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There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data
by rndn 11y ago
There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)
- Zikes 11y agoA stenographed image embedded in a Word document, printed and faxed to a document archive that scans and digitizes it, embeds the scan in a PDF, and emails it back to you.
- baddox 11y agoCan you make that fully automated from the end user's perspective?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Cacti 11y agoDuring this process you will lose data. A lot of data.
- iblaine 11y agoPretty sure this happens in Washington DC when bills need to be reviewed by various departments.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoThe original image is a picture of a worker's monitor displaying some error message that IT asked for. I'm not joking either.
- prawn 11y agoHey, client of mine, you need to pay my invoice. Also, that photo you sent me won't open.
- Mithaldu 11y ago> most implausible data storage medium That still works well! It's easy to make something bizarre and unusable. Have it bizarre and surprisingly usable. :D
- Zikes 11y agoDarn, that rules mine out, then. Fax is about as unusable as you can get...
- ryan-c 11y agoHere's my entry. https://github.com/ryancdotorg/dnsstore https://github.com/ryancdotorg/dnsstore
- mmahemoff 11y agoA similar service is here: http://www.cambus.net/interesting-dns-hacks/ http://www.cambus.net/interesting-dns-hacks/ Interesting about DNS stores is they save a round trip, so it's not just a weird abuse of the protocol to store content, it's also potentially a performance optimisation.
- silverwind 11y agoAnd almost every provider around the world provides a free 'CDN'. It's win-win!
- mmahemoff 11y agoHalf-CDN Half-DNS I call it the CDNS :)
- jackgavigan 11y agonslookup -type=TXT jackgavigan.com ;-)
- an_account_name 11y agoLicensed under the WTFPL! One of my all-time favorites.
- empyrical 11y agoMy personal favourite: https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- tacone 11y agoThat just segfaulted my brain. Everything we may ever write in the future is already there, you just need the address.
- zedadex 11y ago> Copyright infringement? It's just a few digits of π! They were always there! You really have to admire that creativity
- jordigh 11y agoThe problem is that the address is typically larger than the actual data you want to store.
- mafuyu 11y agoLuckily, I know of a scheme to compress the address 100%! ;)
- tacone 11y agoOh no! I sketched up a script to gzip the chunks, hashsum them, and then find out how many collisions there are before the real occurrence starting from an approximate address in the PI digits chain, so that I could have: ($address*1e12)$hash$collisioncount The resulting string is 10% of size of the gzipped string, at the expense of CPU. But when I read you achieved 100% compression I just deleted the script and got out to get a beer. :-(((
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoWhile I'm not sure every number is in pi (see my other comment to grandparent), there is a similar really weird feeling I get when I consider all digital data is really just numbers. That means there is a number, that when turned into a .avi (or format of your choice), shows anything you can imagine. Imagine yourself talking with Plato. There is a number that produces a 1080p video of you doing just that. Actually, there are a lot of numbers that do that, as every little difference in the setting would be a different number. There is a number that produces a high def photo of when you married your high school sweetheart, even if you never actually married her. There is one of you being awarded the Nobel prize. If there is a proof that P = NP, or that it doesn't, or even a proof that it can't be proven either way, then there is a number that would be the PDF version of that document.
- baddox 11y agoThe Bitcoin blockchain works fine, but is fairly implausible for interesting amounts of data.
- vidarh 11y agoUsenet messages and mail systems are both good old ideas (I don't know of any actual implementation, but it's certainly been discussed at least back to the early 90's). For Usenet you could depend on widespread resilien distribution + reasonably long retention periods for a lot of groups (but risked having messages killed by admins if too obvious spam). For e-mail, anything reflecting your e-mail back can be used to juggle data: Send messages with attachment, refuse to accept the inbound reflected messages for a couple of days to let the other party store the data for you while they retry, then accept the message and instantly send it back out again. Then there's the old Linus Torvalds quote: "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
- fatratchet 11y agoUsenet is perfect for that since binary newsgroups for piracy have gotten really popular over the last few years. You can basically use it as a reasonably reliable key-value store that lets you store 300kb to 1mb blobs. Add some encryption and parity and you've got yourself nearly unlimited storage, even for free if you use trial accounts from certain providers.
- 0x0 11y agoYeah, I remember reading about the e-mail reflection idea in the book "Silence on the wire", authored by "lcamtuf", the guy who's more recently known for writing afl-fuzz.
- fatratchet 11y agoTo get reliable and free storage, photo hosting is usually the easiest way. Flickr offers 1TB, picasa/g+ offers unlimited storage with some hidden quoats. Everything that allows lossless photos lets you store arbitrary data. Depending on how careful you wanna be you can store hundreds of GBs per account. Email attachments used to be a great way a while ago but nowadays using multiple gdrive/dropbox/onedrive accounts is much easier. They are easy to create in large numbers (especially if your ISP has dynamic IPS) and as long as you're even a little bit careful, nearly impossible to ban. Add some redundancy across different services to that and a $2 VPS that gives you tons of upload bandwidth and you've got yourself as many TBs of free,fast and reliable online storage as you want. I spent so much time as a teenager with no money and some python skills coding storage solutions like that. I'd say it was to store movies and tv shows for myself but in retrospect I mostly did it because it was so much fun to develop.
- namwen 11y agoYeah, I wrote something that stores data to Flickr last summer: https://github.com/namwen/hoardr https://github.com/namwen/hoardr . I kind of had a reason but it was more for the enjoyment of getting it to work.
