this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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In the 90’s, companies were super lax on data security, retention, and destruction. In my city we had major IT players like INTEL, HP, Motorola, etc. We would dumpster dive and find whole computers full of data and no passwords. We were after the hardware so all our friends could play Doom MP, Quake, or later Unreal Tournament… so we usually wiped them but who knows what was in those things. It was a lot of e-waste and because of divers with bad intentions, now there’s incredibly strict corporate rules about data security/destruction.
Different topic but ewaste today is absolutely insane. People throw out working post-2015 "gaming laptops" - maybe a dead battery or something equally simple to fix.
I cannot speak for other countries, but here in America, I blame the fact that once family and personal computers became a big thing they stopped teaching about them in schools.
I know I never had a single class or subject related to using a computer. They just expected us to know how to use them.
And they still do. The "kids these days and their compyooturs" fallacy. Irks me to my core.
I was fortunate to have a middle school typing and graphic design class, and in highschool I learned hardware troubleshooting and stuff (A+ equivalent IT work)...but that "career path" of flipping computers that people downloaded the wrong screensaver on kinda died out.
Still learned a lot though! If the I.T field was still hanging out with buddies in some dungeon nobody visited, I might be in that field today lol.
We had an “informatics” class for 2 years, and it was just really, really basic excel and mostly sitting around.
Maybe I just don't know where to look or what.
I always hear these stories but companies in my city tend to donate old machines to charities (cool if it works that way) or trade them in to their vendor or something.
I'm actually kinda afraid with all the tarrifs and crap that we're gonna see secondhand hardware turn into speculative inflated eBay fodder because average folks can't afford new anymore.
Still looking for this supposed mountain of <TPM 2.0 machines that are supposed to surface for next to nothing any minute now. 😅