The problem some people see is that drives remap "grown defects".

This means that after manipulating the "grown defect table", you might be able to recover part of the data that was overwritten in the new location, but not in the old.

The chances of those few blocks holding interesting data are very very slim, but if they are the launch codes for the nuclear missiles you'd better be safe than sorry.

Even for "sensitive" information of a big company I'd say: I'd be willing to risk it: Not everybody CAN recover that data, chances are someone will get at the disk and find it completely empty, and then start using it. If the drives are marked: "Super secret next model Iphone plans inside" then you'd better be more careful.

Apparently by logging in I ended up on a different Apple story. Sorry. :-(

His name must be Tristan Schaap. Not Schapp.

He used to work for me, but Apple made him an offer he couldn't refuse. When he left, he said he was going to work in security. Apparently they found something else for him to do :-).

As far as I know he went to apple for an internship, and after that they asked him: finish your studies and come work for us after that.

His name must be Tristan Schaap. Not Schapp.

He used to work for me, but Apple made him an offer he couldn't refuse. When he left, he said he was going to work in security. Apparently they found something else for him to do :-).

Exactly! You need to solve the problem at hand and not something unrelated.

Provided they reach their goal of having a cryptographically secure log-message-chain, what do you do if your software reports: sorry, chain broken here? You know that your logfile was tampered with. So what?

But with the binary format and the program that is required to read the binary format.... The hackers just replace the binary-format-reader and make it report: "all is fine". It's easy enough to do: the source is available....

What the article is missing, is that you can manage reasonably well at 10 or 20mbit. But jumping to 100Mbit as I have done means a huge improvement on a few applications. Things you'd "just not do" because they would take too much time.

Similarly the network companies are aching to be able to sell you stuff that the network can't handle today. A video rental store just around the corner can rent you a movie when you're "in the mood for a movie at home". But you have to go out and walk/drive to the shop. Wouldn't they sell more if you could rent the movie from your couch? Sure! And you can do that already. But then it takes planning. How many people plan badly?

And another thing. Just looking at the traffic numbers, you can extrapolate when > 20Mbit is necessary. Telcos have to start planning for that and actually invest for that way ahead of time. So it's good that telecom companies are looking ahead and investing ahead of time. In the mean while some advanced users will be happy to be connected to the internet at gigabit speeds TODAY.

I'm copying over a large dataset at the office. I tried to get it started on Friday to have it finished by Monday morning. No such luck. It's been doing over a gigabit all weekend....

(Yes I know the AC (and this remark) is talking about in-the-office, while TFA is about internet).

Of course some differences between theory and practice can be expected. For example, some experimental noise is expected. And at these scales, some fuzziness is also weird if it wouldn't happen.

However the topology should be correct. Now in the top image on the right there is a "white" area at the top. Whereas on the left (the real data) the white area at the top has a dent in it. As if there is a black area on the top with two white areas on the corners.

In short: From this experiment I'd say: The theoretical model is seriously flawed.

People are underestimating the (relative) difficulty of the different steps in "space travel".

A good measure of difficulty is the energy required to get there. To go up to "the edge of space" at 100km high you just need g.h per kg of of payload in energy. That comes to about 1MJ/kg.

To get into low earth orbit at 200km high, you need g.h for the height, but also 1/2 v^2 for the kinetic energy. This comes to 2MJ/kg + 28MJ/kg = 30MJ/kg. It is about 30 times as difficult to get into low earth orbit than to get to 100km.

Taking along enough "fuel tank" and "motor" to use this energy after you've burnt part of it is a serious problem.

Remember the math problems with trucks or camels that can carry only so much water or fuel and you want to travel into the desert? You need to go on one trip to make a stash of fuel along the way that you'll use on your final expedition. With space travel that's (almost) not possible. You'll have to take everything along in one go.

Now to go to the moon is again an order of magnitude more difficult. Getting back doubles the difficulty again!

Getting to another planet is similarly difficult as getting to the moon and back. Getting back from another planet is very difficult indeed.