Why The Appearance Of A One Terabyte microSD Card Means The War On Unauthorized Music Downloads Is (Almost) Over

from the war-on-video-downloads-over-after-that dept

Moore's Law is well known. But many people think it's about how chip processing power keeps increasing. It's actually about the number and/or density of components on silicon. As such, it applies just as much to memory storage products as to processor chips. It's why you can now buy a one terabyte microSD card for $449.99. Never mind the price: although it's steep, it will inevitably tumble in the next few years, just as happened with lower-capacity microSD cards. What's much more important is what you can store with one terabyte on a tiny, tiny card. Mashable has done the calculations:

About 1,000,000 e-books (at an average size of 1MB per e-book)

About 200,000 photos (12-megapixel iPhone XS Live Photos at an average size of 5MB) or 500,000 photos (12-megapixel iPhone XS photos at an average size of 2MB)

About 250,000 iTunes songs (at an average size of 4MB for an average 4-minute tune)

About 222 Full HD movies from iTunes (at an average of 4.5GB per movie)

Perhaps the most interesting one there is the music. Spotify says it has over 50 million tracks on its service. That means a 256 terabyte microSD could probably hold every track on Spotify, and thus most of the recorded music that is generally available in a digital form. Even with today's one terabyte card, you can probably store the complete catalog of songs in a particular style or genre, which is what many people will be most interested in.

In any case, assuming Moore's Law continues to hold, it will soon be possible to buy a 256 terabyte microSD card. Yes, it will be pricey to begin with, but progressively cheaper. At that point, moves to stop unauthorized sharing of music online will be even more pointless than they are now. People won't need to download lots of stuff from dodgy sites any more; they'll just find a friend who has a 256 terabyte microSD card loaded up with all recorded music, and make a copy. After that, they just need to update the parts that interest them -- or find someone with a more recent complete collection.

The same will happen to videos, although that's a little way off, since something like a 256 petabyte microSD card will be needed to hold every film that has been digitized. But it too will come, just as the milestone one terabyte capacity has finally arrived, however improbable that might have seemed a few years ago.

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Filed Under: copyright, piracy, storage

Massachusetts Lawmaker Wants To Make It A Felony To Have Secret Compartments In Your Car

from the big-problems,-small-minds dept

A Massachusetts lawmaker is looking to give law enforcement another way to bust people and seize vehicles. Modify a vehicle you own in a certain way and you can expect to never see that vehicle again.

Blame it on the war on drugs and pressure from law enforcement lobbying. Stephan Hay, a Democrat state representative for Fitchburg, has introduced a bill that would criminalize operating a vehicle with a hidden compartment designed for the purpose of secretly transporting drugs and related contraband, equipment, currency, or weapons.

The bill, H.1266, separately criminalizes the process of altering a vehicle with the intent of creating such hidden compartments. In each case the bill calls for a two-year mandatory minimum sentence, five years for subsequent offenses. The bill also allows police to seize the modified vehicle.

Notably, the bill wouldn't limit "secret compartment" busts to those containing contraband. The presence of an aftermarket "concealed storage space" is enough to trigger an arrest and seizure. The state would have to prove there was intent to use the compartment to store contraband, but the wording in the bill [PDF] flips the burden of proof when it comes to the vehicle itself.

Proof that a conveyance contains a hidden compartment as defined in this section shall be prima facie evidence that the conveyance was used intended for use in and for the business of unlawfully manufacturing, dispensing, or distributing controlled substances.

As Reason's Scott Shackford points out, Massachusetts already has the worst forfeiture laws in the nation. This built-in presumption of guilt only makes this worse. Defendants will start out in the hole, asked to prove a negative simply to have a small shot at recovering their seized vehicle. Unknowingly purchase someone's drug-running vehicle? It's as good as gone if the police discover any secret compartments. Seeing as criminal charges would result in something more aligned with due process, it will come as zero surprise if the law is used to seize vehicles but leave prima facie "drug traffickers" otherwise unharmed.

