I’ve also commented (not in the original thread, can’t remember where) that the hard drive is a very much cherry picked analogy. Substitute it with DRAM and you get the opposite result: information-theoretic “death” within minutes of power loss at room temperature, a few weeks or months at most at liquid nitrogen temperature.
Of course the human brain is neither a DRAM nor a hard drive. Rather than arguing from analogies I think it’s better to listen to actual domain experts: neurobiologists and cryobiologists.
Yep. I put up this hypothetical before: Drop an iPhone into liquid nitrogen, slice it up very thin. Now recover the icons for the first three entries in the address book.
At least in this case we would expect it to be possible for someone with enough money and time, with today’s technology. You should be able to recover the contents of the hard drive.
The domain-expert (Gutmann) says otherwise. At this stage, it’d really take an example of data recovery in practice, not just in “you can’t prove I’m wrong!” hypothetical.
(I’m assuming you don’t have an example to hand of having recovered data yourself in this manner.)
I read Gutmann as talking about what you should expect, security for the real world. I don’t see where they talk about someone willing to put in an unrealistically huge amount of effort. But maybe I missed that? Could you point me that way?
It is true that I can’t philosophically prove that arbitrary hypothetical technology that would achieve something currently nigh-equivalent to magic cannot possibly exist, nor can I philosophically prove the data isn’t there any more, yes. I can say there is no evidence for either, and expertise and evidence against both, and that “but you can’t prove it isn’t true!” isn’t a very good argument.
I’ve also commented (not in the original thread, can’t remember where) that the hard drive is a very much cherry picked analogy. Substitute it with DRAM and you get the opposite result: information-theoretic “death” within minutes of power loss at room temperature, a few weeks or months at most at liquid nitrogen temperature.
Of course the human brain is neither a DRAM nor a hard drive. Rather than arguing from analogies I think it’s better to listen to actual domain experts: neurobiologists and cryobiologists.
Yep. I put up this hypothetical before: Drop an iPhone into liquid nitrogen, slice it up very thin. Now recover the icons for the first three entries in the address book.
At least in this case we would expect it to be possible for someone with enough money and time, with today’s technology. You should be able to recover the contents of the hard drive.
The domain-expert (Gutmann) says otherwise. At this stage, it’d really take an example of data recovery in practice, not just in “you can’t prove I’m wrong!” hypothetical.
(I’m assuming you don’t have an example to hand of having recovered data yourself in this manner.)
I read Gutmann as talking about what you should expect, security for the real world. I don’t see where they talk about someone willing to put in an unrealistically huge amount of effort. But maybe I missed that? Could you point me that way?
It is true that I can’t philosophically prove that arbitrary hypothetical technology that would achieve something currently nigh-equivalent to magic cannot possibly exist, nor can I philosophically prove the data isn’t there any more, yes. I can say there is no evidence for either, and expertise and evidence against both, and that “but you can’t prove it isn’t true!” isn’t a very good argument.