Clean your data

Last month, during a “trip” to my local recycling center to throw away my green waste, I was walking nearby the electronic garbage and I notice a good looking 27″ iMac. I didn’t hesitate long, and took it with me.

At home, I had to find the right power cable and decide to give it a try. By miracle, the iMac started first time, without password, and I was on the profile of the previous owner.

Before going any further, as it seems strange to find such an iMac, I contacted the owner (yes, I found out how to contact him..) to ensure that it was not stolen. He replied, after a few days, didn’t scare really much and confirmed that he was the one putting it at the recycling center.

On that iMac, I found all his personal life : name, emails, 10 years of pictures, invoices, ID card, passport, diploma, tax receipts,… Just name it ! Everything needed for an identity theft.. I warned the owner, and confirmed that I’m more a White Hat, and I was not going to do anything wrong with his data.

But that’s really scary, and you should never do that. At least clean the hard drive, crash it, put a password, destroy the iMac, but please do not throw your data like this !

This guy is an atomic engineer, working on a famous French aircraft carrier. Documents, pictures and names/ranks of his colleagues were on the hard drive..

After some reviews, and talks with friends, I decided not to contact the ANSSI, because imo it was not enough to present a security threat. However, I’m not really proud of the people defending my country, in IT security measures at least.

I properly erased the hard drive, and install a fresh new SSD, and tada ! New working iMac !

Not going any further, you get the idea.
Please get rid of your personal data before throwing an electronic device, and at least use password..

Even Apple has an article for that : https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065

For more information : https://www.economie.gouv.fr/particuliers/protection-usurpation-identite

Lunii Hack : Improve longevity of the Lunii

My kids have this wonderful radio called Lunii , a “story maker”. That’s great, but the battery is not big enough and I decided to take a look.

The standard battery is a classic 503035 that you can find anywhere on internet for a few euros. It’s a 3,7V – 500mAh battery.

Good for us, it had a big brother, the 103450, a 3,7V – 1800mAh battery. You can also find it easily on internet.

Replacing it was easy (make sure of the polarity of the battery before replacing it, red on red, black on black). I will do a 3d-printed box to maintain it inside the Lunii.

Opening the Lunii by removing 4 screws

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Improving the battery-powered night light of my son

My son have a nice fox night light, that he really need every night. Unfortunately, it needs batteries (3x AAA) and as we forget to switch it off every morning, it’s kind of battery consumming. (Rechargeable battery is not an option)

So I look into my stock of “Let’s keep it, it may be useful someday” and found a perfect 220V transformer !
As I didn’t want to damage the night light, I decided to keep the option to use batteries : I need to make fake batteries.

Adapting new fake batteries

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Cutting the end of the 200V transformer, soldering a screw at the end, and adding an anchor