Filed Under: cars, compartments, massachusetts, privacy, stephen hay, storage

DailyDirt: Storing Digital Bits In More Ways

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

• Storing digital information in minerals could create memory technology that's durable for a million years. However, the problem probably won't be how long the information remains un-corrupted -- but how long it'll be before the tech is obsolete and no one can retrieve their ancient file formats. Storing information for hundreds or thousands of years can be done, but it's also difficult to ensure the technology to read it will still exist. [url]
• 3D Xpoint is a new kind of non-volatile memory from Intel and Micron that claims to be 1,000 times faster than current flash drives and solid state drives. It's also 10 times denser than conventional memory and is expected to be commercially available in 2016. [url]
• Photonic memory chips sound like the future, and some researchers have even created a non-volatile kind of memory using phase change materials. Using light instead of electrons as the basis for computing devices isn't quite ready yet, but creating more and more components that could form a completely optical computer could jumpstart a different kind of Moore's law. [url]

Filed Under: archive, backup, data, media, memory, non-volatile memory, photonic memory, storage
Companies: ibm, intel, micron

DailyDirt: Keeping Information For A Really, Really, Really Long Time

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

• A single gram of DNA can store up to 455 exabytes of data, and roughly four grams of DNA could store all of the world's collected information. It's not cheap to store arbitrary data on DNA yet, but the costs are coming down. [url]
• Stored data on DNA encased in glass at freezing temperatures could survive for a couple million years. The DNA of a woolly mammoth in Siberia was preserved for 40,000 in a tundra, so it's not unthinkable that we might want to keep a few backups of our data on ice. [url]
• Making large DNA crystals with precisely-controlled structures is something that can be done with a "DNA-brick self-assembly" method. Being able to do this could help fabricate all kinds of nanoscale designs and create a manufacturing process for complex, artificial DNA structures. [url]

Filed Under: archive, backup, data, dna, nanotechnology, self-assembly, storage

NSA Decides It Wants To Hold Metadata Indefinitely, Asks FISA Court To Reverse Decision Telling It To Destroy Records

from the we-have-all-the-data,-now-we-have-all-the-time dept

A house set against itself cannot stand gets a win no matter who's dealing the cards. As was noted earlier, the NSA's metadata is currently integral to a series of lawsuits against the government. This fact prompted the DOJ to ask the FISA court to bend the minimization rules and extend the holding period from five years to "whenever."

This was shot down by FISC judge Reggie Walton, who pointed out that the government's argument was faulty on multiple levels. First of all, changing the stipulations of the minimization procedures put the entire metadata collection on shaky constitutional ground, seeing as it's almost entirely composed of data on American citizens not currently the subject of NSA investigations. Secondly, the DOJ cited evidence preservation statutes that applied solely to private corporations, something that clearly doesn't transfer directly to a government database composed of US citizens' "business records."

On March 10th, a contradictory decision was handed down by US District Court judge Jeffrey Wright, who declared the NSA was required to hold onto metadata relevant to ongoing lawsuits. This set up an interesting situation for the NSA, which would now have to decide whether it would rather have data with no expiration date or destroyed data that would never possibly appear in court.

The NSA has now shown its hand. In a motion filed Wednesday, the agency asked the FISA court to reverse its decision on destroying the held metadata. The filing refers to the temporary restraining order entered by Judge Jeffrey Wright which stipulates that the agency must hold onto the data until the cases are resolved. The NSA notes that it now is subject to two contradictory notices and is asking the FISA court to honor the other court's decision.

I'm not exactly sure how the FISA court will respond to this. Walton made it pretty clear that he felt the government's arguments were weak and jeopardized the minimal privacy protections surrounding the bulk records collections. Not only that, but presumably the FISA court's authority supersedes a district court, considering it is the entity charged with directly supervising the collection and handling of the NSA's bulk collections.

Well, no sooner had the ink dried on this post than FISC judge Reggie Walton delivered an opinion agreeing with the District Court's order and will allow the NSA to retain the metadata associated with the two cases listed in Judge Jeffrey Wright's order. Walton's decision to reverse the FISC's opinion hinges on these two specific cases, Jewel v. NSA and First Unitarian Church v. NSA. As he notes, the DOJ's request to hold the data was based on common law rules normally applied to retention of corporate data in civil cases, something entirely unrelated to bulk surveillance metadata. Addiitonally, he points out that none of the plaintiffs in the cases the DOJ listed had requested the data be retained.

