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CD-Eating Fungus Among Us
dublin writes: "The Electronic telegraph reports that two years ago, the first confirmed case of a CD-eating fungus was confirmed in Belize. (Ah, the price of living in paradise...) The fungus eats the aluminum right out from between the polycarbonate layers (and apparently muches a little on those, too) leaving clear spots on the CD. Have fungi always been this mean and we're just figuring it out, or have we been invaded by super-fungi? " The article, to say the least, is a little short on details. But something like this surprises me not in the least.
also used as an explosive(!). Was used as a film base until the 1950s. Burns explosively, and can "spontaneously" decompose... open the can one day and there's film in it, the next day a gooey mess. Hollywood still has a lot of master materials on nitrocelluose-based film stock.
The film you buy today is acetate or Mylar (or equivalent) base... similar to audio tape. It *will* burn, but won't support combustion. For an experience you won't forget, get caught in a projection booth when you're running nitrocelluose film and the projector jams. Better hope your fire protection system is in good shape!
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Quality AC posts since 1999!
The RIAA has reverse engineered this fungus at the behest of Metallica by colluding with the CDC's sample of a fungus from MIR that ate my friend's AOL CDs (they had spots missing just like this article claims!) while he was away at the beach\school\military\camp. I knew this would happen and Microsoft would be involved in order to further their .NET strategy. We should all switch to DVDs, glad I have all of my music on vinyl.
You've never tried sticking a CD in a microwave? Its cool. 3 seconds should do it. It'll crack the surface and make it look really cool. Good for makeshift light switch covers etc.
Nah. When I lived in Bermuda, many years ago, there was a fungus that ate vinyl. It got a bunch of my LPs and tapes. Try to store things at low humidity. "Water is life".
The Thing That Only Eats Hippies
Wendel brought it to life
In the guest-room bathtub
It was a special project for his 4-H club
But it broke looseout in the middle of the night
And now it's eating flower children left and right!
All the punks are gonna scream YIPPIE
Cause it's the thing that only eats hippies
First it cruised on out to Malibu
And ate a couple of surfers who were too tough to chew
Then it slithered it's way out to old Irvine
And ate a couple of hippies and they tasted just fine
Now it's got a sweet tooth for long hair
So Bob and Greg and Grant you should beware
Followin the Dead is how it gets it's kicks
Shame it wasn't born in 1966
Listens to the music and begins to sway
Dreamin acid dreams of a hippie souffle
Hey hey hey
What do they taste like?
Some kind of treat?
How many hippies can this monster eat?
It ate Stills and Nash before they could shout
Then it chewed on David Crosby but it spit him out
All the punks are gonna scream YIPPIE
Cause it's the thing that only eats hippies
There it goes
Gonna send em all to the big folk festival in the sky
So long suckers!
you must put all your cd's in the microwave at the same time.
It depends on if the fungus is bio-engineered for Region 1, Region 2, or Region 3.
If you see fine truffles growing on your bootleg Dr Who DVD, it might be the French-created Region 2 fungus. If it bears a strong resemblance to Hedora the Smog Monster (or even Biolante), this might indicate an East Asian origin of this fungus (no doubt created with the help of US nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific after WW2).
Although the linked article has almost no information, I remember reading a few weeks ago that the strain of fungus involved needs a very hot and humid environment to thrive. The numbers were around 30 degrees Celsius and 90% relative humidity. Unless you keep your DVDs in the shower, this is mainly a problem for those in tropical areas with no climate control.
Actually, the superconductor plague did turn out to be the result of a conspiracy ;P
(and if that was a spoiler to anyone, go read the rest of the series already)
The rest of the series wasn't THAT good.
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Not recycling, but could be used for waste disposal (think of AOL CDs). However, given how difficult it is to obtain aluminium, decomposing it is not exactly something we'd like to see.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
by using a green MagicMarker(tm), and coloring the outside rim of the disc. Also helps to trap stray red LED laser light, so that your CD player uses less energy.
...
I think I heard this from a friend of a friend, who read it on some urban-legend website
Interesting that one of the X-files reruns aired last night (at least in San Francisco) was the one about migrant workers and an enzyme that acted as a super-catalyst for Fungal growth.
Better rip all your CDs to mp3 so you have a backup when this baby hits!
In Vino Veritas
Yup. There was a company (Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs) that used gold. I think CDRs use something else too, don't they?
Outlawed? Are you kidding? Lars will be very happy abpiut this, since people will have to go out and buy new Metallica CD's. :-)
Does this mean my cd's can be infected by fungus ? :)
or should i use some sort of anti-lice spray or burn them before puttin' them in the drive?
Freaker / TuC
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Actually, Aluminum used to be worth more than gold because it was so expensive to de-oxidize.
They made chandaliers, plates, candleholders, bullion, and other things out of it.
Than someone discovered a cheap way to do it, and all that thuff was instant junk.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
"They say that absence makes the heart grow fungus."
Damn, is that a great album :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Notice that clay tablets are the only medium listed above that gets *stronger* when exposed to fire. Just sayin. Maybe it's time for cuniform data storage.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Is this the only thing known to cuase CD's to go clear, or are there other things which might do this? I've personally seen discarded CD's left outdoors turn clear in a matter of weeks. Maybe it's not just in Belize that we have to be worrying about this.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Well, cds were always breakable, didn't that bother you? :-)
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
They want our CD's to be rendered useless just like all other media formats before. Just wait, until we see the DVD-Audio format billed as fungi-proof.
Hey...this just happened to me a couple of day ago.I live in Mexico and I found an unburned CD I had (which was previously ok) with a white spot on it...
We're very close to Belize...you know..
Hugo
Isn't celluloid very flammable? If your building burns down, your CDRs are probably toast, but at least they won't *cause* your building to burn down.
-B
just got back from Belize on Wednesday. And, while I didn't bring back any CD-eating fungi, I did bring back a nasty intestinal critter. Gotta run...
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
The only CD case that helps your CDs reach their estimated lifetime.
If you're suggesting that we switch to magnetic media for CD's and DVD's, I'd wager that we'd have to update the drives too (and I think that you'd have a hard time convincing people to buy new players because of some possible threat of a cd-eating fungus that they'll probably never get).
To answer your question using my admittetly basic knowledge of magnets, if a sufficiently strong magnet came close enough to your discs for a long enough time, then the disc could become polarized.
while in afghanistan and pakistan, a couple of cdr's loaded with mp3s got spots on them. they made the surface appear darker... and i couldnt read from those spots on the cd anymore. i'm really concerned because i brought this cd home with me to the states not knowing about this fungus yet. i've been home for one month now, and i'm really concerned as to if this can spread somehow. methinks i'll go home and burn this cd... Please, if anyone has anymore information, email me at bikeman395@yahoo.com
In The Ringworld Engineers it was revealed that the microbe was actaully seeded on the Ringworld by the Puppeteers. Hmmm. What are the UFO sighting rates down there?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
In The Ringworld Engineers it was revealed that the microbe was actaully seeded on the Ringworld by the Puppeteers. Hmmm. What are the UFO sighting rates down there?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
just be sure to keep your cheesey 80's metal cd's away from the rest of your collection.
--listening to motley crue's too fast for love as we speak.
-- Segmentaion Fault (core dumped)
This fungus was obviously spawned in the super-secret Redmond labs as a marketing tool to encourage .NET adoption.
The article makes no specific mention of DVDs.. I wonder if they're susceptible as well.. if not, it's kind of funny how a new crazy strain of fungus starts eating CDs just as music companies start the push towards DVD audio..
my dog eat's them to, but that's another story.
Seriously, I've experienced dark spots in local-quality cdr media several times, something I've come to blame my dvd player for (Kiss 1512), I toasted 10 VCD:s and tried 'em in the player, 2 out of 10 tested noname blanks had darker spots rendering those areas unreadable after the first time&spin in the player. 3 others also suffered from black spots after several sessions in the player. The other discs didn't seem to mind.
