On Sat, 25 May 1996, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
frankly, I think this was a great idea that we could explore some more. in a sense, it stores data "holographically" over all kinds of different people's messages. imagine a system in which the scientology documents are stored in people's signatures, and someone writes software to go and recombine the documents based on finding signatures "out there".
This software already exists. Take a look at Disperse/Collect at http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai. Disperse splits a file into n base64 encoded pieces where any k of them can be used to reconstruct the original. Collect will search through arbitrary collection of files (for example the entire news spool) for these pieces and automatically reconstruct everything that it finds. Wei Dai