Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 15:46:22 -0400
From: Rick Wash <rwash (at) citi.umich (dot) edu [email concealed]>

On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 12:03:20PM -0700, Nicholas Weaver wrote:
> So who cares? Why juggle when shelves hold so much more?

easy to delete large amounts of data quickly. Imagine you hear the feds
knocking on your door -- you just unplug your fiber, and let all the light
(aka your data) fly out into the room. Your data is gone, permanently.
If the latency is a minute, then it only takes a minute to delete everything
-- all 6.5 GB of data according to your calculations. Show me another
method that can delete 6.5 GB a data in a completely unrecoverable manner
that quickly.

To continue, that works a few times, then the "doorknockers" realize
that everything they are after is freely available, thanks to you.
Fiber is dirt simple to tap. Plus the access latency in this approach
handicaps it for anything useful (see magnetic bubble memories). Oh,
and the alternate method is easy, no hard storage, i.e. everything in
RAM with a marginal power supply. Delay line storage has been around
for a long time, if it was useful, it would be commerical.

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