Life in a Terabyte
My Life in a Terabyte: The Register
Article examines the memex and research at Microsoft on MyLifeBits Project which is system for storing everything. Extrapolating storage growth, this will be possible. Email, pictures, audio and even complete motion video of your life. Think of the video droids in "The Artificial Kid" and that seems to be where we are heading for permanent storage. Question is how will privacy be handled? Can your words be played back under court order? Will your data be subpoenaed? What happens to the Fifth Amendment:
nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himselfand the maxim ''nemo tenetur seipsum accusare,'' that ''no man is bound to accuse himself.'' Food for thought. Will data loss still occur? The Physical device will always be a weak link, but redundancy through RAID, distributed content should make this less likely.
The security implications for such a device are interesting - it will never forget anything and people will want to protect it carefully. Its loss would be a complete disaster. Maybe the best place to keep it would be in a secure server farm rather than on the desktop or laptop, as Microsoft intend.
Update there is a DARPA grant that is in this vein:
According to Lifelog | Metafilter:
LifeLog is interested in three major data categories: physical data, transactional data, and context or media data. “Anywhere/anytime” capture of physical data might be provided by hardware worn by the LifeLog user. Visual, aural, and possibly even haptic sensors capture what the user sees, hears, and feels. GPS, digital compass, and inertial sensors capture the user’s orientation and movements. Biomedical sensors capture the user’s physical state. LifeLog also captures the user’s computer-based interactions and transactions throughout the day from email, calendar, instant messaging, web-based transactions, as well as other common computer applications, and stores the data (or, in some cases, pointers to the data) in appropriate formats. Voice transactions can be captured through recording of telephone calls and voice mail, with the called and calling numbers as metadata. FAX and hardcopy written material (such as postal mail) can be scanned. Finally, LifeLog also captures (or at least captures pointers to) the tremendous amounts of context data the user is exposed to every day from diverse media sources, including broadcast television and radio, hardcopy newspapers, magazines, books and other documents, and softcopy electronic books, web sites, and database access.
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