450 GB on a paper, the researcher speaks up..

Finally, 2 weeks after stirring the IT world with the claim of storing over 450 GB of data in a sheet if paper with colored dots, Sainul speaks up here. He posted a comment with a link to his press release. Its interesting to read he says "Rainbow Storage is not a method to store data on paper but it is a group of techniques to represent data in the form of colour, colour groups and some symbols."
He feels that people have mixed up the newspaper article.

"Many technical groups are discussing about this and they are wasting their valuable time. I think they are mixing my two statements.

1) We can store data even on an ordinary paper

2) We can achieve huge density by using rainbow storage"

He also says it was "the concept of disposable storage.", so there is no prototype yet.

The problem starts now, when he says "The picture will be highly compressed ( Not in magical ) and it can be represented in any color representable medium"
The question many people asked in this blog and else where in Digg is, if you have a binary data and that binary data is of a picture it makes sense to compress that picture almost lossless, because you are compressing the binary data.. But when the picture itself is the data, and each dot actually represent as Mr. Sainul claims 8 bits, how is he going to compress that again? what format will that data be in? as picture? or binary!!!?

Anyway I think there are many experts out in the field who knows better than me, but I am still skeptical when he says he is going to release a product for consumers by 2008!

Just in case Mr. Sainuls page gets dugged, I am quoting his entire press release below

"There are some rumors spreading around the world about my work, Rainbow Storage. �We can store 100s of GBs of data in a sheet of ordinary paper� is a great misunderstanding and I do believe that it is impossible with existing technologies. Many technical groups are discussing about this and they are wasting their valuable time. I think they are mixing my two statements.

1) We can store data even on an ordinary paper

2) We can achieve huge density by using rainbow storage

I used an ordinary sheet of paper to demonstrate this work, I think that�s why the misunderstanding.

Actually Rainbow Storage is not a method to store data on paper but it is a group of techniques to represent data in the form of colour, colour groups and some symbols. We can use any colour representable media as storage medium including paper and plastic sheets. Paper and ink is not the only way to represent colour, there are other efficient methods available now and many kind of researches are going on in different parts of the world .

Definitely, Ordinary sheet of paper with normal printer and scanner will give poor density, but it can be used for some specific purposes. (Acid paper with special ink can last to decades and fading problem can be solved considerably by using some techniques in Rainbow Storage). It put forward the concept of disposable storage. We can create many useful products like digital catalogue for commercial products.

I prepared Rainbow Storage as my academic seminar paper and it was a study to explore data representation capability of colors. Most of the living organisms are getting huge amount of data through vision. Our eyes can only understand colours and colours only. But our brain is doing many complex operations (like distance calculation of objects by using images from two eyes) by using this colors. We can identify distance of two objects (which one is closer) in different environments (eg : Brightness difference). So the visible light (colors) contains a huge amount of data.

Instead of using 0s and 1s here we are using color dots. Each color dot can represent minimum 8 bits (1 byte). If we are using some powerfull mode of representation (forget about ink and paper) we can represent more data on a single spot. By using some groups and symbols , we can also increase the density in to some extent.

Please mail me your suggestions and queries to rainbowsainu@yahoo.com. Kindly give me time to reply because 100s of mails and enquiries are getting daily. So I am unable to reply them all.

If anyone interested in my projects and interested to work with me (Both technical and financial), please mail me to sainuworks@yahoo.com

In Rainbow Storage, we are converting digital data (any format) into somo clors, color combinations, and some symbols known as rainbow format. Hence a rainbow Picture will be generated. The picture will be highly compressed ( Not in magical ) and it can be represented in any color representable medium. We can use the medium as a secondary storage device. The density will be according to the medium, read and write methods using. For retrieving the contents from the medium, readers capture picture and generate data from the color combinations. Although environmental light differences and colour shading is a problem, it can be overcomes up to a certain limit by using efficient mapping functions. Each rainbow picture contains a header, body, footer, parity, Rainbow boundary mapper etc. Header contains the measurement of the rainbow picture. the algorithm (not basic) which is being used etc. It also contains an efficiently designed error checking mechanism.

By using Rainboe Storage, we can develop many kind of products. It Includes

1) Disposable storage

2) RVD

3) Rainbow cards

4) Datacenters

Rainbow storage can be used to achieve Disposable storage. We can store any kind of data in any kind of color representable media. It can be used as one time storage. We can use bio degradable materials here (because it is not intented for long time). These category of products can be used for Distribution of files, documents, etc. Here we can use even printers, scanners, cameras etc as input and output devices. I am planning to release two useful products in this category by the middle of 2008.

RVD (Rainbow Versatile Disk) is another product that can be developed by using Rainbow Storage. We need to develop specific drives for reading and writing. It can hold huge amount of data and it will be very cheap enough to reduce storage price dramatically. The technique Vertical lining is used in RVD to ensure high density. Storage capacity will vary according to the nature of mediums used.

