New Polymer Ideal For Secure Data Storage 142
aphexbrett writes "Clever geometry is the basis of a new material that is said to be ideal for secure data encryption and dense optical information storage. The material consists of a lattice of onionlike spheres in which the particle core and its layers each contain a different dye. The material can hold four or more pieces of information in one spot--not just two as in binary optical data storage. And it opens a door to high-density three-dimensional optical data storage. Read a summary of the research over at C&EN News."
Every other week (Score:5, Interesting)
When do we get a 100 gb solid state disk for 50 dollars?
Give 'em some time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Give 'em some time (Score:5, Informative)
That's right. For example, CD was invented in 1979 (CMIIW). Started to be introduced in 1983. Beginning of adoption is around early nineties. So, it takes 10-15 years before it's truly popular.
But sometimes, inventions wither before they see the daylight or poorly marketed. I just hope that it will soon hits the market with the right price.
Re:Every other week (Score:2)
don't take me wrong, the technology is great, it's just not "Out of the box, commercial ready". That is to say, things still need to be worked out on how to make them practical. I'd just be happy with seeing my next storebought computer ship with a memorystick/Compact flash/secure digital memory car
Re:Every other week (Score:2)
Re:Every other week (Score:2, Funny)
When 10 terabyte hard disks are 50 dollars and the minimum space required for an OS install is greater than 100GB.
Re:Every other week (Score:1)
maybe even smaller...
Re:Every other week (Score:5, Interesting)
Whats more, the technological advances we've made have enabled us to exponentially pick up the pace of our research. Really makes you sit back and ponder what people in the Renaissance could have done if they had the ability to communicate like we do with the net.
If anybody knows of any articles/papers on this topic, I'd love a link to it.
Re:Every other week (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Every other week (Score:2)
My physics101 professor said science started with Galileo, in the early 1600's Italy. That's when someone first started "asking Nature" for the truth, i.e. did experiments and checked the results, instead of reading what the masters wrote. It doesn't matter how "logical" it is, if experiments don't confirm it, your reasoning is wrong.
Re:Every other week (Score:1)
The reason you seen announcements like this every other week is funding. Grant money is drying up for research (thanks Bush), thus it becomes more important to sell your research. The C&E News is the American Chemical Society's "industry" newsletter. The last ACS meeting focused on "nanoscien
Re:Every other week (Score:2)
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.
The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change com
Re:Every other week (Score:2)
Don't forget, you can now get 128MB solid state devices for pennies, and I remember when my hard disc was only that big.
here they come (Score:4, Funny)
Re:here they come (Score:1)
Re:here they come (Score:1, Funny)
Re:here they come (Score:2)
Re:here they come (Score:1)
commentary (Score:2, Funny)
"Cool! Hopefully, this'll be big enough to put Duke Nukem Forever on it! Oh, oh! And it'll have enough space for all those Phantom Console games I'll be downloading."
Seriously, though. Sometimes I wish researchers would just go voltron* with manufacturers and get the product out and surprise the crap out of all of us apathetic slashdotters awaiting our be-all-end-all data storage medium, as well as flying cars, hoverboards and the whole gamut of consumer electronics novelties that only
Re:commentary (Score:2, Funny)
Re:commentary (Score:1)
Re:commentary (Score:1)
Re:commentary (Score:2)
Re:commentary (Score:1)
Still doesn't make it a good idea.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The approach is *really* simple... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The approach is *really* simple... (Score:1)
Re:The approach is *really* simple... (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno... regular dumps should cover that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The approach is *really* simple... (Score:1)
YADSA (Yet Another Data Storage Alternative) (Score:1)
Our Future Ex-NeverReleased Storage Solution (Score:1)
My impression is that the peer from the extraterrestrial trea
Re:Our Future Ex-NeverReleased Storage Solution (Score:1)
Uh huh... Explain how that theory fits in with all the different memory card formats.
