What if mass storage were free? – George Copeland (1980) [pdf]

Re:What if mass storage were free? – George Copeland (1980) ... by roca on Friday December 01, 2023 @07:56PM (#38494691)

One thing the "no deletion" argument misses is that sometimes you have to delete data for policy reasons. At least two cases are important:

* Users ask you to delete their data. If you don't, and they find out you didn't, you have a problem.

* Legal action may require you to delete data. (E.g. you may find that someone uploaded child pornography to your system.)

This is actually a huge problem for companies like Google (where I work). When you have enormous volumes of highly reliable and durable (i.e. replicated) storage, it's actually really hard to make sure you can delete all copies of specific data reliably and quickly.

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Re:What if mass storage were free? – George Copeland (1980) ... by deobald on Friday December 01, 2023 @09:10PM (#38495180)

While acknowledging you're only addressing the Copeland paper (and not Endatabas, where the OP found it), here's the Endatabas solution to this problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDHGjUMqPvI&t=129s

Apologies for the hijack. :)

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Re:What if mass storage were free? – George Copeland (1980) ... by Dylan16807 on Saturday December 02, 2023 @06:11PM (#38503159)

> here's the Endatabas solution to this problem:

Where?

The narrator says "Endb supports ERASE. Mustard is gone." and then moves on to another topic entirely.

This is right after they said the data was immutable.

What does ERASE actually do? Does it wipe the old bytes? Does it add a tombstone that could be bypassed?

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