Actually, data has been stored on vinyls. There was a radio show in Finland called "Silikoni" in the 80s who broadcast Commodore 64 and Spectrum programs. You would record them on tape and then try to play them back on the C=64 cassette deck. It sometimes worked. Many people complained, though, because they just happened to tune in during the high-pitched squeak of a C=64 cassette recording and thought their precious Hi-Fi was broken.
Once they found one EP from Finnish Broadcasting Company's archives that had music on the A side and a Spectrum program on the B side. It was some kind of an early music video; you were supposed to listen to the A side while watching the program draw some graphics on the computer screen.
Friend of a friend lived in Belize for a couple years, and told of everything from floppy disks to hard disks being devoured by ravenous fungi, and what the fungi couldn't digest got demolished by galloping rust. Even system boards were sometimes eaten.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
These exist. I had a friend with one of the very early CDs and it was an etched glass disk with a metal film and covered in plastic. It was so heavy that most cd players could not spin it up before they timed out. It was a bit of fun at the hi-fi stores...
Quote:
"It completely destroys the aluminium. It leaves nothing behind."
So, the fungus splits the aluminum atoms or fuses them together? Aluminum is an element, it can't just "disappear".
If you post it, they will read.
Of course there is a safe method!! Marble tablets!! They last for centuries!
.e.
www.perceive.net
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
Now Microsoft has an excuse to sell us the same software every two years :-)
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
Maybe old Michael Bolton CDs can be recycled as a Dutch dinner delicacy
Well, neither -scarely- nor -scarey- are words. Perhaps you meant -scary- (frightening) ?
It's probably understandable that the previous poster got a new word by adding one letter, rather than removing two.
I think you may be onto it. Encode the data genetically in somebody's nads. Then one only has to read the DNA of his offspring.
Interesting that your tagline mentions being well hung -- an aid to producing more offspring, therefore making the data safer.
Actually, it was Disney's "Lloyd in Outer Space" just a few weeks ago. Remember, the one where Lloyd's science fair project developed a taste for junk food?
>I'd be wary of this; commercial aircraft are built using large amounts of aluminium. If this new & improved recycling fungus ever got out..
now there's a topic for the class of horror movie we haven;t seen since the BLOB
Heh. I spent a summer working in a CD plant. An ongoing work order had us churning out something like nine million AOL discs over the course of a couple of months. I kept telling them that every single one of the damn things was going to end up in the trash, but they all ignored me. Such a waste -- if only we had these fungi back then...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I hope it doesn't find my warez cd's ;)
--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
no, that's linux. And according to Microsoft that is a cancer, not a fungus.
--------
"Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal--if you don't use your thumbs."
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
Or maybe we should coat our CDs with fungus eating bacteria? :-)
CD-Rs and CD-RWs contain no aluminum. Only mass-produced stamped CDs contain aluminum. So archives made to CD-R or CD-RW are not vulnerable to this particular form of attack.
Having said that, I don't claim they're invulnerable to any attack forever. The secret to reliable and long lived archives is live archives. You regenerate the archived material before deterioration is expected, and you keep on regenerating it.
As far as gold CDs go - yes, some labels, especially audiophile ones, use gold on CDs instead of aluminum. While some claim gold reflects better than aluminum, that's not where the improvement in quality comes from. Generally more attention is put into gold releases to make them "right".
Of course, that's not always the case. While a company like DCC really knows what they are doing and almost always puts out top-notch product, some gold CDs by the major labels (and even MoFi) are worthless from a sound quality perspective. The best sounding version of Who's Next is a budget (aluminum) CD from Canada, even though 2 gold versions and one "remixed/remastered" version have come out over the years. Go figure...
I have seen lenses eaten away by fungus. I've also seen the aluminum faces on stereo components eaten by fungus. The probability of a CD being eaten by the fungus is dependent on the way the disk (disc?) is made. If the aluminum plating goes all the way out to the edge of the disk and becomes exposed to the air, then I would imagine that there is a chance that it could fall victim. Otherwise, I'm not too worried.
:)
I've wondered about a CD eating fungus ever since I saw that stereo face plate years ago. It was a cheap "Soundesign" stereo if that makes any difference to you.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
The camera lens fungus eats the coating on the lens. I've seen it before in Brasil, in the tropical zone. Any moisture accumulated inside the lens barrel has to be evaporated or the fungus will appear. A good way to deal with this is put a damp lens in the sun for 1-10 minutes, until it heats up enough for the water to evaporate. But don't leave it in the sun for longer, as the delicate mechanisms, oils, and plastics can be very heat sensitive. Also, a water-tight equipment bag (sold at camping equipment stores) combined with silica gel packs (available at camera stores like bhphoto.com) can create a humidity-free storage environment (but the gel packs die quickly! get the kind that turn red, and buy quantities. Dry the bag and equipment out in the sun before putting them all in together.)
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Scientists discovered a cockroach in the USA that lived on the wire insulation in TV sets. Fortunately, this breed is not very widespread. Unfortunately, if you find a new material, then nature will come up with something that eats and enjoys it.
>> They're easy enough of a pest to get rid of. All you need is a big can of Raid...
But, isn't it your big RAID box that attracts them in the first place?
All this means is that you'll need more energy to recover the aluminum from old CDs
Not necessarily although this is a definate possibility (even probability). However another possibility is that separating the fungus from the CD, then chemically separating the aluminum from the fungus may be less energy intensive than separating the aluminum from the CD directly.
I wouldn't want to decide without more information.
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
Even though they claim you were sold only a license to the music, they will not sell you a new CD for only the media cost. Any software company will do this, however.
All cdr and like disks use a metallic film on one side. On cdr media, it's in the outside, top layer. If you don't believe me, take a 'coaster' cdr and scrape the label side. Almost everyone uses aluminum because its so easy to use. The only other material i've even heard of for this use is the gold cds made by 'original master recordings'.
These use gold instead of Al and 'Sound better'.(right)
So, fungus is a real possibility here in 'americas rainforest' (Tennessee). We've had near 100% Humidity and 80-90 degrees for the last few days.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
http://www.paperdisk.com/
--- even the safest course is fraught with peril
There's no way to store data with a gaurantee that it won't be corrupted. Unless you somehow manage to encode it in a black hole (we think), but then you wouldn't be able to get it back out. Even before this fungus, CDs could be broken, and were easier to break than the stone tablets you mentioned. But information in general can't be accessed unless it's represented in a pattern on physical objects (I use the term physical to mean all physics - electromagnetics too), and if you can rearrange the physics to include encoded information, then something or someone else can rearrange them to be garbage. Gauranteed. So don't worry about safe. Worry about relatively safe. CDs are still the way to go. But we're getting better! Lots of new ideas are in the works. Don't you read slashdot?
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
Those sound really cool. Where can I get one?
:) Gotta mention that .01%
But as long as we're talking theory, heads up: if a substance were truly unalterable, there would be no way to encode information on it in the first place. Maybe those thingies are really hard to alter, and maybe they're 99.99% safe, but hey, I'm anal retentive
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
I have a really old Violent Femmes CD from 11-12 years ago. And it has clear spots in the media and is unplayable.
Should the record company give me a new one? After all they want to take away my digital fair-use rights.
The thing that sucks is that this is one of my favorit albums.
ummm...I already give a sperm sample every time I see Britney Spears...
Kind of like how nature made cows and then made people to enjoy cows. And now, a plug: T.G.I. Friday's Jack Daniel's Steak is perhaps the most perfect food in existence.
Instead of using alternative materials, why not just make the CDs more resistant to intruding fungus, or intruding anything for that matter. Couldn't they seal the sides of the CD more effectively? I've always wondered if water or other bad things could seep through the sides. Now I know.
Harvest these little critters in large quantities. Pack them up in a fancy box. Sell them to companies as a way to protect their sensitive data. Kind of like a self destruct button in case the feds come knocking on their door.
