That's someone else's data (three someone elses' if you count the iPhone end users) read from the root block device on a minutes-old brand new fresh Digital Ocean VM that I got from them for a $5 PayPal payment. It had been mkfs'd but not zeroed.

Command was:

    apt-get -y install binutils ; dd if=/dev/vda bs=1M | strings -n 100 | grep 2013-12

The destroy api call docs are here:

https://developers.digitalocean.com

(It's the /droplets/[droplet_id]/destroy one.)

I think he's showing that the data is not "destroyed" in the sense it still exists. Destroy in a virt context doesn't necessarily mean "destroy all the resources associated with a VM"--I don't know about DO's product offering, but at the hypervisor level, at least with Xen and libvirt, you often want to "destroy" the instance (forcibly terminate/undefine from the hypervisor) and leave the resources (storage pools/devices, IP pools/addresses, network flows/filters etc). I think focusing on the word "destroy" is a bit of a canard; the real problem is insecure defaults wrt block device scrubbing when you issue an API "destroy" (which wouldn't be any better if it was called "delete" or "undefine").