The year is 2245. The heirs finally locate a working, antique reader that can handle the ancient USB key, hoping to find great-great-grandpa’s crypto-wallet or the pin-code to a long-lost Maltese bank account.
Instead, they find a 4-bit, VGA-quality scan of Miss October.
So your 8KB of data will last forever, but what about the firmware required to access it running on flash?
In 200 years, AI will hack it for you, but you’ll need a dozen antique dongles to get from USB-Z to A.
it does say it has a built-in serial console and raspberry pi
And the firmware inside that rp2040 is stored on plain old flash memory. So while the data may still be on the memory chip, the controller chip dies at just the same pace than every other usb drive - and then you can’t access it.
- Print out 8KB on high quality paper.
- Store in good environment…
How do I read that data back
With your eyes
But 100 years we’ll all be mole people without eyes!
My brain doesn’t have the decryption key. I’m no man in the middle.
Just get two men to stand on either side.
An actual book stores more data than that and for longer. At that point, why not just etch the data onto a metal plate or something? 8K is only a few pages of text at 12pt. It could easily fit onto two sides of a small-ish metal plate, etched in 8pt or so, and it would last, potentially, for millennia.
I think the idea is to improve upon this tech so the capacity would become larger.
It’s FRAM, which has been around for ages. The problem is its prohibitive cost— hence the 8k.
This can be rewritten many, many, many times.
What’s the practical benefit of that? If the point is long-term storage, rewriting isn’t a priority (or possibly even a need). And this isn’t designed for capacity.
It’s so I can exchange fart jokes with my great great great great grandson via a magic USB port a la The Notebook, assuming that’s how it works, idk, never actually seen the movie.
I’m going to get one for my favicon.
What’s the favicon?
Then I said “I don’t know, what’s the favicon with you?”
I would be surprised if you couldn’t get 8KB for 200 years out of standard flash simply by extreme duplication — 8GB/8KB means a million copies on one (very small by today’s standards!) drive.
Or is the failure mechanism something other than bitrot?
Will the chip actually last that long though? I would have expected a ceramic package with gold plated leads, not a plastic SOP-8.
what about physical damage. or emp or something. I feel like that will be a problem well before 200 years.
The other flash chip storing program code for the rp2040 will decay before then making the longevity marketing dumb
Kind of hard to return this after 195 years if it fails.
The more you read is just gets wilder and wilder.
I’m admittedly interested now.
future firmware updates are expected to include encryption features
Just use GnuPG. SMH
FRAM module? Seriously?