The Court concluded that any interests the civil plaintiffs might assert in preserving all of the BR metadata was "unsubstantiated" on that record. The Court further observed that no District Court or Circuit Court of Appeals has entered a preservation order applicable to the BR metadata in question in any of the civil matters cited in the motion. Further, there is no indication that any of the plaintiffs have sought discovery of this information or made any effort to have it preserved, despite it being a matter of public record that BR metadata is routinely destroyed after five years.

Filed Under: bulk collection, doj, fisa court, fisc, metadata, minimization, nsa, storage

MPAA 'Settles' Another 'Victory' Against Hotfile For $80 Million That No Artists Will Ever See

from the chalk-another-one-up dept

Filed Under: cloud computing, cyberlocker, storage
Companies: hotfile, mpaa

DailyDirt: The Future Of Storage

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

• Printing at about 100,000 dots per inch in full color has been achieved by researchers at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. As a proof of principle, a test image of Lenna was formed on a silicon wafer covered with a nanoscale metal coating. [url]
• Amazon is starting to offer archival storage for just $0.01 per gigabyte per month. This Glacier storage service is aimed at replacing old tape archives and geographically distinct facilities, but retrieving the data isn't so convenient: data retrieval requests can take hours (hence the name Glacier) and there's also a retrieval fee after you've accessed more than 5% of your data vault in a month. [url]
• Geneticists in Boston have stored a 5.27-megabit book (containing 53,246 words, 11 JPG image files and a JavaScript program) on DNA. This is the highest density of non-biological data ever encoded by DNA, and a gram of material could store 455 exabytes of data. [url]

Filed Under: archive, data, dna, exabyte, gigabyte, nanoscale, printing, storage
Companies: amazon

DailyDirt: In The Year 2525...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

• Digitally-stored information about nuclear waste needs to be accessible many thousands of years from now. Engraving the info on sapphire discs with platinum is just one proposed solution that could work for future archaeologists -- but in what language should it be written? [url]
• If you thought your burned CDs/DVDs lasted forever, think again. But if you still want to store your data on plastic discs, there's a company (Millenniata) that sells an optical disc engraving technology for writing CDs/DVDs that work with standard CD/DVD readers -- and that claims to last for about 1,000 years (or at least hundreds of years). [url]
• Neanderthals were making cave paintings over 40,800 years ago in Spain. How much of our art will survive the next 40,000 years? [url]

Filed Under: archaeologists, archive, data, neanderthal, storage
Companies: millenniata

Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%

from the how-not-to-win-friends dept

Techflaws alerts us to an announcement by ZPÜ, the organization responsible for setting the levy on storage media in Germany, that fees will rise rather significantly (German original). For a USB stick with a capacity greater than 4 Gbytes, the tax would increase from 8 eurocents (about 10 cents) to 1.56 euros (about $1.93), a rise of 1850%; for a memory card bigger than 4 Gbytes, the fee would go up from 8 eurocents to 1.95 euros (about $2.42), an increase of 2338%.

No justification for such a huge jump was offered, but since one of the constituent members of ZPÜ is the German music collection society GEMA, which seems to have an unlimited sense of entitlement when it comes to demanding money from the public, that's hardly a surprise.

In particular, no rationale is given for including memory cards, which are used almost exclusively in cameras to record content produced by end-users -- so the idea that the levy is somehow justified as a way of compensating creators for revenue supposedly "lost" by piracy is manifestly absurd.

Basically, this outdated and insulting approach treats all Germans using digital storage as if they were pirates. Of course, arbitrarily imposing 2000% tax hikes on storage is probably the quickest way to turn them into something much more dangerous to GEMA and its friends: ardent supporters of the German Pirate Party....

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Filed Under: germany, pirate party, storage, tariff, usb
Companies: gema