- adrian_blx 11y agoThere is also hyperglobalmegastore https://github.com/adrian-bl/hyperglobalmegastore https://github.com/adrian-bl/hyperglobalmegastore All data is encrypted and you can even mount your flickr 'drive' using fuse.
- vivab0rg 11y agoThis project needs more stars!
- rogeryu 11y agoUntil this gets so popular that Google or Flickr start to analyse photos, and come to the conclusion to either delete those photos and videos, or to convert them and destroying the data for you. Then, years later, you need your backup and ....
- dbarlett 11y agoPacket juggling http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/juggling_with_packets.txt http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/juggling_with_packets.txt
- andrewstuart2 11y agoPacket juggling over RFC1149-compliant networks. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
- daveloyall 11y agoWhen you say that, I picture this. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=starlings+swarm&iax=1&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=starlings+swarm&iax=1&ia=images
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- elwell 11y agoConvert data to binary. Use Amazon Mechanical Turk API to create tasks for people to remember the index of each bit (the value of the task would be $0.01 for binary 0 and $0.02 for binary 1). And, for reading memory, a new task to input the index they remembered and the value they were paid.
- oconnore 11y agohttp://bash.org/?98 http://bash.org/?98
- pimlottc 11y agoYou'd have to factor in a ton of redundancy to account for the human bits who just got bored and wandered off. Anyway, people would probably just start saving the bits on this computers after first job or two. Which would be an amusing result for being just a convoluted interface to a remote hard drive, but it's conceptually less interesting then actually using distributed human memory as a digital storage medium...
- xanderjanz 11y agoyou could structure it such that the longer they sit there remembering the data, the more they get paid. When they want to leave, they enter what they remember and get paid.
- mmahemoff 11y agoFurl - Storing data in URL shorteners and aptly refers to itself as "parasitic storage". Some precursors referenced on its homepage. https://code.google.com/p/furl/ https://code.google.com/p/furl/
- hhm 11y agoSteganography is always interesting for data storage. It is pretty easy to hide data into pretty much any medium. See http://jthuraisamy.github.io/markovTextStego.js/ http://jthuraisamy.github.io/markovTextStego.js/ and https://github.com/hmoraldo/markovTextStego https://github.com/hmoraldo/markovTextStego
- chrissnell 11y agoCombining steganography with Reddit could be interesting. Random (mildly interesting) photos pushed to imgur and posted to /r/pics by the same user every time.
- alfg 11y agoSomething not too far off that I made a couple of years ago for fun. Stores small snippets of data in the URL. https://github.com/alfg/jot https://github.com/alfg/jot with demo.
- rcthompson 11y agoSo, with this plus a URL-shortener as a frontend, you're essentially using the URL shortening service as the data storage.
- alfg 11y agoHa, right! Especially since the URLs can get very lengthy depending on the message.
- _lce0 11y agogenius!! ready for t.co and bit.ly perfectly for small pieces of immutable data!
- notacoward 11y agoErasure-coded comments distributed across the huge number of abandoned Wordpress blogs and phpBB forums that are out there. Plenty of storage, pretty readily accessible, low probability that even one fragment will get deleted, and even if one does that's what the erasure coding is for. EDIT: also, Wikipedia never deletes anything. Even if your "edits" get reverted, you can still find them via the history page. Hmmm.
- joliv 11y agoWikipedia is a bit more vigilant with banning than abandoned blogs are :)
- Hello71 11y agono, deleted media is gone forever IIRC. deleted pages are not visible to people with less than sysop rights (on enwp), and multiple methods are always available to deal with troublesome people, ranging from revision deletion to blocks and eventually ISP contact.
- antihero 11y agoConnect ethernet cables in a loop, keep sending data back and forth "around" the loop. Data is stored in cables. I think this was from an old BOFH.
- voltagex_ 11y agohttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:786NsZY7idIJ:www.shysecurity.com/posts/pingfs+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:786NsZY... and https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs OT: Let archive.org save your pages, people!
- nosuchthing 11y agoApollo 11 used Rope Memory on its voyage to the moon. [1] [2] [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8148730.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8148730.stm [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory
- joezydeco 11y agoMercury delay lines always fascinated me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Mercury_delay_lines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Mercury_delay...
- SilasX 11y agoHow about just a project that implements an S3-style directory system, with a "fill in the blank" for you to implement the storage backend? That is, for a given storage medium, all you have to do is implement methods for "write key-value pair" and "read value at key", and you get to piggyback off that medium for your storage.
- rrrrob 11y agoI'd love to exploit ad networks user profiles for this. I.e., store some bits as "interests", by running a few appropriate google searches or hitting a few web sites, read the bits by seeing what ads you're served. This would probably require a bit of learning and a redundant encoding to make it work, but...
- haylem 11y agoI had a few in mind when I was back in uni and hosting and cloud storage prices were still up. I hadn't thought of reddit, as the abuse would be clearly visible, but I had used back then that Gmail Drive some guy had implemented using emails for storage, and it led me to think a lot of the Google Systems had non-obvious "unlimited" storage options. For instance, I don't know if that's still the case, but Google Calendar surely seemed pretty fit for abuse: while calendar entries were limited in size, you could have as many as you wanted. And calendars can be private, so it's even better. The problem with such systems will be the integrity of your data, when you start being forced to chunk things up. If they change one thing under your feet, you're a bit screwed. Also you have to detect all the undocumented pitfalls (e.g. forbidden characters in an edit field).
- leni536 11y agoI like this one: https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]