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Alan Shugart, the iconic -- and iconoclastic -- co-founder of Seagate Technology, is dead at 76, according to the company. One of the creators of the multi-billion dollar hard drive industry, Shugart was also well-known for colorful antics like running his dog for Congress. He died at about 2 p.m. Tuesday at Community Hospital in Monterey. Shugart's health had declined following open-heart surgery six weeks ago. Until the day of his death, Shugart was still checking work e-mails involving Al Shugart International, his start-up incubator in Santa Cruz, according to his daughter, Teri Shugart. The legendary Shugart and his business...

    Buyers Scour eBay For Data-Rich Hard DrivesThey're looking for drives that haven't been wiped clean and contain valuable data.By Gregg KeizerTechWeb News Jan 30, 2006 02:40 PM Buyers on eBay troll the online auction site for used drives in the hope that the platters haven't been wiped clean and contain valuable data, including credit card numbers, a researcher said Monday. Simson Garfinkel, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society, has been buying used hard drives on eBay since 2001, then analyzing the data he finds on some of the devices. Of the...

While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely. I.B.M. employees, and relatives of employees who have died, are claiming in a series of very bitter lawsuits that I.B.M. workers have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing, laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations. Dr. Richard Clapp, a respected epidemiologist from Boston University who was hired by a group of 40...