Allen, your points are very well taken. I gave a short intro to a panel discussion at the Data Protection Summit last month, entitled "the 21st Century - the End of Recorded History?" that was along the same lines you have raised.
On the one hand, I worry that the strength of our encryption may not be good enough to protect Personally Identifiable Information for the duration of a (young) person's life. But I also worry that the encryption will be too strong, and that historians will not be able to decrypt the data being collected today - assuming the media survives, and that anyone can find the needle in the haystack, without adding more hay in the process. If no one knows what is stored, or where it is located, it is unlikely that someone will be willing to continue to pay to preserve the data, and our history will be lost forever. These are all problems that HAVE to be solved. I have personally gone from around 500 GB to over 12 terabytes of data storage in the last four months, just to have an adequate backup for my ever-expanding collection of digital photographs. And synchronizing only 6GB (three days of pictures) for offline backup over the Internet is projected to take over 10 hours. Bob ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:59:38 -0700 From: Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [FDE] This is sideways, but... To: [email protected], Cryptography <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, ekmi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Hi gang(s), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q Well worth a quick look and it raises interesting points by implication: if the amount of data is increasing at the rate they allege: A) how will storage space keep up, B) how will finding what you need keep up, C) how will encryption keep up, D) how will encryption key management keep up? And these are just a few of the potential questions. As to A), from what I see storage space is not increasing as fast as data speeds - 6 month cycle v. 18 month cycle - so we may wind up discarding history in real-time. Future historians will hate it much worse than the change from film to video for TV news. It also means that history will truly be written by the last one standing. I actually have a funny story from the early days of FM album rock where I lived the history and what is written about it is wrong, but there is no way to correct the misstatements now given how many wrong versions are out there. Look at the recycling of urban myths as an another example. I'm lucky because I'm skeptical so I don't often get caught but good friends who "should" know better get caught about once a week or so. As to B), I don't know about you, but I'm finding it harder to find some kinds of data than I was 3 or 4 years ago. I have to go much further down the stack and the failure rate is higher. To give an obscure example, I was trying to remember the name of the Catholic heresy from about the 11th or 12th century in Spain that is depicted in Luis Bunuel's film, "Milky Way." After working on it for a couple of hours and shooting off e-mails to "experts" I just gave up on the net and tracked down an old VHS tape of the film to re-watch. Haven't gotten it yet, but it is on order. Also finding the exact quote in the morass of e-mail and other files sometimes turns out to be a nightmare as the search tools aren't good enough for mere mortals such as I. As to C) I suspect we can keep up here, but the length of protection will be far shorter than we think because of the need to control the data to ensure that no copies are laying around that can be brute forced. And D) gives me nightmares. All I can see is the basket of keys my parents collected that they had no clue as to what they fit. My basket is smaller, but I still have one. May your nightmares never survive sunrise, Allen ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde End of FDE Digest, Vol 19, Issue 6 ********************************** _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde
