That’s my answer to OhGizmo’s question, “Why weren’t they designed like this in the first place?”.

I can’t count the number of things wrong with this idea, although it’s refreshing to see that some of the commenters at Gizmodo gave it a shot.

Anime-themed motivational-poster contest over at Riuva. Why not?

I went to all the trouble of doing this in Illustrator before I discovered that Despair.com has an online generator. No biggie.

I cherish these people. From the wipe manpage:

I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.

Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands.

My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufacturers and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.

Don't trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.

[update: well, this one’s straightforward: 「女の子の足を開かせる」]

I figured I was getting more Japanese spam recently because there’s Japanese text on this blog, but no, that’s not it. Almost all of it goes to addresses harvested elsewhere, including one I that I can never remember the origin of (“j.nwo@…”). Only one in this batch was even sent to an address in the dotclue.org domain.

The subject lines make for fun reading. One thing to note is that the structure of the language seems to be keeping them comprehensible. Either Japanese spam-filtering is a lot more primitive, mangling it to evade spam filters and still be readable is a lot harder, or both. That might explain why my teacher has trouble sending email from a US Yahoo account to some ISPs in Japan; it’s easier to just refuse messages from specific domains and IP blocks tainted by spam.

• おっぱいを素敵な男性にも吸われたい・
• 迷惑メール届いてませんか？
• 美咲よりjgreelyさんへ
• 突然申し訳ございません
• 火遊び？プリーズ！
• 孤独に死んで行くおつもりですか?
• 写真みてくれましたか？
• 今日待ち合わせできますか？
• ネット版ハプニングバーへようこそ！
• サクラゼロの優良サイトから無料パート
• サクッと軽く性欲解消
• ご指名されました
• Ｈ友１００人できるかな♪
• ☆逆援助相手、真剣交際相手☆
• ☆☆確実な出逢いで今日から楽しい
• ■目的別で交際相手を探してみませんか
• ■即アポ確実■
• 【淫らな人妻、派遣いたします】

A leftover steak!
Kosher salt, black pepper, and
a really hot fire...

In the hornet nest,
an oppressive heat begins.
Hey, it's my grill, guys.

Jeff learned an important lesson about technology today.

A common complaint among older generations is that the youth of today has no respect for culture and history. I’m pleased to see that this is not an issue in Japan.

more...

…while walking to the restroom in search of relief, you:

1. spot a printer with a paper jam,
2. fix the jam,
3. wait to see if it's fixed,
4. clear the second jam,
5. diagnose the problem,
6. solve the problem,
7. reload the paper tray,
8. verify that it's printing correctly.

Then you resume your trip to the restroom.