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We welcome all seniors age 55 and older, who are interested in using, learning, or teaching others to use personal computers. We meet on the 1st and 3rd Thursday of each month from 2:15 to 4:15 p.m. at the Bowie Senior Center. The Senior Center is at 14900 Health Center Drive, Bowie, MD. See the map at the bottom of this page.
Our club has no dues and no tests! Come have fun, and learn to use your computer more effectively. Bring your questions to the meetings, and we’ll try to answer them. Stupid questions? Yes, those are the ones no one asked! If you’re a computer user — either experienced or inexperienced — come join in the fun of helping yourself and others.
Sgt John Boesman and Cpt Justin Bracket of the Prince George’s County Police Department, Computer Forensics Unit, will discuss how they recover digital evidence. They will describe how they forensically examine computer hardware, media and devices that fall within the Unit's area of expertise, and how they provide impartial expert testimony of the analytical results.
Sara Ingeman, Marketing Representative, has sent us a briefing, which a Club member will present on behalf of Sandhills Publishing. Here are the presentation highlights. Aiming to educate attendees about Sandhills Publishing’s magazines and the Smart Computing User Group Program, the presentation will
The presentation will explain how we can receive unlimited computer support from Smart Computing. Each attendee will receive a packet of Smart Computing goodies and be eligible to win other Smart Computing merchandise. We invite all Seniors (age 55+) interested in expanding their computer knowledge to attend this meeting.
Club members explained and demonstrated how to sanitize a computer’s hard disk drive and re-install the operating system.
Computer users want and need a simple and secure way to erase all their data from hard disk drives when releasing them from their physical control. Over a third of drives resold on eBay contain personal data such as tax, credit, and medical records, according to the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in its Protocols for Disk Drive Secure Erase. These drives come from PCs, servers, workstations, ATM machines, and banks.
When users’ information is left on disk drives removed from computers and storage systems, a data security vulnerability is created that many users are unaware of. CMRR says federal and state laws require secure erasure of user data; failure to do so exposes responsible parties to fines of up to $250,000 and to imprisonment for 10 years.
CMRR developed a “Secure Erase” command to reliably eradicate data from computer hard drives for security and privacy reasons. At CMRR’s request, the Secure Erase command became part of the standard specifications for IDE/ATA drives in 2001. Secure Erase runs inside the drive hardware. It completes in about 1/8 the time of a US Department of Defense (DoD) 5220.22-M block erasure.
A DoD 5220.22-M block erasure overwrites all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character, then verifies that that has been accomplished. Note: This cannot be accomplished if any sectors are marked as bad sectors or if there are reallocated (reassigned) blocks. Also, the process can take several days to sanitize a 100-GB disk drive, according to the UCSD Tutorial on Disk Drive Data Sanitization.
That tutorial accompanies UCSD’s free downloadable Secure Erase Utility, which will sanitize a 100-GB IDE/ATA disk drive in one-half to two hours. This downloadable freeware utility executes the Secure Erase function in disk drives built after 2001, in conformance with Recommendations of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-88, Guidelines for Media Sanitization. Secure Erase even makes data in bad sectors and reallocated blocks irrecoverable. Secure Erase is recognized by NIST 800-88 as an effective and secure way to meet legal data sanitization requirements in ATA drives.
Club members wanted to sanitize two computers that had been donated to a local assisted-living facility for residents’ use. The computers used the Windows NT operating system, but the operating systems were password-protected and the passwords were unknown. The disk drives were smaller than 15 GB; it was not known whether they had bad or reallocated sectors.
The computers were built in 1998, so the club members could not use the Secure Erase command. Instead, they used the free version of LSoft Technologies’ KillDisk, which boots and runs from a floppy disk and writes zeros across whichever drive partitions the user specifies. After they did that, they displayed the disks’ contents at several locations, and indeed zeros were there. The members asserted, but could not demonstrate, that any bad or reallocated sectors were overwritten with zeros.
After that, the members installed Windows 98 on both computers and demonstrated that the computers were operational.
Arnold Nasyrov, Personal Banker, Bank of America, Bowie Town Center, showed us the benefits of Online Banking with Bank of America.
W. Wesley Watts, Jr, Chief Information Officer, Prince George’s County Public Schools, discussed technology in the public school system.
Katherine Perez, Chief of Police, Bowie Police Department, described the communications and computer capabilities available to our officers when on patrol.
Kathy White, manager of the Bowie Senior Center, described her vision for providing access to the Internet for our Senior Citizens. Two additional computers will be installed for that purpose. The two existing computers will continue to be available for playing computer games. Later, Internet access might be expanded by creating a Wi-Fi Hotspot.
Darren Morgan, general manager of the Bowie MD Staples store, and Mike Lemerise were the featured speakers at our March 20 meeting. They described the products and services they offer, and demonstrated on an actual computer how they perform a PC Tune-Up (diagnostic service).
Our speakers were Bob Boller and Denise Haworth, Director and Assistant Director of the City of Bowie’s Information Technology Department. They discussed
Bowie Senior Center
14900 Health Center Drive
Bowie, MD
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This page was updated July 31, 2008