Damn... my tinfoil hat must be busted today.
Re:YADSA (Yet Another Data Storage Alternative) (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not quite as organized as a crystalline structure, but hell, it's almost the data crystal I and all of us have been promised for so many years...
Re:Almost... (Score:2, Interesting)
This system consists of a periodic lattice convolved with a basis (the onion). This is in fact the definition of a crystal, as any condensed-matter-physicist will tell you. Any system with this property will disply many analogues of the properties of traditional crystals.
I read... (Score:1)
Yuck.
Another good idea - atomic level data storage? (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting....but leads to other questions! (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, I would've liked to see some metrics to give an idea of the capacity such a material has in comparison with some of the recent stuff developed by, for example, IBM. Although I appreciate that it's early days at the moment.
Finally, making a reader for the material is one thing, but I imagine making a writer is an altogether trickier process....how do add and remove all these dye-polymer shells, or is the whole point to have a static, WORM-style data store?
Re:Interesting....but leads to other questions! (Score:5, Informative)
Given the correct photo-stabilisers, the dye layers could be made to last for "extended" periods of time. Maybe up to years? The problem lies with the light-fastness of dyes; when a dye molecule undergoes the electronic interaction with light that produces colour there is a % chance that the molecule will be damaged by that change. The higher the energy of the electronic interaction, the higher the % chance of damage.
Blue (visible) dyes are generally amongst the most intrinsically stable as their interactions are with the red (low energy) portion of the visible spectrum. On the other hand, UV reactive dyes (such as Optical Brighteners/Flourescent Whiteners) are degraded very quickly by their high energy interactions. Put a sheet of copier paper out in the sun for a couple of days, and then hold it next to a new sheet - you'll see how quickly the OBA's have been destroyed!
Now, photo-stabilisers can be added to the dye mix to counteract these degredation processes but in a system where you are wanting several dyes to be active at differing wavelengths it will be difficult in the extreme to arrange the system so that one of these "onion layers" doesn't absorb the wavelength required by another layer!
Finally, making a reader for the material is one thing
And what a thing it would be! The nice thing about silicon chips is that the access time is constant (IIRC each bit is activated in parallel?) across the storage unit. You can read bits 1, 2 and then 3 with the same latency as bits 1, 1583945856 and then 393758273589235892253. With a "three dimensional matrix" of discrete units, you first have to find your bit before it can be read! Imagine with current mass-use technology... a read head housing 4 lasers (as in the 4 dye example in the article) trying to access a bit at the "start" of the data, then one that's physically 1.5cm away, and then again, and again, and again.... the latency would be huge!! Maybe I don't know enough about
So yes, security tagging would be OK - relying on the macro-structure of the matrix under different lighting and the good old Human Eyeball Mk1 - but data storage? I think it'll be a while before this gets used...
Re:Interesting....but leads to other questions! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Interesting....but leads to other questions! (Score:1)
And long term data storage mechanisms, like hard disks and CDROMs, all have moving parts that have to seek to get non-adjacent data anyway, just like this would.
Re:Interesting....but leads to other questions! (Score:1)
They could learn from the Etch-a-Sketch...
To format, merely shake the cube to remove the data.
To save your data indefinately, don't shake the cube
Re:Interesting....but leads to other questions! (Score:1)
Re:Interesting....but leads to other questions! (Score:2)
I can imagine something like this: The dyes undergo some chemical change when a specific wavelength of laser light is applied to one of these 'onions'. Until activated in this way, the various shells in the onion don't react in the specific way needed to read any data from
Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
*ZZZZZZZZzzzzZZzzzzzzZ*
Are you trying to be dense? (Score:5, Insightful)
The venturi effect was discovered hundreds of years before the Wright Flyer was built, and it was 20 or 30 years after that before airplanes were useful for much. That doesn't mean the discovery and prototype (or specialized applications) were of no interest until commercial airliners appeared.
