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Re-program the system you are on to stream data which normally simply disappears into the proverbial bit-bucket to an RS-232 port or similar, to which a device would be connected that would in some physical way represent the discarded data (possibly, a bank of LEDs, or, for the wealthy, a dedicated SVGA
monitor displaying a comical rendering of a trashcan which is filling with data, represented by chaotically printed, out-of-alignment green characters.) Alternatively, a public radio channel could be set up. Each machine that has a dev/null could be set by its master (voluntarily) to broadcast the tossed-out data with a short range transmitter. This way, other people could ride around with laptops connected to simple digital receivers, as perhaps "one man's trash is another's treasure."
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Baked in the form of chad recepticals. You're probably too young to remember paper tape or punch cards. |
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In fact, we used to joke that the chad had to be destroyed so the Russians (remember, they used to be the enemy) couldn't reconstruct the secret data. |
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Awesome. Attach /dev/null to a small receipt printer bolted a couple of inches above a scanner, so that any data is printed out and immediately shredded. |
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I neve knew /dev/null could be so much fun! :-) |
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I've always wanted to write a device that pictorially shows you how many 1's and 0's have been deleted... Easy to do with a 256-nibble LUT. It'd be interesting to see the ratio of 1:0's in documents. |
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I like this almost as much as physical biff. A colleague of mine (Rensselaer Polytechnic - Troy, New York) baked such a thing so he would not have to leave bed to see if he got email. Message received...RS232 sends signal to microcontroller that raises flag. Read mail, flag goes back down. |
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