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New Polymer Ideal For Secure Data Storage
aphexbrett writes "Clever geometry is the basis of a new material that is said to be ideal for secure data encryption and dense optical information storage. The material consists of a lattice of onionlike spheres in which the particle core and its layers each contain a different dye. The material can hold four or more pieces of information in one spot--not just two as in binary optical data storage. And it opens a door to high-density three-dimensional optical data storage. Read a summary of the research over at C&EN News."
Since when do innovations become mainstream so fast ? If there's a decent demand for these products and a decent way to build them, they'll come sooner or later. But you can't just rush things like that, that'd be irresponsable, moreover concerning such a small market.
In 1992 I remember reading Business Week's article on Hitachi's 5, 10 and 15 year plans - their 15 year research plan (ie 2007) included having atomic level data storage. Now it is 2004 and we seem to be some way off still. So maybe these micro-stores are trickier than people think.
Somebody wake me when there's a new data storage more cost effective than a traditional hard disk, because that's what 99% of us care about for mass storage.
*ZZZZZZZZzzzzZZzzzzzzZ*
That is because they are not cheap, easy to manufacture and dense enough compaired to investing in our current hard disk drives.
Yet Another Organic Storage Device..
As you may have noted, organic electronics and related topics are currently very hip. The problem is that these materials are very very instable. Great opportunity for secondary results, when your first hand research does not succeed. Just find some device the shows a somewhat reproducable instability and declare it as memory device.
Most of the published devices have endurances (write-read cycles) in the one or two digit order. Their data retention is measured in minutes. Reading/writing is so slow that you would need really really massive parallelism to get on par with HD, CD or flash. It could not be any further from a real application.
There is a difference between new research, something that can be practically implemented, and something that's ready for mass-market production. This is obviously not in the third category, but that doesn't make it uninteresting.
The venturi effect was discovered hundreds of years before the Wright Flyer was built, and it was 20 or 30 years after that before airplanes were useful for much. That doesn't mean the discovery and prototype (or specialized applications) were of no interest until commercial airliners appeared.
If you only care about deployable mass-market products, I suppose that's fine, but it's not worth posting about. If you can't tell the difference, or choose to ignore it, that's just obnoxious.
As far as I can tell, the connection to "secure data storage" is fairly tenuous. Or at least, they don't mean what computer security people would expect by that phrase.
C&EN's summary says that such material could be used to make ID cards which show different images (data) under different light, and that this "would be nearly impossible to fake." As far as I can tell, what this means is that a card made with this material is easily distinguishable from one that isn't. This only makes faking hard if forgers aren't able to make the material themselves. There wasn't anything in the article specifically saying why that would be the case, but it's easy to imagine that needing esoteric equipment would raise the bar a bit.
Having only read the C&EN blurb, I can't confidently say that there isn't some more direct security connection that wasn't mentioned. But no obvious candidates are coming to mind. You could store various watermarks and signatures and whatnot, but you can do that with existsing systems too.
I think it is just the writer gerring carried away. It is just security through obscurity: a new technolog which will be difficult for forgets to duplicate - until 30 minutes after it bcomes possible to make a lot of money by forging it.
The article is pretty uniformed: confusing bits and states: 1 bit-> 2 states, 2 bits->4 states.
I don't see ut as much to write home about unless they get more than two layers. If they could get 8 bits inot 1 onion, thy might be onto something. This current implementation seems to be little more valuable than the dual layer DVDs.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
OK, I felt like I was missing somethign at first, but from the look of a lot of posts at least I'm not alone. From what I can get from this, it's an improvement on typical (optical) data storage because instead of storing one bit per dot (which as far as I know CD's and even Hard drives do) this can store several bits per dot (limited by how many distinct dyes they can put together). Sounds cool. And the mention in the article of using this to store multiple images on the same space is pretty cool. But, where's the secure storage part come in? That image thing gives security cards as a possible use, but useful to printing ID cards != secure storage. Maybe they go into more detail in the first article, but lynx didn't like the PDF there, so I don't know yet...
Is there better info I've missed? Or is the write-up off ?
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