Secure Data Storage... On Your Fingernails

opticsorg writes "Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced."

But what if

[LrdZombie]

You bite your fingernails?

Breaking a nail

[Cyphertube]

Damn it! I broke a nail. There went my passwords!

I love how they reported the results in megabits. So is that 5000000 bits? Whee! I usually do my data in bytes.... Divide by 8, no?

Interesting Consequences

[DanielMarkham]

Things to think about:
Girls break a nail, loose last month's vacation pictures!
Would you back up some of your nails on others? Perhaps you could use your toenails as "offline storage"
Sounds like fingernail polish would "erase" the storage. So then could you write to them again? Are nails only WORMs?
What would the readers look like? Would you stick your hand inside your computer? Gee. Hope there isn't any moisture in there.

Long Distance Tax Overturned. You May Be Due a Refund. But Good Luck Getting It. [whattofix.com]

Great, my data lasts until I work on my car

[wowbagger]

Great, so my data lasts until I work on something that chews up my hands.

Will this survive being GoJo'ed after I change my oil? Or being scraped up working in the yard?

What will the bit error rate be after I've painted the fence and scrubbed the paint off my hands?

So now I'll have to wear gloves anytime I do anything remotely physical? Better hope I don't break down and don't have my gloves with me.

Re:But what if

[Anonymous Coward]

you need .par files on your toe nails

Practical?

[Wookie Monster]

How practical is this? Since this is optical technology, wouldn't a scratch or dirt on my nail interfere with retrieval? Then there's fingernail polish.

Re:But what if

[Anonymous Luddite]

>> You bite your fingernails?

Obviously, your data is screwed.

If there were a pressing need to store data physically on something the size of my thumbnail, why not store it on - something the size of my thumbnail? I mean you could burn it on the back of a watch, or jewellry. You could even set it up so the surface you're writing to is better protected than my thumbnail and easily replaceable.

Just because we can do something doesn't make it a good idea. I'll keep my usb thumb drive, thanks.

Re:But what if you chew your nails?

[Krenath]

Simple:

Data you wrote there six months ago is destroyed. Data wrote more recently remains unaffected.

I'd think that if you were interested in any kind of long-term storage, the parts of the fingernail that were written to would be close to the nail bed.

Unless you chew your fingers down to the first knuckle, thereby eliminating all traces of fingernail, biting your fingernails shouldn't affect anything recent.

Now, for women, colored nail polish is probably the greatest threat. And manicures are probably number two, what with the sanding and polishing of the nail surface. But depending on the depth the data is written, maybe it would survive a manicure...