[plug] message/output of wipe command?

[Daniel Pittman]

sothisistheinternet <sothisistheinternet at gmail.com> writes:

> When running wipe, there are a series of numbers being presented, and
> I'm curious as to what the number in parentheses indicates:

Did you read the manual page and documentation from the package?

(Not that this would actually help, in this case, but letting us know
 that you did proves that you made some effort.)

> # Wiping /dev/sdb, pass:  1  (13)    [    123456    /    1123456    ]

My guess would be: current pass, total pass count, current block, total
blocks, in that order.

Also, the author of that utility is rather paranoid, to the point I
wonder that he or she doesn't just go back to using stone tablets or,
perhaps, living in a mud hut in the jungle with nothing more
sophisticated than a vine around:

     I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area
     to secretly make copies of your data.  Rising totalitarianism makes
     this almost a certitude.

     [...]

     Don’t trust your harddisk.  Encrypt all your data.

     Of course this shifts the trust to the computing system, the CPU,
     and so on.  I guess there are also "traps" in the CPU and, in fact,
     in every sufficiently advanced mass-marketed chip.  Wealthy nations
     can find those.  Therefore these are mainly used for criminal
     investigation and "control of public dissent".

That surely is some serious paranoia: my computer, every single
component, is under the control of the Jovian lizards ^W^W government,
who actively use this control to manage "public dissent".

Oh, well.  People, can't live with 'em, can't feed em to the Jovian
lizards ^W^W government mind control security drones.

Regards,
        Daniel