It’s often the simplest tricks that are the most effective. For example, not even the most advanced, most expensive data protection and encryption can guarantee that people won’t be able to get their hands on the data that’s stored on your hard drive, but you could easily take it outside and light it on fire for a bit. That would make it virtually impossible for anyone to access the data on the hard drive, even yourself, but some information is so important that it’s better to destroy it then allow it to fall into the wrong hands. That’s the idea behind the new self-destructing chip that a group of engineers at Xerox PARC have developed.