I'm reporting to you from the Dutch hacker conference Hacking At Random, where I got to watch CMGG's Christian Mesu demonstrate its portable hard drive shredder. Mesu said the device is incredibly popular with governments and corporations with classified data on their old hard drives. Just wheel this baby into your office, and it can turn hard drives into powder by cutting them into 1mm slices, or just chop them in half.

Pop the hard drive into the slot, press a button, and the device applies 19.8 tons of pressure to the drive, using specially-prepared knives that have to be changed after roughly 30 drive shreds. Anyone who has ever gotten angry at their slow and/or broken hard drive will get a visceral thrill out of looking into the guts of the machine, watching the knives slowly shave bits of the hard drive off until it becomes a pile of metal shards. The hardest part to cut is the spindle.

Mesu said he's just started breaking into the US market with these, so don't be surprised if you stumble across one in your server room over the next year or two.

Personally I expect to see one of these awesome devices in the next James Bond flick – except it will be about one quarter of the size, and Bond will smuggle it into some kind of secret location using his wheeled suitcase. Also, somebody will inevitably lose some fingers in it during an interrogation scene.

Learn more about the hard drive shredder at CMGG.

HOPE happens July 18-20, but even if you can't be there, you can pre-order the book online. Here's what the publisher says about it:

Since its introduction in January of 1984, 2600 has been a unique source of information for readers with a strong sense of curiosity and an affinity for technology. The articles in 2600 have been consistently fascinating and frequently controversial. Over the past couple of decades the magazine has evolved from three sheets of loose-leaf paper stuffed into an envelope (readers "subscribed" by responding to a notice on a popular BBS frequented by hackers and sending in a SASE) to a professionally produced quarterly magazine. At the same time, the creators' anticipated audience of "a few dozen people tied together in a closely knit circle of conspiracy and mischief" grew to a global audience of tens of thousands of subscribers.

In The Best of 2600, Emmanuel Goldstein collects some of the strongest, most interesting, and often controversial articles, chronicling milestone events and technology changes that have occurred during the last 24 years - all from the hacker perspective. Examples:

* The creation of the infamous tone dialer "red box" that drove Radio Shack and the phone companies crazy. It was in the pages of 2600 that this simple conversion was first brought to light. By modifying an inexpensive Radio Shack touch tone dialer with a readily available crystal, free phone calls could easily be made from all of the nation’s payphones.
* An historical chronology of events in the hacker world that led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
* A close looks at the insecurity of modern locks through an article entitled "An Illusion of Security" that debunked the value of Simplex pushbutton locks, used on everything from schools to homes to FedEx boxes.
* The stories of famed hackers Kevin Mitnick, Bernie S., and Phiber Optik as they unfolded. Through 2600, the world heard these controversial tales despite the efforts of authorities and the mass media.

Oh man, I loved 2600 when I discovered it as a little script kiddie weenie in high school. It made me realize that there were other smart, technical, disobedient people in the world. As a grown-up I've spoken at HOPE a couple of times, and can guarantee it is one of the best hacker conferences in the U.S. Better than DefCon, you bitches. Seriously.

The Best of 2600 [Amazon via BoingBoing]

I'm sort of a sucker for "AI gone berzerk" stories, and "War on Terror goes too far" stories, so I ought to be the natural audience for War Games: The Dead Code. But even my undiscriminating tastes can't quite go there.

Here's the story: The government wants to fight terror, so it creates a new A.I. called Ripley. She's a sexy girl, with a sultry voice (although interestingly, an early synopsis on IMDB refers to Ripley as "he.") And when she's not hunting down Al Qaeda's funding networks, she's playing "high-stakes games in the darker reaches of the Internet" with teenage boys. But then when one hacker d00d decides to play the "Dead Code" game, she somehow turns it into reality and starts planning to nuke Philadelphia. Only the hacker d00d can stop it, because Homeland Security has absolutely no failsafe or method of controlling the AI they created.

Meanwhile, I can't find any information on MGM's lawsuit over ownership of wargames.com. They sued a guy who had owned the domain since 1998 and was using it for his own personal gaming site. Whois says the guy still owns the domain. But both that site, and the guy's personal site, appear to be down, which is a bad sign. [Slashfilm]

He says futuristic thriller and cheesefest Antitrust makes him smile:

Antitrust may not be realistic, but is good geek porn because what geek doesn't want to be flattered with the idea that Microsoft and other giant corps all respect your mad skills so much that they'll send out beautiful women (and, unfortunately, assassins) to try to pick your brain. Even Bill Gates was begging that guy to work for him, but he was chillin in his garage doing his own thing. It is a pretty terrible movie, but I did find it somewhat entertaining.

Mara goes on "missions" where she meets lonely dorks in VR, teaches them about sex, and sends them back to the so-called real world. Each episode is punctuated by therapeutic interludes with God, who processes with Mara about the sexual issues raised by her escapades. In this clip, Mara (inexplicably dressed in awful PVC) has to teach a hacker how to make love to the girl he's had a crush on for years. The best part of this movie is catching all the hammy mid-1990s references to computers ("Holy megabyte!" one character exclaims) mixed in with soft-core sex. Plus, what could be more of a turn-on than watching Mara talk about her abandonment issues after having a hot threeway with a geek and a simulation of the girl he loves?