I recently got a new desktop PC, and donated the old one to charity. Before doing so, I wanted to wipe the old machine completely clean. I was checking out a few data erasure products and happened upon cyberCide (I loathe that capitalization, by the way) from CyberScrub.
On their product page, there’s what appears to be a quote about their product from the New York Times:
There are no commercial or black-market file retrieval products that have been known to retrieve a file after this process.
I searched for that phrase because I wanted to check out a couple competitors, and figured the Times article would cite them. Here’s the article, and the original context for that quote:
The Defense Department, however, is a bit more cautious and has established a national security standard called 5220.22. This specification requires three separate overwrites, first with zeroes, then with ones and finally with a random character between two and nine. There are no commercial or black-market file retrieval products that have been known to retrieve a file after this process. In other words, the only way to make a file more secure would be to take your hard drive out back and set it on fire.
As you can see, cyberCide isn’t mentioned in that paragraph. In fact, it’s only referenced once, later in the article, in a list of competitors to the “most popular” product.
Yes, cyberCide may adhere to this security standard. However, it’s pretty shite to excise one sentence from a tangentially-related paragraph and publish it prominently, like a testomonial or positive review, on your site. It suggests an endorsement by a prominent newspaper, and that’s clearly not the case. It’s misleading and does a disservice to your customers.
I eventually went with KillDisk because it was free and didn’t try to fool me with dodgy citations.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
This is the one I use at work for hardware burn in, testing, and hard drive erasing;
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
I use Eraser
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
The original article sounds like bollocks anyway; writing zeros and ones implies binary, but the random digit from 2-9 sounds like a PR person just making stuff up. There are only two logical ways to describe writing data to a hard drive, either binary (zeroes and ones only) or character based, meaning any 8 bit character. In the latter case there’s no reason to limit the range to decimal digits, except for a lack of understanding of how data is represented digitally.
You strike me as a genuinely detestable creature. You’re arrogance belies you’re blatent lack of substance in your life. You seem to have a talent for color coordination but this is a far cry from compensating for feeling ugly, greedy, loudmouthed and unpopular. I would advise you to leave the blogosphere because you remind me of what I hope I never have the misfortune to become.
Mufty: Heh, you sound a bit like Mr. Burns: “This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election”.
The design wasn’t mine, so I can’t even claim colour coordination. Happily, I don’t feel any of ugly, greedy, loudmouthed and unpopular.
If you don’t like reading this site (and I’m guessing that’s the case), try out one of the many sites in the sidebar. Hopefully you’ll find something more to your liking there.
You’ll have to excuse the outburst. The summer heat can do funny things to a Nuclear Power Plant owner. How did you blow my cover?
What was all that about? Was it a joke? Why so gracious Darren? I would have just deleted that post.
Neal: In truth, I don’t know if it was a joke or not. I rarely delete comments–only if they’re really vulgar and insulting to a third party.
I prefer to leave the comments up. Each comment (whether offensive or not) speaks as much about the commenter as it does about me.