From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 04:04:26 +0800
To: cypherpunks@Algebra.COM
Subject: Re: Burning papers
In-Reply-To: <199801251819.MAA17338@manifold.algebra.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980125115620.007d0680@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 12:19 PM 1/25/98 -0600, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
>Just for your information, I _WAS_ mistaken. The papers burned really
>well. My confusion about burnability of papers arose because in the
>past I tried to burn magazines, and not papers and letters. The whole
>big box is gone, after two burns. Burning is unquestionably better than
>shredding.

There are shredders, and then there are shredders.  The SOHO-sized
shredders that just cut things into ribbons aren't very thorough
(and it's been demonstrated that documents shredded that way can
be reassembled by sufficiently large numbers of Iranian college students)
but they're good prep for burning the papers.
On the other hand, the cross-cut shredders that leave flakes no more
than 1/8" rectangles or even smaller chad are good enough for
classified documents.

Of course, if your documents are on floppy disks, any shredder that
won't jam on them does a pretty good job :-)

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639