I've read this story a few days ago, unfortunately not in english, it is said that this fungus does not only eat the shiny bits away, it also eats the transparent plastic away. Secondly, the extreme conditions are said to be found *mainly* in places like Africa. Still, this new fungus means again that the human race cannot beat mother nature...
--
Bizar technology?
Now I read about CD eating bacteria, even about CD's detoriating by themselves, so, is there perhaps an alternative for storage with a longer life?
--
Bizar technology?
There was a story a while back that talked about how Titanium is about as cheap as aluminum. Perhaps this would work. Or maybe we'd be better off to push for holographic CDs and DVDs that are only plastic.
I don't think cost would neccesarily be a big deal. Whatever material they use, the data stored with it will probably still be more valuable. For instance, the cost for the gold that it would take to make a gold CD would probably be minimal in comparison to the cost for production and profit. This may be the financial hurt for the RIAA we've been looking for. The RIAA switches to gold and has to lose a couple cents on each CD to keep people buying them. (Nah, they'd just mark them up.)
How about embedding the magnetic bits in the plastic so they can't 'flip' and change their state? Would that even work? Read-only magnetic media?
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Um...excuse me. CD-Rs don't have an aluminum layer.
[snip]
CDR work by having a laser burn a shiny substance sandwiched between two layers of plastic (Both sides are generally clear, but this is because it's cheaper to keep one type of plastic on hand.) When you burn the shiny stuff, it don't shine no mo'.
Um... no. CD-R media does have a reflective aluminum layer. What you 'burn' is a die coating that obscures the aluminum. Burn through the die, and the laser can reflect off of the aluminum behind it. The previous poster might have been thinking of CD-RW media, which uses a layer of amorphorous crystals that change their reflective properties when hit by the 'burning' laser.
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Wouldn't the fungus be more useful in some sort of plan for world domination?
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
And you'd be fine until the first time you dropped your very heavy, very malleable platters.
I`m hoping my MP3`s will be safe! :)
>In the case of CDs, the image is pressed into >some aluminum foil which is then covered with >more plastic to protect it Actually not...The plastic beads are melted into a disk which is pressed with the master. Then the aluminum coating is applied through vapor deposition (you melt the aluminum and the vapor condenses on the plastic). Finally, it's coated with a lacquer or another layer of plastic to protect it. (A few friends of mine work in the CD creation / duplication industry - They have a single machine that does all of this...Plastic beads go in, stacks of CDs come out)
Decode to 0's and 1's, and engrave them into diamond tablets. Sorta like punchcards I guess.
You'll need a few million diamond tablets though...
"It completely destroys the aluminium"
2 E=MC and all that.
``Laser Rot'' actually had to do with the glue that held the two sides together (LDs are actually two separate discs joined) and that it, in combination with flexing due to the relatively large size and heaviness, let in moisture that contributed to oxidation. The manufacturers apparently caught on pretty quickly and did something (change the glue? I don't know). I don't think anyone's really reported a case of laser rot since the mid-eighties.
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
You think that's strange -- I have a music CD that I burned for myself about a year ago. After burning it, I was driving around in my car listening to it, and when I stopped and left my car, I left it in the CD player. A few weeks later when I decided to change the CD out (I don't drive much), I noticed a big chunk of the metal was missing. Now, get this -- the plastic was still perfectly intact. It was almost as if somebody had cut out a chunk of the metal and pulled it out of the edge of the CD. Kinda freaky, but it hasn't happened to any other CDs of mine...
--
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Time to vacuum pack all my CDs and head for the hills.
No more dirty, dusty CDrom drives for me. Thats where this fungus lives y'know.
They'll never get my precious data.
Niven's silicone eating pals might become a reality down the road... tho as an American, I am comforted by the fact that it won't happen in my lifetime, so I don't need to worry about it =)
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
I understand that tatooing is getting quite popular among the "unable to make new long-term memories" set.
Perhaps that could be used here as well?
I read a long while back about some people thinking of making wire insulation with the chemical that makes pepers hot in it. The idea was to keep rats from eating it. Wonder if something like that would work
last time I saw them was 1988....
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
You mean, a strain of fungus that only eats your competitor's blend of ingredients?
Biological warfare in the global marketplace.
Now I even got competitors in this kind of things... should have more regulations!
the library of congress will not move any of their audio archive over to cd from vinyl, mostly as a result of something like this. they know that cds will degrade in quality over time, and they had speculated that a fungii such as this may exist. this and the fact that they seem to agree that there is a degradation of sound quality between the cd's and the original vinyl. it doesnt really surprise me that they have confirmed this finally.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
flesh eating ants records
My uncle served as a radar operator in the Pacific Theater in WWII. He told me that the first radar units that they deployed on Pacific islands would quickly become clogged with fungus and other biological nastiness and stop working. In my own military designs, fabrication costs big bucks because (among other things) we have to coat the electronics to avoid this very problem.
Actually, this fungus came from outer space.
Anyone remember this novel? It concerned a kind of fungus, I think, that ate plastic.
And in a similar vein, Stanislaw Lem's "Memoirs Found In A Bathtub" took place in a world where someone had invented a virus that destroyed paper. (Interestingly, FILM was indeed used as the dominant preservation medium in that book.)
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Since the compositions of different discs by different manufacturers do vary, it might be possible to have the fungus eat only discs that are made of things in certain combinations -- or that only act when certain dyes are present on the disc's surface.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
I *dare* you to start an EMail spam warning everyone about this bad new danger to their music collections, and encouraging them to sanitize their CDs before it's too late!
People will do it too. Remember this? I'm just waiting for the e-mail hoax telling people that they can remove a "deadly virus" from thier computer by jumping off a building. It would be raining people at the company I work at...
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"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
>>...at least until a vinyl-eating super-fungus makes landfall.
I'm glad a MP3 eating fungus probably won't appear.
---
>>That's the RIAA.
They're easy enough of a pest to get rid of. All you need is a big can of Raid...
---
Nah, it's the MPAA. Now they can argue that region encoding helps prevent people from importing fungally-infected DVDs.
(Seriously, I'm not sure if DVDs would be succeptible. A quick google search indicates that they do have an aluminum layer, but says that they're better sealed than laser discs. Whether that means that they're also better sealed than CDs is beyond the scope of a quick joke post.)
Yep, I've got a couple of CD's like this. I thought it was just corrosion from being stored in damp conditions though.
I've a couple of CD's where this has started at the edges, and some where it's all the way through the disc.
Sorry. I guess you'd have to be a Mexican to appreciate that kind of humor. It's not too funny, come to think about it, but maybe it was just the mood I was in.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Silverbased microfilm makes since to me, since silver is fatal to basically all prokaryotic (single-cell) organisms.
The only problem I can see is that I can't find these CD's (atleast not sold online). I searched for the catalog number for both the spindle of 50 (I'd prefer this) and the pack of 20 + Jewel Cases (probably okay, but for whatever reason CD manufacturers inflate jewel case prices well beyond their actual cost), and came up with nothing but a *few* stores in foreign (non-US) countries that don't ship internationally.
If anyone does know where these are sold, I'm curious enough to order a spindle to see how well they behave and try committing some of my more important data to them for long-term storage.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
uhh....and before this fungus came into existence, the cd's were impossible to destruct? I thought microwave owen did pretty good job on this problem.
This is the place where you write something that will make you seem like a complete idiot.
Friend of mine once left a banana skin 'gainst a particularly fine Mandrake 7.2 iso'd CD. Seemed there was discoloration (blackish I think) after the event, requiring the disk to be replaced. (Second note: I'm not sure of the makeup of a fungus, but maybe we should be encrypting our data onto the fungus instead of burning a CD ? ;p)
This space for rent.
Murphy's Law of Copiers
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
we can have AOL compost heaps now.
Signed Bacteria INC.
-------------------------------------
Where is my mind?
