Decayfmt – a file format that corrupts itself a little every time you open it

Discussion (8 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jasonpeacock•about 1 hour ago

Reminds me of Tie::Hash::Cannabinol:

  Tie::Hash::Cannabinol is a completely useless demonstration of how to use Tie::StdHash to 
  pervert the behaviour of Perl hashes. Once a hash has been tied to Tie::Hash::Cannabinol, 
  there is a 25% chance that it will forget anything that you tell it immediately and a 
  further 25% chance that it won't be able to retrieve any information you ask it for. Any 
  information that it does return will be pulled at random from its keys.
  
  Oh, and the return value from exists isn't to be trusted either :)

[1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Tie::Hash::Cannabinol

jolmg•about 1 hour ago

> This is a social contract

What's the other side of the contract? Why would a reader oblige to corrupt?

angeldimitrov94•about 2 hours ago

Seems like there is no mechanism to allow non-corrupting reads from authorized processes? Begs the question then of what the point of this is. Pure novelty, or truly something that could be used in practice?

m3047•about 1 hour ago

You might look into (Norbert) Weiner functions.

dang•about 2 hours ago

Kind of like how human memory works, if I understand correctly.

NDlurker•about 2 hours ago

Should have patented it and licensed it to Snap

m3kw9•about 2 hours ago

I thought something like this should be part of the file system to make it even more laborious to by pass

dylan604•16 minutes ago

A company I was at had a disk array that would do something like this. It wasn't a documented feature mind you. During writes, it would randomly zero out data within a file. So at least it didn't get progressively worse, but it was a bear to isolate. These were large media files so a quick look at the head/middle/tail could easily miss the problem areas.

M95D•about 1 hour ago

Would you please stop inventing more ways to enshittify the world?

Decayfmt – a file format that corrupts itself a little every time you open it

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Discussion (8 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews