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If you want something that extremely stable and will last for a hundred years then you want data glyphs. You use a printer, paper, and a flatbed scanner or hi res camera and you have a viable backup solution. The most common data glyph is the bar code.

As with everything there are downsides:
  - You need to use a quality paper and ink if your backing up for the long hall
  - Printing takes time especially if you're using
  - Storing a ream of paper for each back up

Below is list of some glyph formats. There use to be a site for a full Xerox solution but I think they licensed it out to another company.
http://www.adams1.com/stack.html

Bar codes printed on media of all kinds are generally quite robust and not error prone. The printing device does not need to be special in any way. The reader does not need to be special in any way. Print the key on acid-free paper using a laser printer and store it for a looong time. I'll leave it up to the slashdot tifosi to declare how long it would last in a bank vault.

Some nice ways to encode keys and store it as a symbol on paper here: http://www.adams1.com/stack.html

Symbology is very non-sexy knowledge, but valuable in logistics.

Would it not be cheaper to print the movie using a more traditional archiving method (paper, microfiche, analog tape)? Plenty of digital->analog methods are available, and surely some more could be invented if necessary. Might be a lot of pages, but hey-- paper is cheap and may not degrade as quickly.

Just a thought.

W

Just out of curiosity, what information does your 'letter of identity' contain (name, address, SSN, DOB, driver's license, height, weight, fingerprints(?), blood type(?), images (front/side?)) that make you _so_ absolutely identifiable to affirmative-action-education-equivalent screeners with it?

Is it just a piece of paper? barcoded? magnetic-strip? any of these: http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/stack.html ?

*Find RFID, Replace Barcode* Items have been tagged for awhile now, and have made shopping as well as plenty of other things, more efficient and less expensive. http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/upccode.html UPC was born on April 3, 1973, and guess what, I STILL don't have my barcode tattoo. Walmart is not making you implant an RFID tag to shop there, these are inanimate objects. Put your tin foil hat on the shelf, before you have a heart attack. :)

If they need more machine-readable information than a conventional barcode, use the 2-D barcodes like UPS does (they use Maxicode, good for about 100 ASCII chars.) And check this out - once the passport is closed, nobody can read it. Oh, and it's not detectable with metal detectors, and it's compatible with the existing publication techniques.

My gut is tellimg me that the RFID manufacturers are lobbying the politicians. The malicious behavior is on the part of the RFID manufacturers who are desperate to expand their market.

This page has a number of public domain schemes that might work. Some are fault more fault tolerant than others, but many of them should work.

Serious use of these schemes would require some kind of "Rosetta Stone" document or sculpture to make breaking the codes easy. If the archivist was to act carefully, I bet it would be possible for great-hoevermanygenerations-grandkid to break the bar code scheme, just by knowing a that the pattern is a rational symbology and by having enough repetition, of course. Automating the process would of course take some Perl scripting genius, or whatever they will be using.

Quality paper can last a really really long time.

Actually a receipt does not deny anonymity. If the receipt is one of the new bar codes (;-) Just joking!) (like used by UPS and FedEx with the square with the dots in it), then if someone goes into a booth, votes, and then gets a barcoded receipt the receipt could have all of their choices on it along with their number (if wanted) or not.

The thing is - no system is failure proof. In the matter of paper receipts someone could print up hundreds of invalid ballots and stuff the ballot box with them after they go into the booth. With electronics - you just need a way to muck up the program or hardware. And yes - people really do try to do these things.

Even systems where a paper receipt is printed and then the person has to drop the receipt into a box in front of someone else can be tampered with. If both people are in on doing this then the person dropping the ballot drops multiple ballots and the other person verifies that they only dropped one ballot into the box.

The only way I know of to stop people from trying to muck up an election is to have cameras broadcasting everyone doing their thing across the entire nation, at the same time, and the video be recorded at multiple locations. But even then someone could tamper with the broadcast and what about anonymity?

So, in the long run, you want something which can record things in two or three ways: Electronically, paper which is readable by a computer, and paper which is readable by a person.

That is to say: Have a voting booth which has a machine in it (whatever kind you want) which creates a paper ticket. The paper ticket has both a readable copy of the voting as well as a machine readable copy (ie: An itemized list and a barcode of the itemized list). The machine works by tallying the votes and printing the receipts (which can then be checked by the voter against what they wanted to vote for/against). The ballot is then taken over to a lock box and dropped in it by the voter. If there is a problem with the election or a recount must be done, then each ballot can be read into another machine which scans the ballot's barcode and displays that information onto a screen. The information displayed is reviewed against the printed itemized list and, if there is a problem (ie: Itemized List doesn't match the Barcoded List) - then you know there is a problem with the voting machine. If there are enough mistakes, then you have to have a re-election to deal with the problem and the machine's vendor.

That's my $0.02 worth.

Some have entire programs: check out http://www.offshore.com.ai/arms-trafficker/rsa2d.h tml

more interesting factoids at http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/stack.html

out of curiosity, is anyone working on a 3D barcode???

Actually, yes. Look up Ultracode. It's a barcode with two spacial dimensions plus a color dimension.

Yes.
And btw, I only have a 2D barcode on my license, my cereal only has 1D barcodes...

The barcodes most popular in the world todare are actually 1D barcodes, because the information is only stord in one dimension. However, you may have seen the types of barcodes that the article is talking about.

We can now put information down on paper!!!

Just think of what we can do now!

Be careful at what you laugh at.

Data (other than print) has been stored on paper via bar codes. Some early programmable calculators (notably hp) used this to store programs.