Since a similar fungus has now been found on earth, I think it is far more likely that the MIR fungus is from earth, not space. Once carried to the station from earth by accident, the fungus found the place, with an abundant supply of yummy metal, very much to its liking and propagated like a tribble. That should teach us to watch what we bring into space vehicles and stations with us. After all, once up there, there is no way to stop at Walmart for some pest control products. ;)
As for CD's, just take the same precautions that you would take with anything you want to archive and keep for a while. Keep them in a dry, cool, dark place, away from humidity, acids and other corrosive chemicals.
Mothra 1961-2001:Her heart can reach!
If there is aluminum exposed on the surface of the cd it should be easy to paint over it with a cheap acrylic paint. this should render the cd highly water and fungus resistant. Storing your cd's in a cool, dry environment is probably the #1 way to assure your collections safety from corrosion and microbes. If a cool and dry environment is unavailable, then dessicants and and a clean place to store them should do the trick. It probably doesn't hurt to have several backup copies of any cd with important or irreplaceable information. Off-site storage of critical information at a facility that specializes in securing and preserving data would be a good alternative as well. When you ask yourself how far to go with your backups, think about how important the information is to you and how much effort it would take to replace it.
My dog ate my cd! No seriously!!! Could someone please make a story out of it and submit it to /.
Maybe we can throw this at RIAA as another justification for making mp3's of their cd's. Think they'd believe us?
Yanno, This reminds me of what happened to the ancient civilization that built Niven's Ringworld. After years and years, sitting around in trash heaps, microbes developed that could eat the wiring found in the civilization's computer. One microbe BigMacAttack later, and a once mighty civilization was left with only their fingers to count on. -lsa
I oughta be in pixels.
I once found a CD along a road in New Orleans, someone must've tossed it out (skipping in the car player perhaps?) Anyway, the steamy, salty, pollution laden south Louisiana air caused it to delaminate and I could actually peel the aluminum layer off, leaving a completely clear disc. The fringes of everything look rainbow colored when looking through it, because the data is still there. Neat.
I keep my CDs in a liquid cooled, lead-lined container filled with pressurized inert gas. Oh, yeah. It's also got a beer tapper on the side.
- Sig this!
First the filtering of Napster, and now this. Can anyone save us from the RIAA?
"I am a man, and men are
animals who tell stories."
"The meek shall inherit the earth, the rest of us shall go to the stars." Isaac Asimov
http://www.c-3d.net/videos.html (The 10 minute version covers the item the best.) Great idea. Fantastic news. One question though... &n bsp; IF THE DISK IS TRANSPARENT &n bsp; HOW IS ANYBODY GOING TO BE ABLE TO IDENTIFY ONE &n bsp; DISK FROM ANOTHER DISK !!! Think about it, how are we going to be able to tell our entire music collection from our entire computer program library? Of course, this will not be enough room for some peoples' porn collection. Once I get a high-speed net collection I'll be able to host a GOOGLE server with a daily snapshot of the web though. And I want some scratch, fingerprint, and drop protection for my Ultra-DVD collection too. There is no way I want a fumbled disk turning my software archive into garbage. http://www.c-3d.net/index.html
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
Lucky for me, all my copies of Debian are on cd-r. I pity all those poor people who paid $200 for a copy of Windows 2000. We always knew it was more vulnerable to viruses, well now we know it's more vulnerable to fungi as well!
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
AC, it appears that you failed to notice the satire in the 'CD microwave' post.
~~~~~~~~~ "I must create my own system, or be enslav'd by another man's." William Blake, Jerusalem.
Yep, I expect the aluminum would arc and burn, but the fungus will be dead! 8-)
I think I'll test that method first on a worthless CD... now where did I leave that Glass Tiger disc?
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
I had the shiney side (the side with all the print on it too) eaten off in chunks from a few CDs while I lived in Costa Rica (about 6 days by bus south of Belize), common speculation down there was that it was cockroaches that were the culprit, I had caught a few loitering around my CDs a couple of times, but never actually caught any eating anything. I have also witnessed the same thing on some friends CDs in Honduras (only a day and a half by bus from Belize, depending on route). I have to wonder about the fungus answer though, since none of the CDs that I had with me at the time are being eaten still while they live up here in Canada, I would imaging that a fungus could endure this climate just fine, though cockroaches and people have a fairly hard time of it.
about an unbreakable pure glass CD. The idea was that it had no metallic reflective surface, relying on the simple reflection of the glass. Therefore it needed a more sensitive diode than those found on regular CD-ROMs to be read. Also it used an expensive process of enhancing the pits after it had been stamped , and the data was guaranteed to be safe for more than 200 years with no maitenance or special storage whatsoever. And this was sometime at the beginning of the 90's.
You better get on a 3-year recopy cycle, then. You don't wanna lose all that good old pr0n. Reviewing it every 3 years will make it seem almost like new again, so you are probably doing this anyway.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
It's finally arrived! Only M$ mistook "the fungus" of Open Source for a "cancer" at first. According to mycological data available at the present time, it seems that each wee beastie munching on CDs looks quite like a penguin.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
A group of archiving experts got together at some point (I'm not sure of the details) and decided that film is the safest archive format.
Even assuming that magnetic tapes, organically decomposing CDRs and other digital storage media will last into the next century, can we count on having the legacy equipment to read them? That's the advantage of storing an image on pure celluloid.
Cheer all you want about saving money with digital cameras -- but let's see how that floppy disk holds up to my photo albums in 100 years.
--------------------------------
Yes, CDRs use some sort of organic compound with a shelf life of only ten years (far short of aluminum).
I always make a backup CDR for every one I burn -- and it's a good thing, too. The oldest ones (3 years) are already failing.
--------------------------------
sounds like some dumbass tried it!
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
I doubt this very much. No organism uses aluminum for growth. Yet all organisms are sensitive to Al+++ because it replaces the working Cu or Fe atoms from enzymes which renders them useless. In other words: Aluminium is toxic. Fungus does not eat aluminium
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Today's Theme Ingredient: CD Eating Fungus!
I use misburned CDs as coasters. They look nice. I noticed that after getting drops of various alcoholic beverages on them, they developed transparent spots. This is an easy result to reproduce.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Maybe the RIAA cloned the fungus so we buy more CDs.
I have a CD that I bought in about 1989 by Big Audio Dynamite. It has had this condition for at least the last seven years. I had always thought that it was a bacteria that had infected the disk during manufacture.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." Pablo Picasso.
Magneto Optical disks. The actual medium is sealed in a glass disk.
Recycling of metals is not only for reuse purposes. Metals in their native form may be hazardous to the soil and water in which they are present. (This point is still debated hotly among the concerned groups.)
Fot instance, biologists can work out what makes the fungii like Aluminium and devise ways to make it digest other metals also (Chromium, lead for example). After the digestion the metals can be released to the environment in a friendly compound forms.
This would be a great help for recycling metals in industrial waste
So it is all about rendering these metals harmless to the environment than reusing them. Anyway, aluminium is not prohibitively expensive today!
yAthum UrE yAvarum kELir All the places are our place, everybody is our kin. (A Tamil Poet - 2000 years ago)
keep out the moisture.
.Hey, what're pacemakers made from?
hell, that'd kill just about anything.... Retinas, monitors,, etc..but really, is there a way to protect existing cds? maybe lace the CD with a non-Aluminum eating bacterium, so the other one has no room to grow? Hey, it does work on human skin, after all...
