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Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need [video]

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266 points by davidfactorial 4 years ago · 42 comments (41 loaded)

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GuestHNUser 4 years ago

Tom7 is brilliant for anyone that hasn't seen him before. His Reverse Emulation video (https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0) and Weird Chess Algorithms (https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA) are a must watch. His dead pan delivery coupled with the ridiculous amount of effort he puts into things that don't _really_ matter is honestly inspiring.

mixmix 4 years ago

Can anyone recommend other hidden gems like Tom's channel? I've been following him for years and still have not seen a merrier hacker. George Hotz's livestreams (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzFUMGbVxlQs5s-LNAyKgcq5S...) were as good perhaps, but the format is quite different, and he doesn't do them anymore.

geocrasher 4 years ago

I haven't finished the video just yet, but so far what he's describing is strange, weird, fanciful versions of Delay Line memory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

  • anyfoo 4 years ago

    Same thought, and also I remember hearing about the idea to misuse buffer memory in routers as storage somewhere.

    I always get a kick of delay line memory. The Mercury memory also mentioned on the Wikipedia page, which I've seen in person (but sadly not in operation) at the Computer History Museum, is literally sound waves in liquid metal. How much cooler than that can memory get...

    Though the nearby (and at their time quite popular) "storage tubes" that were effectively CRT screens with very long image persistence are cool, too, and one of the fewer dynamic storage technologies where you can see the individual bits. The actual ones, not just a representation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube

gotaquestion 4 years ago

When I think of "hack", these are what I have in mind. Completely bending something to a purpose never intended. Utterly bonkers. But the fact that he offers multiple concepts, implements them, and documents them in an ELI5YE (explain like i'm a 5th year engineer) is a true sign of genius.

avidiax 4 years ago

Why limit ourselves to ping, when all of DNS is available for exploitation.

If we are willing to run an authoritative DNS server, we can simply find open DNS resolvers, then query TXT records from our own domain, with a suitably near-infinite TTL. It's free real estate^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H storage.

Perhaps that's not hard enough for harder drives. We can do the same thing, except use NX records from an arbitrary domain as the storage medium. We can query e.g. a01234-somedatahere.example.com, which will produce an NX record in the resolving DNS server. We can later "read" this data by issuing the same query and seeing that the TTL is not the original NX TTL of example.com. This is a destructive read process, so we will need to immediately write whatever we read, but suitably altered to avoid a collision, e.g. a01235-somedatahere.example.com.

  • anyfoo 4 years ago

    Great idea, and pretty much exactly how DNS tunnels work (only there you want the TTL to avoid caching--through an explicit 0 TTL or changing names--because you want to exchange every packet only once except for retransmits).

    However, I'm not sure it's fair to talk about "limiting ourselves to ping", as I'd argue that there are vastly more generic hosts replying to ICMP echo than there are open DNS resolvers (which I know includes all openly available nameservers). I believe the video also has shown that the number of pingable hosts pretty much approaches the number of hosts with an external IPv4 in the first place, at least the map he's shown looked lighter than dark to me.

drpixie 4 years ago

I had a large collection of hard drives that had caused uncountable grief, we would relieve the stress by abusing the drives. Unfortunately they have long since been disposed of, but the collection included:

* subject drive to 100t press (it got thinner!)

* immerse drive in acid (little change) or base (drive dissolves!)

* subject drive to industrial guillotine

* warm drive with oxy torch

* drop from 300 ft tower (little change)

and so on. All good fun.

  • shreddit 4 years ago

    I always wondered how "thin provisioning" works behind the scenes. You learn something new every day.

chrischen 4 years ago

That was some twist ending.

rcxdude 4 years ago

There's some prior art for the ping-based storage: https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs , but the tetris storage is amazing.

wodenokoto 4 years ago

The effort put into this video I’ve only seen matched by on YouTube by “Stuff Made Here”

While I can’t say I understand everything that’s going on, I am simply amazed by the creators talent and knowledge.

  • sellyme 4 years ago

    > The effort put into this video I’ve only seen matched by on YouTube by “Stuff Made Here”

    Captain Disillusion is definitely up there. His Flight of the Navigator video is one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen on the internet.

    • wodenokoto 4 years ago

      That’s true. The way he blends in special effects just looks so seamless that you often forget that he basically recreated the video in blender in order to rotate and split it.

AstroNoise58 4 years ago

The escape velocity on the surface of the Earth is approx. 11.2 km/s, not 11000 km/s. Factor of 1000x error. But nice video :)

  • mixmix 4 years ago

    Tom's really mastered his skill of casual misleading, he adds these "wait, what?" moments to every video. A more notorious example will be his explanation of how optical reflection works, check out his "30 Weird Chess Algorithms" (https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA) around 10:20.

    Edit: spelling.

Aloha 4 years ago

Its.. a delay line?

This is a weird way of implementing one, but it's using multiple ICMP queries, each acting as their own delay line.

goldenkey 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

ramtatatam 4 years ago

This video is hilarious, he has got such great sense of humor, I will be chuckling for a week... "harder drive"

And also infect all my peers.

mooman219 4 years ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30973871

rhn_mk1 4 years ago

Could anyone provide a text summary?

  • iicc 4 years ago

    http://tom7.org/papers/murphy2022harder.pdf

    >6 Conclusion

    >In this paper, we decided that sometimes it’s more fun to do things the hard way, and then did so. Using several different techniques and some needless digressions, we created block devices that could support small filesystems, which then could host a fitting file. Each filesystem was bad when considered as a regular hard drive, but good when considered as a Harder Drive. We also compared these drives to the most popular cryptocurrency. The idea was to make the point that cryptocurrency is so egregiously bad that it resembles a “SIGBOVIK joke gone wrong” more than something one would make on purpose. This part may not have been as fun.

RichardHeart 4 years ago

You need not waste electricity to maintain a consensus network. For those who made it to the end.

  • recursive 4 years ago

    However, it just so happens that all the most successful ones do.

  • UncleMeat 4 years ago

    BTC spends a lot of electricity to write data. Writing is a pretty key component of a hard drive or a harder drive.

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