Provided that the information one wants to keep safe is sensitive and important long term, there are two main issues with printing (either text, QRCode, or anything):
* (paranoia) can you trust your printer not to leak the secret? (either in local memory, or to send it to its cloud mother-ship?) you can encrypt your information and print that, but then you are back to square one: where do you backup the password;
* and most importantly, long term resilience: given that with normal printers you can only print on soft materials (like paper, or perhaps plastic), they won't last floods, fire, and other unlikely events; (even if one laser etches some information on a steel sheet, I don't know how resistant to abrasions it is;)
However, by actually drilling holes into a metal sheet, the only way to permanently make the data irrecoverable, is to destroy the object completely.
For point 1 I recall the creator of Age, Filippo Valsorda suggesting something similar:
>The .age-recipients files also include the public key for an offline disaster recovery key. I generated the key with age-keygen, encrypted it with age -p, printed the ciphertext as a QR code, and wrote the random passphrase in pen. This is a bit convoluted, but I don’t trust printers. All this was done in a tmpfs, so nothing reached storage. Only had to do this once, and have been using that key as the anchor for all my disaster recovery data.
https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/passage/
The real start is on the next pages which goes into _real_ deep intro for Diodes and transistors. I think it was just a matter of giving an intro but overseeing that people don't know what these symbols mean.
For me, an electronics engineer by degree (not by trade), it was so basic I could see the author forgetting this.
I wonder how popular this tag must be/have been to be able to find someone that had already dissolved/sandpapered it? Can't wait for the follow-up on this, turn that e-waste into something usable!
Videos are really the thing where you just can't get around large formats. There's only so much you can compress, and even then if there is a lot of movement or color change even compressing won't do much.
"You can't compress noise." Well, humans can't tell the difference between two snippets of white noise.
It'll be fun. Remember jbig? (can't find the source, but iirc "most of what we're sending is text, so our fax can detect identical characters and reuse them! genius! [ten years and several bonuses later] um boss, our fax swapped a few ... 'identical' ... digits in someone's legal documents, so you have to appear in court now. also their entire scanned document archive is potentially corrupted and they may want damages")
I guess the 'no photos on the internet' people will have the last laugh; they won't be the ones seen criming in the background of someone else's blurry holiday photo.
> "You can't compress noise." Well, humans can't tell the difference between two snippets of white noise.
new codecs (decoders?) have something called Film Grain Synthesis. i think you have to encode the content before this is applied at the source?
i'm not sure this actually madebit into the AV1 standard or encoders yet.
tried encoding Hurt Locker a few years ago and the film grain added to it really put the hurt on x264/handbrake. the final file size was nearly as big as the original content. back then the same amount of cpu burning could have probably found a full btc :D