Then came the SoftStrip, a kind of 2d barcode that could store higher densities of data. It was used primarily by magazines in the late eighties to print programs that you could scan into your computer (most likely an apple II) rather than laboriously typing them in, which was fraught with errors. A couple of magazines that this appeared in was Nibble and Byte.

But this was not economical for large programs (as it competed with advertising space), and it never achieved widespread popularity.

But the idea was just too clever to die, and other applications of this idea have appeared along with imitators.

The most readily available example of this idea being used is postage printing, that seems to now be widespread.

This technology will always be cheaper than RFIDs, magnetic strips, and smartcards.

As an aside, the benefit of this paper disc that Sony invented is going to be the cost of the media. This is the primary reason Dataplay discs were not able to get off the ground. With the media being inexpensive and a company like Sony to boost it in their applications, I suspect that this could become popular.

One last thing - don't forget that the first technique of storing data on paper other than writing and pictures would be the thumbprint.

Simple, print the key data on machine readable paper, it will last 500 years. Like a barcode primer?

MacOS refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna Be

Whoa, I just had this crazy idea. Why bother with Bluetooth or barcode scanners when you can use Camera Phones!! There's already a ton of standard two-dimensional 2d barcode standards. All the camera phones are running Symbian with Java, or maybe Linux with Java. Write a little open source image processing application and then ...

encode a URL into the barcode and take a photo of it ...there's your global namespace, your application platform is HTML or WAP or whatever. The whole network is already bootstrapped.

It would be like semacodes but without any nasty dangly scanners to carry around.

simon

Computers and lasers were too expensive for this technology to be feasible at the time, so the patent expired just before the technology could be commercialized in 1966.

Any patent that covered 1967-era bar code readers, much less the 1950s-era bar code technology, would ordinarily have expired by now. Lemelson has attempted to bypass this by taking advantage of an unusually long delay between the filing and issuing of his patents, but last year a federal appeals court ruled that the doctrine of laches could be invoked as a defense. This defense would render the patents unenforcible.

There is an excellent list of 2 dimensional bar codes of this style, some of which are public domain.

I have always wanted to work on an opensource project to put business card info in a standardised format into a 2d barcode you can print on the back of your business cards. Someone can then just slap the card in a scanner and have correct information put straight into their address book.

Yet another item on the ever increasing 'cool ideas if i ever get some spare time' stack.

Umm... shouldn't that read...

0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0011 = 3
0100 = 4
0101 = 5
0110 = 6
0111 = 7

Besides which, barcode != binary, (per se). Please see this page for a table that explains the layout of a UPC-A barcode.

Here's an ISBN number I just scanned (maybe this'll get Amazon slashdotted too)
9780924771453

Any bar code scanner sold in the last decade (at least) will decode not only UPC and EAN, but several other symbologies, including ones that include letters. There are single chips (from HP, e.g.) that take the analog input from a light measuring device and do everything for you.

There's good information about UPCs and EANs at http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/upccode.html

Some mass-market paperbacks have UPCs instead of EANs.

2D barcodes can hold up to 2000 or more characters. PDF417 (a 2D symbology) is in the public domain, created by Symbol which allows this many characters. You can download a free PDF417 Generator and roll your own 2D barcodes. The only drawback is that a 2D barcode requires a more precise scanner and technique.

3D Barcodes are indeed 'bumpy' and can even be painted over.

BAR CODE HISTORY A breif page about the progression of the barcode. (timeline mainly)

These guys have a free demo for reading / writing PDF417 ...

Here is a pretty good summary of the PDF417 format ...

Here is some more information about the PDF417 standard ...

but HERE seems to be a very thorough summary of all of the 2D barcode formats ...

Maybe future researchers will have fantastic OCR cheaply available, and the benefits of barcodes won't be worthwhile. But maybe not, and why make their job unnecessarily more difficult?

If you want other bar code scanning hardware try: http://www.csensors.com/index_b.html

Other misc bar-code info (TONS OF IT): http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/
---
Don Rude - AKA - RudeDude

I hate to do this, but I figured "why not get these smart guys' input on the subject?", so here we go:
The previous poster was kind enough to list 0-9 and their respective binary equivalent. Take notice of the code for the number 6: "01-100", which appears as two thin lines separated by a thin space.
Now grab your nearest recent grocery store purchase (or follow this link if you're lazy) and take a gander at the calibration marks: the identical markings at the beginning, middle, and end.
Yep, you guessed it! 6's, each 'n every one of them! So now you have 666 in every UPC code.
And the relivant scripture: Revelations 13:16-18 says
"16. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead,
17. so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.
18. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666."
Spooky! To me, anyway. All we need is UPC codes on our hands/foreheads for a prophesy from 1000's of years ago to come true!
You guys think this is a weird coincidence, or maybe the guys that came up with the UPC code decided to make an inside joke or something?
My uncle showed me this like 10 years ago, I'd be curious to hear what you guys think about it...

There was a link in the article to a page describing how to read the barcodes, but it just gives a table showing the binary codes and their decimal value without explaining it. I couldn't resist trying to understand it, and I have composed the following rules:

• From left to right the first 4 bits have values of:
  • 1247
• Each code most have 2 and only 2 of the bits set. The fifth bit is used to ensure that this is always true.
• The value 11(decimal) represents the digit 0(decimal).

Once I started I couldn't stop, so check out this page for a good reference on barcodes.

Odd thing is that when you get a look at all the different barcode formats, they chose about the easiest one to be read by humans because:

• When dealing with only the digits 0-9, spaces don't mean anything, you only have to focus on the bars. However the spaces are useful to help you spot character boundaries. This means you don't have to keep as good a track of where you are when reading across.
• There are only 2 line widths rather than the 4 used in some other systems.
• The encoding for one digit always looks the same, no matter where it appears in a number and what digits surround it.