Paper storage story was a hoax

A NEWS STORY which claimed a Kerala student had developed a technique for portable data whereby the data can be stored on ordinary paper has been dismissed as a hoax.

The article claimed that Sainul Abideen, who has just finished his MCA at Muslim Educational Society Engineering College, had developed a 'rainbow technology' which uses used geometric shapes to stuff huge amounts of data onto an A4.

The story looked plausible and there is even a picture of Abideen showing off his invention. But according to Ars Technica, the story is a hoax. Its hacks worked out that starting with a scanner on a maximum resolution of 1,200 dots per inch, it would be only possible to get 134 million dots on a sheet of standard 8.5" by 11" paper. Even if the scanner was good enough to pick up the colour of the dot the maximum that could be stored on a single sheet would be 100MB.

Ars says that no amount of circles and triangles could be better than existing compression algorithms and even they could only increase the amount stored on a piece of paper by three times. Well away from the Gigabytes that Abideen claimed. µ

L'INQ
Arse