
German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection - ditados
http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/04/30/029216/german-ministry-of-education-throws-away-pcs-for-190000-due-to-infection?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
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mxfh
Other than the title might suggest this happened at the (second highest)
administrative level, the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
(Landesministerium), not at the Bundesministerium. Also reportedly some of the
machines were brand new so no need for "radical" upgrade methods for all of
them.

The only good thing about this that federal auditing by the Landesrechnungshof
seems to work, since they complained about it in their yearly report in the
first place and it got only picked up by the press after that.

[http://www.lrh-mv.de/land-
mv/LRH_prod/LRH/Veroeffentlichunge...](http://www.lrh-mv.de/land-
mv/LRH_prod/LRH/Veroeffentlichungen/Jahresberichte/LFB_2012.pdf) (german pdf,
page 152)

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new299
IT departments generally run on extremely tight human resources and tend
toward spending money on equipment rather than people, so I can kind of see
this happening.

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daveid
They did clean their servers. The slashdot title/summary are a bit misleading.
Perhaps they wanted new PCs already and simply estimated that it might be a
good time to upgrade rather than clean them?

Still wish they would've donated the PCs instead of throwing them away.

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kaybe
It's too expensive to make sure there's no recoverable data, that's why they
generally don't. It's even too expensive to take them apart and parts are
harder to donate as well (more work on the other end).

(On the other hand, if you're in IT there - very cheap computers! They usually
trust their own personnel to be responsible and wipe everything properly/not
look for anything before use. )

While it's sad I can understand where they're coming from.

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dreen
Its even more sad since its not that expensive at all to just run `dd
if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1` on 170 computers, thats what, a days worth of
work for one skilled sysadmin?

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roel_v
If one PC is missed and some sensitive data is sold to a recycling company,
and somehow somebody finds it and reports it, there is hell to pay in the
press and potential liability. Why take the risk? There is no incentive to re-
use these computers. Plus, let's face it, nobody wants old pc's anyway. I
tried putting up a bunch of them for free on our local equivalent of
Craigslist last year and nobody wanted them, I ended up paying a recycling
company to come pick them up. (~ 3-4 year old machines, admittedly with 21"
CRT monitors)

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dreen
OK well fair enough but this is another thing I don't understand, maybe its
cause I live in central europe but why the heck would you pay someone to
recycle something? I gathered all my old hardware (~10 desktops) and sold it
for scrap, theres actually lots of rare earth metals in there. All you have to
do is take them apart and drive to your local metal recycling point, they give
great prices by the kilo. You won't get rich but at least you know its not
gonna pollute some dumpyard somewhere.

Its just weird for me because if you pay someone to recycle computers they do
exactly that which means they get money from you and the scrap people for
essentially just taking things apart (which is kinda fun right?).

~~~
roel_v
The issue was mostly the CRT's - they're like 20 or 25 kg each, I would've had
to lug all of them down 3 flights of stairs, plus I would've had to hire a van
to bring them away or drive 5 times or so with my car. Plus there are hardly
any metals in the monitors, so I wouldn't have gotten paid for them anyway. We
were moving offices at the time, I had other things on my mind. I made a deal
where everything including the CRT's and a bunch of really old stuff like old
ink-jet printers etc. were taken away. Maybe I would've gotten paid a bit had
I sold just the PC's - even then it would've been so little that it wouldn't
have been worth my time, plus I would've had to pay more for the rest.

Regardless of whether it's possible to get some pocket change for old pc's,
the point is: it's not cost effective, when you count the hourly salary of a
professional, to do anything more than the absolute minimum to dispose of old
computers. Especially for a government organization - bureaucracies are not
designed for cost-effectiveness, but for predictability and accountability.
That is not a value judgement, just an observation, but one that immediately
dispels of 50% of whining about 'governments wasting money'.

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sek
The official report says this was more of an excuse to get rid of old
hardware.

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yoster
Talk about some inefficient spending on Germany! Thousands of dollars wasted,
and to think in the states we waste billions.

