(eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

Forwarded message:

> Subject: Re: (eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium 
> Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 09:33:30 EST
> From: Ryan Lackey <rdl at mit.edu>

> Documents by specification last only as long as someone is willing to pay
> to keep them up.  This is not necessarily forever.

Admiral Hopper used to give a talk about the worth of data and she had a
very nice chart that would demonstrate the worth of data over time. Initialy
it is worth a lot because it is hard to reproduce, obtain, or distribute. As
time goes on it becomes less and less important. In her particular context
it was related to the economic decision of when to move data offline in
large database applications.

> Once your DBC escrow
> "account" runs out, the data is worthless

That's a jump of logic. The data may infact be quite popular even though you
don't offer it anymore (might even do this in order to increase its worth, 
say some sort of insider trader newsletter). It's probably not in the best
interest of the data haven model to speculate on exactly why a particular
source decides to quit sourcing.

> remain in Eternity forever if no one cares enough about it to pay to
> have it stored.

Then again, if it was really important I might intentionaly want to attack
the ability to provide long-term income. A better model might be to charge
for the access and let the actual submission be no charge. A portion of the
retrieval charge could then be piped back to the source. Consider the case
of say nuclear or biological information for a weapon. That sort of data
would be accessed only infrequently (unless you're giving something this
expensive to obtain and verify away - a d-h operator error, no.) but should
be quite expensive to retrieve.

> If the data is still relevant and worth breaking in 50 years, they could
> just intercept the encrypted email, store it in a government vault for
> 50 years,

More realisticaly they would have somebody just add it to a batch job and
let the spare cycles of the machines crank away at it. Or perhaps set up a
key challenge and get people all over the world to work on it in their spare
cycles. Who knows, perhaps the source of the data woudl be intriqued enough
to provide spare cycles unknowingly.

> If you do not postulate that level of signals collection capability on the

It's not just their sig-int capability but their complete processing
resource capability that must be considered as well as their psychological
motivation. Granted, all of these are extremely difficult to measure let
alone verify. Perhaps a little paranoia might be a good thing.



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