If you only care about deployable mass-market products, I suppose that's fine, but it's not worth posting about. If you can't tell the difference, or choose to ignore it, that's just obnoxious.
Re:Are you trying to be dense? (Score:1, Interesting)
What I AM saying is that I don't care to hear things being touted as replacements to things which they obviously are NOT. At least not yet. Does the article tout this so? Not necessarily. Will some
You're talking to someone who's going into pharmaceutical research--I damned well know the difference. It's
Re:Are you trying to be dense? (Score:2)
Did you READ your original post?!
You shoot down the article for not reporting any cost-effective solutions for mass-storage - "*ZZZZZZZZzzzzZZzzzzzzZ*" - and NO F-ING MENTION of your (later claimed) scientific interest in the research.
Squeamish Ossifrage calls you on it - "This is obviously not in the third category [consumer products], but that doesn't make it uninteresting.". The science presented being it, NOT ABOUT ANY CONSUMER-GRADE stora
Re:Are you trying to be dense? (Score:1)
I said I AM INTERESTED from a scientific standpoint BUT NOT from a consumer standpoint.
Duly noted (Score:2)
Re:Well... (Score:1)
Well, you took enough time to read the /. blib, click on the "read more..." link and post something. It seems like you were more interested in this story than most of us are about 75% of the stories on slashdot.
/nova20
Pieces of information in a bit (Score:5, Informative)
A binary bit holds one piece of information, it has two states but is still only one bit (piece) of information.
Re:Pieces of information in a bit (Score:3, Informative)
With two dyes, "we have four different ways to write and then read on a single spot," Kumacheva says: no dye, dye one, dye two, and both dyes together. Three dyes offer eight (23) variations, and so on.
Re:Pieces of information in a bit (Score:1)
It's nonsense - I'm not aware of the definition of 'piece' as a unit of information. Of course, 'spot' is undefined as well. But I'm sure you get the idea: scan once and recover two bits.
Re:Pieces of information in a bit (Score:2)
As you say information=bits... so those 1024 bits of information can be used to store 16 million-google-google-googles (the number not the search engine) pieces of information.
But it'd require 128bit addressing.. ick..
Re:Pieces of information in a bit (Score:2)
First, "binary bit" is redundant - "bit" is short for "binary digit". Second, your implication that 'bit' is equivalent to 'piece' is flawed, for the reason above.
Finally, the fact is that there are two states, and based on the article context, "states" is what they meant by "pieces of information".
Dental Applications (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Dental Applications (Score:2)
And would it be blue?
Recycle... (Score:3, Funny)
YAOSD (Score:5, Insightful)
As you may have noted, organic electronics and related topics are currently very hip. The problem is that these materials are very very instable. Great opportunity for secondary results, when your first hand research does not succeed. Just find some device the shows a somewhat reproducable instability and declare it as memory device.
Most of the published devices have endurances (write-read cycles) in the one or two digit order. Their data retention is measured in minutes. Reading/writing is so slow that you would need really really massive parallelism to get on par with HD, CD or flash. It could not be any further from a real application.
Re:YAOSD (Score:1)
Re:YAOSD (Score:2)
Btw.. nice site. But I think for many articles it is a bit of a stretch to assign them to chemistry categories. Solid State Physics = inorganic chemistry? I dont think so.
Re:YAOSD (Score:1)
Useless for the proposed applications... (Score:5, Informative)
New Rule (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New Rule (Score:1)
Security through obscurity (Score:4, Funny)
Come on, this is just security through obscurity. Somebody's going wonder why you keep an ever-expanding pile of onions next to your computer...
Over my head or over hyped? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't see how this is ideal at all. It just seems like a multi-layered dye implementation that is convoluted by application to small spheres instead of to a flat surface. That is, why deal with nano-anything when you can just layer coats of dye on the disk itself? I don't see any way to get 3D storage out of it, either, because you have to get past any one dye layer to get to the next; no bit can be "under" another bit that blocks the same light. For that same reason, I don't see how you can even use
Re:Over my head or over hyped? (Score:2)
3 bits, not 4
Er, that should have been states, not bits.
