Checksums, etc. was Re: One Time Pads $5000|Cheap

In message Sun, 12 Dec 93 10:14:22 EST, bogstad@blaze.cs.jhu.edu (Bill Bogstad) writes:

Another problem is even if the media itself has this capability the standard writer devices are going to want to write block checksums etc.; which is probably going to fail.

A few years back I was into WORM disks for imaging systems. We needed to be able to burn an image on the disk, and then go back and set a "logical deletion" flag so that the records would no longer be accessible. The standard WORM device controllers wouldn't let it happen. They insisted on verifying the checksums on the block. We considered hacking the controller logic, but gave up as too much of a maintanance headache. But even WORM medea are rewritable at a low enuff level. Pat