On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 16:52:39 -0700, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

" on Sat, 28 Jul 2012
15:17:33 -0400 typed in alt.survival the following:
On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 09:32:47 -0700, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" on Sat, 28 Jul 2012
07:59:39 -0400 typed in alt.survival the following:

HeyBub wrote:

The Daring Dufas wrote:

It was for an engineer friend working for the same construction
company I worked for out in The Pacific at the missile range when the
company got contracts to build U.S. Embassies in various countries
around the globe. For some odd reason, the government is kinda picky
about security at embassies. You could look up balanced magnetic door
switches of a few types, some more secure than others and harder if
not impossible to defeat. O_o


In the opening episode of this season's "Breaking Bad," the cops raided the
headquarters of the bad guy. The cops confiscated a laptop computer and
checked it into the police property room. Obviously, when the cops got
around to looking through the computer's files, Walt and his buddy would be
screwed. Oh, what to do?

The got an OLD delivery truck with an aluminum shell. In this truck, they
mounted the business end of a magnetic junk crane, you know the type, about
five feet in diameter and capable of picking up trashed automobiles. Also in
the van they mounted 42 heavy-duty batteries.

During the night, they drove the truck up against the back wall of the
police property room and threw the switch.

It was a hoot to see all the shelving and metal property leave its location
and hug the wall!

The cops were, um, call it confused to see everything in the property room
in disarray. Then they found the truck, tipped over against the back wall.

Where there's a will, there's a way.


It takes an alternating magnetic field to demagnatise a disk and the
permananat magnets inside the drive have a higher density that that
would have provided.

Aren't the electromagnets on those booms A/C powered?

Perhaps, but "42 heavy duty batteries" aren't. ;-)

Good point.

OTOH, in "Cryptonepricon" (Or however it is spelled - Neil
Stephenson's book) the "good guys" built large magnetic coils into the
door and window frames of the server room. Any computer drive taken
out of the server room without first killing the main power - got
wiped. When they said they offered secure data storage, they meant
it.

I doubt they could get the magnetic flux density necessary to write a modern
disk drive.

Oh they did get the necessary flux density. It was, after all, a
Major Plot Point.

In the real world - just a matter of engineering.

Unless science trumps engineering. Getting that sort of flux density over a
large area tends to cause "problems".

Of course, you can't expect a script writer to
know that. Like an episode of McGyver years ago: He was inside a
nuclear reactor and the control for the 'alarm system' was built on
Radio Shack perf board.

Good thing, I've talked with many friends over the years about how
They got Missile (etc) Security all wrong - and the consensus was
usually "Do you really want them to get it right?"

Right. No need to know. It just ruins the story line. ;-)

OTOH, I understand that Tom Clancy has been interviewed a couple of times
because of some of the details in his submarine scenes.

A) the SF story publish in 1942 about the making of an "atomic
bomb" which got the author a visit from the FBI. (And there was a
short story some years later, about how a guy got tired of the bad
props for a science fiction series, so made some "realistic" ones.
They were accepted, and soon, the series was a mega hit because it all
seemed "real". Then one evening, he answers the door, and mistakes
the person at the door for the FBI, before spotting the "Flying
Saucer" in the driveway.)

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of
sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose
boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead—
your next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

B) "The Secret that exploded" - after a while, if you speak the
jive of the tribe, they assume you too have the necessary clearance.

AIUI, he was allowed a tour of a boomer but all of the classified stuff was
covered. His imagination just filled in the "obvious". IIRC, the issue was
the SONAR station.