I had an imported music CD (Scriabin Preludes) get corroded by something; this looks like a likely explanation. It was a "gold" CD, at least in color. I have no idea if it was really gold. The "hole" was not at the edge, but near the center. There was about 1/16" of green around the hole, and the whole was about 1/4" in diameter.
dude: you can have santana
fungus: i don't need any more psychedlia, my mushroom cousins do enough of that- howabout your creed?
dude: chick music? i'd love to give it to you, but it's my girlfriend's. take this old windows 98 cd.
fungus: microsoft gives me indigestion. howabout your "children of the corn" dvd? my corn smut friends would love some.
dude: you want smut? i burnt some pr0n archives on these recordable cds and my girlfriend says i have to get rid of them anyways.
fungus: sorry, no can do, i don't do recordable cd cyanine dye yet, just aluminum, but i'm working on it.
dude: well you can't have my incubus, i see how you're eyeing it.
fungus: medieval doctors believed the incubus was a little man who lived in single cells *sigh* that idea is just so appealing to me for some reason.
dude: you mean homunculus, not incubus.
fungus: oh sorry! well then give me that old pre-internet microsoft encarta cd, i need to brush up on my trivia.
dude: i thought you said microsoft gave you indigestion?
fungus: did i? sorry, i meant aol... i ate so many of their cds! anyways, they are all the same to me, large monopolistic technology companies that is. they are beneath us mindless slimy rotting unicellular films.
dude: agreed! encarta is yours then.
fungus: munch, munch oh wait... what's the cd key for this? i'm unable to eat anymore until i have that number...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...or "eat" into his investment.
- Lull stupid monkeys into false sense of security (check)
- Influence stupid monkeys by using sateration programming of lifestyle television shows and inept and lacking movie plots, to force them to use the stupid monkey computer network (check)
- Spread self across stupid blue planet using the most prevelent substance on the stupid blue planet as fuel -- AOL CDs (check)
- Use the global fungi network to send a pulse beacon to the ancient brotherhood of Nog from the home planet.
- Invade, and eat their stupid monkey brains for brunch!
Why can't you all just SEE?!--
McCarrum!
Robert Anton Wilson
Why not get CD's where the whole metal layer is gold like mitsui? Those I actually believe are archival in quality and will be around in 50 years.
Duh! just switch over to FMD , they are made of simple layers of polymers and have no aluminum in them at all. Not to mention being able to hold 180gigs on a CD. Its the future, man, dont resist it...
...passes to Moses... ...SCORES!!!
The Original Atrox
--Jesus Saves...
-Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
Shame of Slashdot
Compact Disk, Rotten, Wooly
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
<HUMOR>
This fungus is obviously derived from the space fungus on the Mir station. It landed on Earth when Mir crashed, and began to mutate. Now it is attacking our CDs!
This is not a coincidence, the space aliens planned it this way so as to destroy our information systems in preparation for their invasion! THEY were the ones who introduced the space fungus into Mir. THEIR agents caused NASA and the Russian Space Agency to crash Mir on Earth!
People of Earth, Unite against this invasion!!!!
</HUMOR>
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I think the fungus is revolting, first it will be aluminin based data storage, then they will go after larger prey like casino and video game tokens. Remember one fungus can be as small as a spore or bigger then your back yard. And they just won't take being dissenfected anymore. I just know that I'm going to be on the fungises if it comes to war.
-------------------
Insert Witty Remark Here ===>____________________________
You can tweak efficiency, conserve, recycle, digitize your information, employ redundant design, make backups of backups of backups, use nanotechnology, draw energy from the vacuum, slow it down all you like; entropy always wins in the end.
Is nothing safe?
With and emp and some fungus, all of my precious
nude "7 of 9" and Natalie Portman photos could
be destroyed.
"Once men turned thinking over to machines, in
the hope that this would set them free.
But that only permitted other men with
machines to enslave them."
-- Frank Herbert's Dune 1965
Next thing they'll tell you is CDs rot your brain (don't they?). Long live the Licorice Pizza!
The company I work for sells some Gold CDs, whose aluminum surface is coated with a layer of 24kt gold.
The label that produced these advertises them as sounding better, which is dubious in my mind. However, does anyone know whether this would protect them from fungal infestation?
- Justin, currently dousing his DVDs in Monistat
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
I know it's not popular with the high-tech crowd, but go with paper for long-term, stable and easy to use data storage. I'm a book conservator, and constantly work with books that are 300+ years old that are in pretty good shape, except for some minor problems with the case (cover). Acid-free paper will last 500 years or more, given even halfway decent storage conditions. Sure, it's subject to fire or other problems, but what isn't? And you don't have to worry about some long-obsolete technology being needed to read the data, or updating your media every time there a technology paradigm shift.
Be part of the world's largest collaborative work of art: http://www.paintthemoon.org
- The List
- Lipstick
- butter
- AOL
Actually, AOL is exactly the opposite but they go w/ the subject. Back to the lipstick: Maybe we could get Maybeline (or other lipstick company) to bring Microsoft crashing down!of general note, fungi are not all that good at munching on metals, iirc. they are very good at consuming organics with wild abandon, and that's what contain the Al or other metals of the CD/DVDs. polycarbonate derivatives come to mind as probable. if you want to munch on metals, chose some sort of bacterium - they tend to have the better metabolic machinery for that task. as for "gold-eating" bacteria, they didn't eat it, but they would concentrate it (iirc). by eat, i mean metabolize. Au is not readily metabolized, even by bacteria (is why we likes it so much). lastly, the Al degradation was most likely a result of either acid or base production by the fungus. probably acid as usually it's usually something in a nitrogen rich environment that pumps out base (urea) and a CD is probably nitrogen limiting.
Now I know why my Ramon's CD has "bald" spots.
Do I get a prize for discovering this first?
Ouch!
Check your map.
Belize is in Central America, just southeast of Mexico. Not even close to South America.
---
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Most CD's only have one polycarbonate layer below the aluminum. The aluminum itself is the label.
Steve Ballmer created the fungus that eats Windows licenses, but nobody's looked for their Windows license since it was released...
According to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, the fungus feeds on carbon and nitrogen from the polycarbonate layer and destroys the information recorded on the aluminium.
There is a Flash graphic (but I haven't seen it).
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
As my high school Biology teacher used to say:
"Ehhhh... There are fungus among us..."
Posted from the wireless couch.
Just call it "assisting evolution." People that dumb, don't deserve to live...
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Technology being what it is, though, you might have trouble getting an interface/drive that slow and klunky when refresh time comes around.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...that you won't learn how to eat the case as well (and be renamed Elevenactin?) you naughty fungus, you...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Anyone know what kind of surface the Memorex "Black" CD-R's use? any different than aluminum?
Imagine if the growth of the fungi could be limited to the course of the track of the CD. It would be nice to inject such fungus inside the CD at one end and allow it to eat slowly the entire CD. Meanwhile you use the CD as a one time pad for an encryption channel. Your pal at the other end is equiped with a similar self-destructing disk.
-- bartman
The reflective layer is gold. You can read the catalog blurb here.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I have a bunch of Kodak gold CD-Rs. They didn't cost much more than the aluminum CD-Rs. Unfortunately, Kodak has stopped making them. Kodak now uses a silver/gold alloy in their Ultima CD-Rs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I saw something like this a few years ago in Texas. I don't know if it was a fungus that did it, but a bunch of my audio CD's had clear spots in the Al. Ticked me off, especially since some of them were from garage bands that I will never be able to replace.
Laserdiscs (remember those?) suffer from what most people call "Laserdisc Rot". If you don't store them properly the surface degrades and the disc becomes unuseable. I wonder if it is similar to this.
Gold is used in recordable CD's. The gold in some of these is so thin that it's translucent. If you have one, hold it up to the light and see for yourself.
Aluminium is used in pressed CD's because of obvious price considerations. The problem with aluminium is that it oxidises easily. Oxidisation of aluminium yields chemical energy, and this is why the fungus can digest it. Gold would be better because it doesn't tarnish in air.
It's a good thing that hard disks use iron oxide. Because it's already oxidised, there's little chemical energy available for a hungry fungus or bacterium.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
This wasn't fungi. This was just salt.
It destroys aluminum with tremendous speed.
While the aluminum is coated with laquer (and in some cases, lots of silk screen printing on top of that), it wouldn't take much of a pock mark in this laquer to allow salt-ladden moisture in. Once it's there, it will oxidize aluminum. Once the aluminum oxidizes, it will allow more salt and moisture within. The seawater might also have a detrimental effect on the laquer itself, exacerbating the issue, though this seems less likely.