Re:Over my head or over hyped? (Score:1)
Depending on what color lasers you use and if the material is such that you can do layers like dvds, you could easily get several bits on one "spot". I don't think you'd get an exponential progression like what they say, either, though.
The real question is "Will this be che
Re:Over my head or over hyped? (Score:1)
Connection to Security? (Score:5, Insightful)
C&EN's summary says that such material could be used to make ID cards which show different images (data) under different light, and that this "would be nearly impossible to fake." As far as I can tell, what this means is that a card made with this material is easily distinguishable from one that isn't. This only makes faking hard if forgers aren't able to make the material themselves. There wasn't anything in the article specifically saying why that would be the case, but it's easy to imagine that needing esoteric equipment would raise the bar a bit.
Having only read the C&EN blurb, I can't confidently say that there isn't some more direct security connection that wasn't mentioned. But no obvious candidates are coming to mind. You could store various watermarks and signatures and whatnot, but you can do that with existsing systems too.
Re:Connection to Security? (Score:3, Informative)
Creating a duplicate is infeasible because you'd have to more-or-less exactly duplicate the position of #bignumber of nano-scale particles inside the containing matrix...
Re:Connection to Security? (Score:1)
"multiple data in a spot unlike...."? (Score:5, Informative)
But what would happen if you mix this multi-dye technique with the existing layering technique....and blue lasers....man....just think of the p0rn possibilities! Each dye can store a different angle (or an "alternate ending").
Re:"multiple data in a spot unlike...."? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:"multiple data in a spot unlike...."? (Score:1)
Lattice? Your Mom! (Score:2, Funny)
Dude! Man! I had this crazy idea! Like, we take this, like, lattice!! And then we, like, totally, make the lattice look like an onion!
Yeah!
Then, no.., Wait. I SAID WAIT!!!
Ok, yeah, I'm chillin' again... Sorry bro.
We take each layer and c
Fact meets Fiction again (Score:2, Interesting)
Secure Data Storage? (Score:1)
Re:Secure Data Storage? (Score:2, Insightful)
The article is pretty uniformed: confusing bits and states: 1 bit-> 2 states, 2 bits->4 states.
I don't see ut as much to write home about unless they get more than two layers. If they could get 8 bits inot 1 onion, thy might be onto something. This current implementa
MMmmmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Hooray! (Score:2, Funny)
How about a LOC on anything? (Score:2)
> a disk the size of a credit card?
What I want to know is why we still can't get the Library of Congress on any electronic medium at all. I want my two thousand DVDs now! I am sure a pony would be able to handle them...
Opticom (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Opticom (Score:1)
So soon? It hasn't even arrived yet!
Re:Opticom (Score:1)
Here's a story... (Score:4, Informative)
Is this optimal? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm certainly no chemist, but why would one choose to use a spherical structure that suffers from poor packing density? Similarly, why would you layer the distinct dye-bearing materials instead of coming up with a solution containing all of the dyes at once and depositing them in a solid block (or at least as a packing of cubes)? Instead of having discrete onion-shaped 'bits', you could have as many bits as your read/write mechanisms could handle, and each dye's contribution would be read from exactly the same spot in the matrix.
So I guess we really will have... (Score:3, Funny)
Density calculations (Score:4, Informative)
Wonka would . . . (Score:2, Funny)
Security? Storage? (Score:2, Insightful)
I knew that learning base 4 would pay off someday (Score:1, Funny)
Onion? (Score:1)
Parfait may just be the most delicious thing on the planet. Everyone loves parfait. You ever ask anyone "you wanna get a parfait" and they say "hell no, I don't like no parfait?
Re:I know this is redundant but..... (Score:2)