🚀 go-pugleaf

In <32257e20....@news.cyberport.com> tan...@cyberport.com
(Warren Young) writes: 
>
>ksch...@darkwing.uoregon.edu (Kevin Leslie Schaper) wrote:
>
>>I couldn't find any fridge magnets, and I'm not sure if a phone
handset is more or less 
>>magnetic, but I left the handset from my fancy at&t darth vader phone
on a full disk for 5 
>>minutes, and all the wav files I stuck on it still played ok.. I
expected it to break it, 
>>whaddya know.. 
>
>_Some_ phones, mostly older ones, are "magnetic".  They use the old
>electromagnet and clapper mechanism to make the ring you hear.  Newer
>phones, though, tend to have electronic ringers.
     . . . 
>The point is, some phones have a stronger magnetic field than others.
>These phones are still around, and even still for sale.  If you can
>find one, make a disk of stuff whose contents you're familiar with,
>put it under the phone, and call that phone (or get someone else to
>call it).  A few rings should be enough to scramble the data beyond
>any hope of recovery.

The old clapper bell phones would definitely do this.  Refrigerator
magnets have to be really powerful to do it because a reversing (AC)
field is far more effective as a demagnitizer.  Of course >>my<<
refrigerator magnets will do it just fine - they come from dot matrix
printheads, floppy disk drive motors, laser printer developers and
other sources of really high intensity magnetism.  Do watch out for
those floppy rotors though.  Once you let one suck down to your
'fridge, you're going to have to pry it off with a screwdriver.  

Andrew Grygus  -  California Republic
-------------------------------------
Resist Microsoft!