If you don't want them to disappear in this manner again, simply don't take them with you. At least, leave the store-bought titles at home and bring CD-R backups. Some Kodak blanks have an extra layer on top, claimed to enhance durability. Others are available coated with a white substance, intended for direct-to-disc inkjet printing (I had some Maxell discs of this description, a couple of years ago). All of these are somewhat more expensive than regular dime-store blanks. The priciest of them (around $US 3 each, it seems) probably being Apogee Digital's brand, which has what they call
"DataSaver II" resin on top.
Good luck.
Kid-proof tablet..
It is really a shame, at times, that "Blatant Misinformation" is not included among the moderators' choices.
i cs4.htm and read until your eyes bleed.
That said, a CD (mass-produced, CD-R, -RW, whatever) starts out as a polycarbonate (the same stuff safety glasses are made from) disc, of familiar size. It contains microscopic grooves on the top surface - in the mass-produced case, this groove consists of binary pits, in the CD-R case, it's simply a spiral groove, with a bit of information about the disc (dye formulation, total time, whether it's been taxed for audio use, etc).
Why is there a groove on a CD-R? Because the burner needs something to track - it, unlike a cutting stylus for LPs, or the mastering machine for CDs, does not have the ability to move unguided. (To the naysayers: the difference between 74- and 80-minute blanks is the width of this groove.)
Moving right along. On a mass-produced CD, aluminum (or sometimes gold) is deposited by an evaporative process atop the aforementioned pits in the aforementioned polycarbonate, thus providing a reflective surface.
A CD-R is first coated (probably sprayed) with a dye, and then that is aluminized (or plated in gold, or silver, or some other such thing - CD-R makers are all about hype, these days).
A CD-ROM burner works by putting "holes" in this dye layer, thus providing an approximation of its mass-produced counterpart's physical pits, as the burned/unburned dye has different reflectivity than the aluminum.
After all that, the disc is sprayed with a very thin layer of laquer. Nothing magic, no fancy plastic - just transparent air-dry laquer, like people have been using for a long, long time for all manner of things. On most discs, one can see a thin bead of this stuff on the outside edge, due to slight overspray.
It is then silkscreened with UV-cured inks (to prevent the solvents in air-dry ink from dissolving the laquer, thus exposing aluminum to the atmosphere and allowing it to oxidize, ala 1980s Bit Rot), and sold.
So. It's like this:
Polycarbonate|Reflective media|Laquer|Artwork
On a CD-R:
Polycarbonate|Dye layer|Reflective media|Laquer|Artwork
A laserdisc is built like a CD.
A DVD is built like a CD.
A DVD with multiple layers is built as follows:
Polycarbonate|Partially reflective layer|Polycarbonate|More reflective layer|Laquer|Artwork
A DVD with multiple layers and multiple sides, is built as above, but sans artwork and with four layers of polycarbonate and reflective media (two semi-transparent, two opaque).
And for those who -still- just don't fucking understand how this bit of simple, decades-old technology is put together, I suggest you find a CD, a CD-R coaster, a sharp object, and a hammer. Take one apart and see for yourself.
And, having done that, if anyone reading this still believes that a CD is constructed differently, they're full of shit. Which would be fine, if the same people wouldn't proclaim otherwise.
For additional information on what a CD consists of and a really pretty animated GIF, start at http://www.disctronics.co.uk/cdref/cdbasics/cdbas
Kid-proof tablet..
...by the RIAA to force us all to upgrade to the next format they're going to distribute music on.
I'm sure in 5 more years they will "discover" a fungus that eats that, too.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I saw this for this first time yesterday! I heard an audio cd I made for someone skipping, and took it out to dust it off. To my surprise, it looked like a small drop of liquid hit the outer part of the cd, and completely eroded the aluminum bits, leaving a little hue of blue in the middle but otherwise making the spot completely transparent. She's been getting into rare incense studies a lot lately, and I wonder if maybe that had something to do with it.
Wierd.
While on Road Rules Latin America, we spent about two and a half weeks in Belize, right on the Yellow River at the Lamani Outpost. Shortly thereafter I noticed that my (blue?) CDRs started getting 'spots' and little by little they started sounding worse and worse, if they worked at all.
Pinche Fungi...
CD production tutorial:
Mass produced CDs are made like LP were. A master 'die' is made that is used to press an image that becomes the copy. In the case of CDs, the image is pressed into some aluminum foil which is then covered with more plastic to protect it. LPs were just platic disks that were stamped directly. In both cases, the master 'dies' were/are precision machine parts that are VERY expensive to produce (but their cost are amortized over thousands or hundreds of thousands of parts)
CDR work by having a laser burn a shiny substance sandwiched between two layers of plastic (Both sides are generally clear, but this is because it's cheaper to keep one type of plastic on hand.) When you burn the shiny stuff, it don't shine no mo'.
The advantage of the press is that CDs can be produce at the rate of hundreds or thousands per hour, whereas an 8X burner still takes 10min or so to burn a CD full of data. The advantage of a CD burner is cost (of course).
The point here is that if this was RIAA's plan, they have shot themselves in the foot. CDs that I've burn have no aluminum layer. One more reason to make my own CDs from Napster theft 8*)
BTW, does this now mean that my computer can have a fungus problem as well as viruses? And if I have fungus, will Gold Bond help?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Ok, for video games, other software and MP3s, CDs are fine. But, for long-term, archival quality storage, CDs suck (and always have, regardless of fungi).
Si, what makes sense?
Actually, DVD-R makes something very interesting possible. Because there's so much storage available per disk: essentially a RAID array of DVDs. What I would do, is automate the whole thing like the old epic storage arrays.
You would have a disk array (like the NetApp Filer), which takes your data to start, and then once you get above the threshold of one DVD-RAID filesystem, you migrate a snapshot out to a RAID-5 set of RAID-1 disk pairs. Thus, you have two DVD-Rs which can fail simultainiusly, and you still don't lose the volume. As soon as a disk fails, you re-create it from a pool of 4 or 5 disks, which you could replentish one a daily or weekly basis as the system informs you that you need to.
Then, it's just a matter of running a periodic check of all of the disks to identify failures ASAP.
Such a device is impervious to power failures (though obviously you need power to actually get the data back), most mundane environment problems (hell, the disks could be soaked or smoke damaged, and just a little polishing should bring them right back to new).
Thoughts?
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
Sure, that's the line that everyone uses. Challenger, Ford Explorers, anything goes wrong, they blame the weather. I don't believe it. It's a conspiracy involving the manufacturers, the RIAA, the MPAA, and Big Oil.
Best Slashdot Co
Of course, that's gunna cost you..
..don't panic
A CD eating fungus is rather disconcerting. I was told recently that the lifespan of a CD is about 50 years because the aluminum eventually oxidizes.
Here is a partial list of archiving materials:
CDs
Books
Stone Tablets
Clay Tablets
ROM
Battery backed RAM
Hard Disks
Floppies
Feel Free to add to the list and rank them according to durability.
Crossbreed this fungus with yeast...self rising CDs...3-D data storage, anyone?
I can see movie producers having fun with variants of this too-the fungus could achieve sentience inside the AOL coaster warehouse, then die of overeating...
Still bored at work...
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
First we get viruses...
...then we get worms...
...now we get fungus.
Oh hell, might as well, we've already got litigation.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Aha!
So there's where the MIR fungi went... I was wondering where it would show up.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
No, this isn't a good thing at all. The aluminum the fungus has "eaten" is still there--it's just reacted with other substances, presumably releasing energy, since that's how fungi work.
All this means is that you'll need more energy to recover the aluminum from old CDs.
If you want to recycle CDs, the easiest way to do it is (probably) to heat them to the plastic's melting point and then strain out the aluminum bits.
And the brethren went away edified.
...at least until a vinyl-eating super-fungus makes landfall.
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
You can't control life. I mean, life will find a way. Oo and aah, that's how it starts, but later comes the running and the screaming.
I somehow get to keep bringing up the subject that I lived in Mexico for 2 years. I actually lived about 4 hours north of Belize... I lost plenty of CDs to this CD eating fungus. It's annoying as hell. I lost tons of software (including my favorite game while I was down there: Total Annihilation).
