Silence on the Wire

Making Parasitic Storage Feasible

In 2003, Wojciech Purczynski and I coauthored a paper called “Juggling with Packets: Parasitic Data Storage.” We took the concept of parasitic storage a bit further and considered a number of methods that could be used to dramatically extend the Internet’s storage capacity, while conserving the bandwidth needed to sustain the information. Our research focused on several other ways to store data on remote systems and classified them based on the properties of the storage medium (its visibility, volatility, and reliability). We also included a detailed discussion of the hypothetical storage capacities for each of the techniques.

The paper was quite short and—I hope—refreshing and humorous, and it’s included here. ...