once, I got a complete bare bone HP SFF system and a low power i5 for 100 shipped for the pair. Not the correct i5 for the system but it still works fine. Complete systems, depending on age do tend to trend in the $150 range. If you're going for a complete system try to get a tower as it may be closer to adhering to standard parts and be upgradable in the sense you can swap in normal stuff later on. Desktop and SFF stuff can be very proprietary.

[Kawaii Koneko]

Do you have a decent sized university near you? My state capital has a pretty big university and every year foreign exchange students and students move back to their home states. So once a year tons of stuff gets thrown out that people just can't take back with them. I've seen quite a bit of random PC stuff. Most of it junk but I did find a pretty cool old Texas Instruments laptop once which I still haven't gotten around to even picking up a new PSU for to see if it works. I also saw an Apple G5 (I think?) but the insides were all torn apart and it didn't look worth the effort of messing with but in retrospect I wish I grabbed it just to tinker. I found some Asus laptop too which I never really tried to figure out.

 

I mean, don't expect anything great. But it can be neat if you just want to mess around and get things working.

 

2 hours ago, Bitter said:

Just please be responsible with any personal or sensitive data left on the computers. .

Be responsible with the data you find from people who were clearly irresponsible with their own data. I mean, I get what you are saying. Hopefully you aren't planning to do anything nefarious with such data anyway so you might as well destroy it I guess but your statement still made me chuckle a bit.

[corrado33]

13 hours ago, Axeoasis said:

This, as well as businesses, particularly call centers and offices. They tend to put their older, outdated workstation PC's up for grabs all the time for a decent price. You normally won't see them below the $150 range but for the parts, they tend to be a pretty good deal.

Exactly. My mom's place of work (accounting firm) replaces EVERYBODY'S laptop with new ones EVERY 3 years. And they're not cheap laptops either, they always have i7 processors with lots of ram (they generally cheap out on the storage though.) 

 

And the best thing is.... anyone at the company can buy them for $50. Those that aren't sold are donated to charity. They USED to just GIVE them away to employees, but then they realized that there was a ton of interest so they started selling them. So every few years my mom sends me a 3 year old top of the line laptop. It's great. 

[Bitter]

Can your mom adopt me?

[imreloadin]

14 hours ago, Bitter said:

Just please be responsible with any personal or sensitive data left on the computers.

It's not my responsibility to make sure other people's data is protected if they just throw it out without a second thought. People like that get what they get. This is especially true if it's a PC from a business, if you can't be bothered to secure your financial data and the data of your employees then you deserve to go out of business in my opinion. However If I do find PCs with sensitive data on them I just wipe it with the DOD spec of DBAN and use the drive myself, I just consider them lucky that I'm the one that found the PC and not someone else who plans to do nefarious things with it.

[Bitter]

23 minutes ago, imreloadin said:

It's not my responsibility to make sure other people's data is protected if they just throw it out without a second thought. People like that get what they get. This is especially true if it's a PC from a business, if you can't be bothered to secure your financial data and the data of your employees then you deserve to go out of business in my opinion. However If I do find PCs with sensitive data on them I just wipe it with the DOD spec of DBAN and use the drive myself, I just consider them lucky that I'm the one that found the PC and not someone else who plans to do nefarious things with it.

That's a fairly shitty attitude to have, I hope you or a loved one never get your identity stolen. Often the data is patient and employee information, people whom have no say in data security.

[imreloadin]

23 minutes ago, Bitter said:

That's a fairly shitty attitude to have, I hope you or a loved one never get your identity stolen. Often the data is patient and employee information, people whom have no say in data security.

Yours is an even shittier attitude since you're basically saying we're all screwed no matter what we do...maybe you should bother listening to your own advice

Personally no company or entity greater than the individual will take data security seriously until they actually have some kind of penalty for it. Whether that is some kind of large fine (I'm talking a percentage of total value of the company, not some piddly little one million dollar fine assigned to a multi-billion dollar company) from a governmental agency or that they go out of business due to proprietary secrets being made public it needs to happen on the scale that makes people take it seriously unfortunately.

[aezakmi]

32 minutes ago, Bitter said:

That's a fairly shitty attitude to have, I hope you or a loved one never get your identity stolen.

Ah yes, "you don't joke about that"

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, imreloadin said:

Yours is an even shittier attitude since you're basically saying we're all screwed no matter what we do...maybe you should bother listening to your own advice

Personally no company or entity greater than the individual will take data security seriously until they actually have some kind of penalty for it. Whether that is some kind of large fine (I'm talking a percentage of total value of the company, not some piddly little one million dollar fine assigned to a multi-billion dollar company) from a governmental agency or that they go out of business due to proprietary secrets being made public it needs to happen on the scale that makes people take it seriously unfortunately.

Where did I say we're all screwed no matter what we do? Following proper physical disk destruction methods will render the data illegible to all but forensic labs at great cost, something a data thief won't bother to go through for an unknown data reward. Wiping a drive is great, especially if you're going to reuse it. I don't like to reuse drives from picked computers because they're usually not particularly useful. Often they've been thrashed hard in low RAM systems with lots of swap file use and are slow 5400 RPM drives and were not terribly reliable SKU's to begin with, some have even been straight up no name Chinese drives like Jupiter and E-Store. With as cheap as SSD's are now (240GB for $35, 500GB for $60) there's no point except for storage drives to use slow platter stuff given how poorly a slow drive impacts perceived system performance. I am not a patient person, I dislike waiting for disks.

[duplexmortician]

You guys are making me want to go into the nefarious intentions business.  You know, to teach "them" their lesson... =p

[imreloadin]

4 hours ago, Bitter said:

Where did I say we're all screwed no matter what we do?

Right here...

6 hours ago, Bitter said:

Often the data is patient and employee information, people whom have no say in data security.

In other words the people who are affected have no hope of recourse and since literally ANYBODY can be affected by this we're all screwed at some point down the line.

[Bitter]

Ah, I meant more in the sense of your 'victim blaming' but I see your point albeit a bit twisted from what I had meant it is a valid interpretation. All it takes is one screw up by someone else to throw your life into disarray, and yes often with little to no recourse as it can be difficult to prove from what data breach the information may have been leaked as sometimes breaches go unreported for long periods of time or thieves sit on the data for a long period of time hoping that those affected simply forget or let lapse their protections. It does suck, things are more tilted in favor of large corporations and governments but such is life at this point in history.