I had maybe 150 music CDs and probably some 50+ computer related CDs and would imagine I lost somewhere in the vicinity of 20 CDs total, so maybe 10% of my CDs were killed by this horrible fungus.
It does look kind of cool, though. It grows out in these little strings that look like tiny worms.
It took me about 4 or 5 CDs before I realized it had to be some sort of fungus spurred on by the incredibly high humidity (I didn't have A/C and fungi are quite common down there).
Silver perhaps?
--
Free Mac Mini
Great rhyme scheme. I'm impressed.
They make fantastic frisbees. Or, drop them onto your car antenna and watch the look on the cars behind you when they fly off and whack them on the windshield.
Or, perhaps, wallpaper one of your rooms. Use them as coasters. or sliders for furniture.
microwave them.
use them as wheels on tiny milk carton cars.
See, they designed this fungus so as to increase their sales. This fungus was released in conjunction with BMG's copy protected CD's.
The conspiracy is simple. You buy a copy of Philip Boa's music. The fungus eats your CD and then you have to go and buy another copy.
It's a brilliant plan!
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I think this happened to me! I got clear holes in my first Final Fantasy 8 PC disc. It looked like someone had spilled some very mild acid on the disc or something, because it ate through the top of the cd, down to the aluminum layer, and stopped there. There was one little cluster of about a dozen holes in one area, and then another 4 or 5 on another part of the CD.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
--
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I have a CD collection, and this is news to me. In fact, I doubt that anyone I know was aware that their CDs may be lunch for a putrid fungus.
How do you figure anyone with CDs will know about this?
First, I meant scarey not scarely, maybe you thought I meant scarcely?
At any rate, I meant that is is scarey -- ie, bad -- news for those of us with CD collections (although, as I say later, not a big deal). However, it is not surprising that such a fungus exists because metal-corroding fungi are well-known
-- Robert...That's the sound of a thousand RIAA excutives mass ejaculating into their pants in orgiastic delight.
CDs do not have two layers of substrate. There is only one polycarbonate subsrate on a CD. It has aluminum and a laquer (sp?) on top of it. DVDs have two layers of substrate which results in a different thickness of each substrate and as a result a different focal point.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I remember reading a while back that someone was doing research on storing information in crystals using a laser that could burn piths into the crystal at different angles. Whatever happened to this technology?
Also, what about flourescent optical? They were like CD's but you could see through them.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
A few spores, carefully laid in the XP press...
Now, if I were more of a conspiracy theorist than I already am, I'd say that this was a bio-engineered fungus. But who would develop it, I hear you asking? (Well, one of you asked it, at least.) The US Government in their top secret Plum Island research center (which has a biohazard rating two higher than the National Center for Disease Control!)? The NSA at Fort Meade? The Army biological weapons branch?
Worse! The RIAA!
Think about it. CD-Rs and CD-RWs are the demesne of music pir8s, and are a tool used for the theft of the property of the RIAA! Wouldn't it be great if the pirates had their tools eaten out from under them?
So, what happens? RIAA immunizes their CD's against this fungus. RIAA agents release it into the environment in colleges and in major metropolitan centers (i.e. anywhere there's a Tower Records.) Before you know it, CD-Rs are being eaten all over the place, CD burners become useless overnight, and millions of gigabytes of data are irrevocably lost faster than you can say "US Government Approved Methods for Destroying Media Containing Classified Data!"
It's a conspiracy, I tell you, a conspiracy!!
Ahem... uhm, that is, if I was any more of a conspiracy theorist than I already am. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
We at Microsoft in order to protect our new license agreements for WindowsXP, needed to fund this new species of fungii to make sure all the bussinesses who use our software repurchased, oops I mean were license compliant with our renting scheme. Basically this new fungii species will ensure a constant revinue oops I mean innovation stream to everybody. Think about it? No need to worry about licensing. Your cd's will just be worthless so you do not need to worry. Its just our way of saying thank you for buying Microsoft software.
After all, I do not make enough money.
I blew 10 billion in the early 1990's with bio-tech investing and need instant return on my investments. With renting and a likely appeal with both the rambus and Microsoft cases, expect better innovation and new products to the market.
WHo knows maybe you will even use your computer to comminicate messages in real time with audio video and use it as a pager. Now when I am through inventing instant messaging, like I did with object oriented programing and the internet, you will have proof that we are good and the government is bad.
http://saveie6.com/
coming from the cd manufacturing industry, I have the following comment: The alu-layer on a cd is covered with a lacquer to prevent any oxidizing or "fungi-attack". This layer could be of lousy quality (too thin) but more likely, it could be wrong applied in the manufacturing process. It is applied using spinning chucks. it's layer-thickness depends on spinning speed, accelaration and time. Since the lacquer is dispenced from the inner diameter, it is impossible to cover the cd 100%. The inner most area, close to the innerhole, is not covered, since it has to be hold by a chuck-pin to center the cd for the application of the laquer. Therefore, any cd, which has an alu layer which covers the entire cd upto the innerhole, does not have protection on the aluminium for 100%. The outside air can reach the alu-layer easy! Usually on the outside, there is a small area of uncovered poly carbonate and with the lacquer application this should be 100% covered with the transparant lacquer. Some manufactures however, like to speed up their production times by "tuning" their process as short as possible. It is possible that they cut the spinning time too much and leave some outside area uncovered. Your cd will not reach the 10 years with that! An easy check can be done by inspecting the cd's 1.2mm side. If the cd has 90 degree edge on the outside diameter, a wave-form of lacquer can be seen. The "rounded" outer-diameters are difficult to inspect. Further more, this lacquer is dryed (cured) by uv light (these days in some 1.5 seconds). The UV-lamps doing this job have only about 1000 hours of effective UV-light available. Some reluctant manufactures leave the lamps in too long and that makes the lacquer layer of lousy quality as well. DVD's are less much less of a problem since the reflective layer lies deep within the polcarbonate it self.
While in the tropics, I learned to keep the data dry. Keep it in a metal gasketed box (army navy surplus stuff is great) and keep lots of silica gel recharged. Plastic baggies do not seal well enough to keep out the humidity for long periods of time. Silica Gel is avaliable in large packages that can be reactivated in the oven. Use an indicator and recharge the gel anytime the humidity gets over 20%. I did this for my tools, test equipment, backup tapes, and important papers. They all survived while most everything else mildewed, coroded, or warped. Do not use the tiny packets that come in products. They can not repeatidly dry the air in a container each time you open it to retrieve something. They are only good to keep something from rusting on the boat trip to the market. Get the big bag.
The truth shall set you free!
goddammit.......you guys are taking this way too seriously....i was just trying to be funny
There's some really nasty fungus out there (not sure of the sepcies, and I'm not interested enough to look it up) that eats the glass on lenses. Cameras are usually stored in dark, cool places, which are perfect for fungi to go to town. I wouldn't worry about CDs too much, especially in the US, unless you keep them in a cool, damp, dark closet. And even then.
Besides, keeping CDs in an archival setting would probably keep this fungus from doing anything to them. Of course, printing *really* important things is a good idea too. Or writing them out on acid free paper with archival inks.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
RIAA releases genetic mutation of cd-eating fungus to destroy music on CD-RWs. The RIAA has promoted the use of copy- and fungi-protection mechanisms on CDs to ensure their legal use. When fearful a city has any pirate CDs, the RIAA releases their anti-copi-fungi into the population.
In a related story, the FCC has released its own mutation of the cd-eating fungus to eat "inappropriate" words out of music. Rapper Eminem is complaining that fans can only buy his clear CDs.
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Developers: We can use your help.
This is one thing that I can see spreading worldwide, left unchecked. The thing is though, that now, in addition to having them in the fire-proof box, to keep my pr0n collection in good shape, I'll need to disenfect?
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
If a fungus is tough enough to eat a CD, imagine what it could do to disks, tapes, film, or paper. You just can't store the CD in a non-air-conditioned or humidity-controlled environment in the tropics, at least until something mutates to take better advantage of the new "food" source. But expect anything like that to work it's way up the chain and eat all floppies, tapes, hard copy, microfilm, and electronic circuit boards first. (BTW, in tropical climates, fungus _will_ eat the circuit boards unless extraordinary measures are taken to protect them.)
Not even in the hot and sticky regions of the US? Our weather outside right now is almost exactly like that being currently reported for Belize. The only difference is that we do have a temperate season; it fell on a Wednesday this year.
During a year and a half sailling trip, about a quarter of my CD's died from the mystery clear spots. The home burned blue ones seem especially susceptible, none of them survived. It may be a coincidence, but no spots formed on CD's with solid color labels, only on ones that are mostly shiney and have a few words on them. Until now I thought it was the metal rusting, from handling the CD's with wet and salty hands. Does anyone know a way to prevent this? Wipe the CD's down with "antibacterial" soap or Hibiclense or 409 every once in a while? It sucked to lose a lot of good music, especially since we weren't near civilization and there was no chance of replacing it.
Great. That's all we need: breeding a super strain of TITANIUM eating fungus. Each of these fungizoids would have the strength of 10 ordinary aluminum-eating ones. And the old-fashioned cheese-eating fungus woudln't even have a chance.
With hoards of titanium-clad killer mushrooms terrorizing the nation, we would need a real superhero to save us.
I doubt the interest of the fungus is to eat the aluminum on the CD. I figured the fungus is just crawling everywhere it wants. If you find fungus growing on the lens within your SLR camera you would notice that the sucker will grow anywhere even there is no food around. So the aluminum is just a victim because it is chemically active and it just react with the fungus contact with them.
That's a figure I remember from the 1980s, so it's roughly still valid I bet.
Littering with old Budweiser cans is ugly, but generally it's harmless to the environment. In fact I'm sure some insects just love to lay their eggs in them when rainwater pools. It does cost money, trees, and energy to go mining new supplies of Aluminum of course.
I'm sure such a fungus might be put to some manufacturing use. Sounds like a research project - thanks!
Let's see them come out with an anti-virus for this one!
.sig is a manual virus. Copy it into your .sig, or you will have bad luck, bad credit, never find love, always be fat, or not help a six year old girl who has cancer.
I wonder how long before Micro$oft tries to claim that they invented this technology as a new copywrite protection scheme.
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This
How long before Metallica's Lars tries to have this fungus outlawed by the federal government, as it may cut into his money-making abilities?
Hehe... Either that or they'll patent the fungus, then alter it so that it only eats CDRs.
I *dare* you to start an EMail spam warning everyone about this bad new danger to their music collections, and encouraging them to sanitize their CDs before it's too late!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
...to destroy rewritable CD's only. Hmmm, sounds like a decent made-for-TV movie!
Record Company:
"Don't worry, your $25 triple-locked, biometrically secured Britney Spears disc probably won't be effected at all! And if it does, just buy another one!"
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Surely a direct result of bringing that MIR space-fungus down to earth.. I tried to warn you...
air and light and time and space
>>Could this fungus, once isolated and brought under control, have applications in recycling?
Sure, but the problem is that it probably grows when it eats (like most living things) and I think I've seen that horror flick.
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A fungus who liked to eat CDs
Made its way to a corp'rate PC
the backups all fried
and admins all cried
mostly bitter 'bout lost MP3s
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
If you put enough food out there, something will evolve to eat it. I just didn't expect it to happen so fast. And the form it takes is a little unusual, I was expecting something to eat the plastic itself. Aluminum can't be nutritious; theoretically you can get energy by oxidizing it, but existing lifeforms do not have the chemical pathways to use this, and the fungus must have other substances to grow. I'm guessing that the fungus eats the glue between the two layers of plastic, and the aluminum is just an innocent bystander. It may also have been primarily growing on something else (like the cardboard label on the case) and just reached down to the glue layer to get some trace element. If it is eating the glue, those gold disks probably won't fare any better, assuming they use the same glue -- the gold foil will still be there, but as the fungus eats the glue on one side and tries to push holes through to the other side I don't think the gold will stay flat and shiny enough to read. But a CD with a different glue would be safe for now, and it is quite likely that only a few spots in the tropic will have the combination of heat, humidity, and the right species of fungus spores to do this -- for now. In a century, we'll probably evolve something that eats the entire CD case and all, and to keep them safe you'll need either a humidity and temperature controlled room, or to bury them in a land-fill where almost nothing ever decomposes. 8-/
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Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
during this past winter i dropped a few burned cd's into a snowpile/puddle aka slush. and the street salt at through the cd.. xericx
You can kill the fungus (and prevent future growth) between the polycarbonate layers of your cd's by sticking them in the microwave for about 10 seconds. The quick blast does the job, just don't leave in much longer else el meltyo.
Let groups.google.com save it for you.
Where could I pick some of this up? My basement is FULL of AOL CDs!!!
;)
... I'd be fun to watch too
-- iNFRARED
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The fungi used to be part of a very secret cult. However, around 1998-1999, various corporations and government agencies learned of their addiction to polycarbonate layers, and decided they could turn a profit with them.
People would think that the fungi would have become common around 1997 when America Online began distributing large quantities of cds; however, the fungi had no knowledge of this. It wasn't until 98-99 that, due to the high demand of cdrs, that the RIAA, in partnership with various CD manufacturing companies and the US Customs, began importing these little creatures, and spreading them around the country, hoping to reduce the lifespan of cds, and in essence, make more money.
It's a conspiracy, I tell you, a conspiracy!
Unfortunately, I don't think it could.
/. thread earlier today] than it takes to mine more bauxite (the ore we get aluminum from). If this fungus 'digests' aluminum, then the aluminum _must_ be reacted with another chemical (I'm guessing oxygen, though I'm not really sure) to produce the energy the fungus needs. That means that you'd have to spend even more energy to extract it than to simply mine more. Since the bauxite ore is aluminum oxide, then the same processes would probably be used.
The point in recycling aluminum isn't to 'destroy' the aluminum, but to reclaim it at a lower cost [thanks to whoever mentioned that earlier on another
What all of that means is that using this fungus to extract the tiny sprinkles of aluminum on a CD aren't cost-efficient enough to make it worthwhile for recycling. It'd actually cost more (and almost certainly yield less) to use this method than to simply mine more aluminum ores.
-SeraphtheSilver
Could this fungus, once isolated and brought under control, have applications in recycling?
"cds last forever"
People never forget:
"people will never need more than 64k memory"
"cell phones dont cause tumors"
"the speed of e-business will make everyone inside the borders of the western world stinking rich"
"napster is the future of music"
I say we mandate that computer cases always be made with a block of wood to knock on, cause these prophecies are almost always wrong.
garret
"Old man yells at systemd"
the geotrichum genus is a filamentous fungi. It is typically characterized by chains of slimy spores, often times with strong odors (they can stink).
It is not odd for this genus to corrode metal; gerotrichum is probably the most common type of fungi found in metal.
Geotrichum candidum was once considered to be a contaminant on the surface of cheeses (it would naturally grow there). Now, however, because it grows so quick it is now used for the inoculation of surface mould to encourage ripening.
While this is scarely news for anyone with a CD collection, it certainly is not surprising. Best of all, however, is that I don't think we have to worry about it too much -- if at all, especially in the US.
-- Robert... something that actually likes AOL CDs.
munch munch
This article was brought to you by Tough-actin' Tenactin.
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Is there really a safe archive method anymore? CDs now get eaten by fungii, disks and tape are subject to magnetic erasure, paper/hardcopies can burn, nad stone tablets/true hardcopy are breakable...
How Jaded Are You?
Back to lp's for all your data storage needs
Tim
PS. All right, I admit that it might have been Steve Ballmer.
The best part about this is if you eat it you see music....Its waaaay trippy man...
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Except that the media has taken to calling them "boy bands".