Rainbow cards can be constructed as a cheap secondary storage medium for PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) and other small digital devices. It can be constructed in many standards and sizes. The size can be vary from visiting card size to size of a SIM card. Specific readers need to be attached with such devices.

Datacenters are the static storage servers that can hold Peta Bytes of data. It will be a sequential access storage system that can be used for secondary storage of data. We can construct a datacentre with cost around 35 lakhs.

My new project is named as Project Xpressa. It is a software/Embudded package for regional languages. By using this, news papers, stories, novels etc can be made audible in its own style. An importance of this is that the newspapers and novels and other stuffs which are available in the Internet can be enjoyed through a mobile phone. This project is designed in such a way that any person who has a GPRS connection (internet access) on his mobile phone can enjoy stuffs which are available in the Internet.

Myself, I had just finished my MCA (Mastar of Computer Application) from MES Engineering college, Kuttippuram , Kerala, India. I am a native of Karingappara, near by Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala, Kerala, India. Now working with some projects and trying to setup a software company. "

Scam of Indian student developing technology to store 450 GB of data on a sheet of paper

Update:
Mr. Sainul speaks up story here
Today I saw for the second time story coming up in Digg about this Indian student who developed and demonstrated a technology to store 450 GB of data on a sheet of paper. This story was first reported by Arab News and later other media outlets started quoting them.
This shows how technically illiterate the news reporters are.. The idea of storing something in paper is good, but trusting someone blindly when they say they are showing a movie from a piece of paper is absolutely naive.
For people who still believes such stories, please try to find answers for these fundamental questions.

• How did he make his paper disk?, though the reporter missed to ask this question directly, it seems he used some sort of printer (laser or inkjet). So if we take the best printer available and try to print a digital photo with such a high resolution so that its size is 450 GB, will you be able to print that with out loosing its resolution?
• Even if a printer is able print at that high resolution, the paper is made of fibre which has uneven surface, think about your CD or DVD being rough like paper, will the drives read it. When you want to store such a huge amount of data, even micron level of difference do matter a lot.
• Some people where suggesting by using different colours one can squeeze in more data, but what about error tolerance then? This guy is questioning the fundamental reason why digital / binary technology became popular, its because its either 0 or 1 , so its mostly fool proof, we could have used different voltages and instead of binary, use 0 1 2 3 4, but then it will not be fool proof.
• This guy is claiming he used circles and triangles to store data, so but even for triangle he has to use 3 co-ordinates , that itself utilized 3 bits, so how is he saving space?
  
• Barcode companies did their maximum when they tried to develop 2 D barcodes and the maximum they could get was around 2000 bytes of data!!
• These types of scams happen regularly in India, a guy claimed he got alien cells from rain, someone developed gasolene from leaves in started selling it in large quantities

update 1
Some people have requested me about how many bits is 450 GB, well lets see what Google says...
3 865 470 566 400 bits!!

So he printed these many dots in an A4 paper? even if printed just 1 in 100th of 3 865 470 566 400 ie 38 654 705 664 bits (ie compressing 100 bits to the space of one bit by using different colors and triangles and circles) with a 15 megapixel camera he will be able to detect only
21 037 500 000 bits!!

A4 paper = 8.5 X 11 inch
Using a 15 megapixel camera he can detect 8.5 x 15000 pixels on the breadth side and 11 x 15000 pixels on the length side so total will be 21 037 500 000

update 2: some people have noticed that the arab news article says 256 GB in a paper, and I was saying 450 GB, actually 450 GB came in the register.co.uk story that broke in digg day before yesterday

update 3: I am an Indian and there are many Indians who are brilliant and hardworking, the graduates from IIT are the best in the world!

update 4: I am going to patent this idea, instead of geometrical shapes, we are going to imprint the whole 26 letters and numbers 0-9 on paper, so I m saying it can hold 500 Terrabyte of data on a stamp size paper :) how is that?

Technorati Tags: scam, india, kerala

Goodtree scam exposed, Gmail started marking their emails as spam/phishing

I had previously written about Goodtree scam in this blog.The 'CEO' of Goodtree, James Currier posted a comment saying that they are a legitimate business, and that sites like myspace also use users address books. But he choose to leave one serious question unanswered, why the mails from Goodtree says that " Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are contributing their technology to a new website called GoodTree" when Google, Yahoo and Microsoft has no involvement in Goodtree. James Currier must realise that he might be able to get some money by cheating people, but you cant build a big business by fooling innocent people.

But the real story today is Gmail has started treating Goodtree mails as spam, and they are warning people. See this screenshot, the mails received last month now has the red warning banner from Gmail.

Some people had raised concerns about them in the past, but its sad to see how easily people get fooled. Goodtree never answers why they always use Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's name in their promotional emails. And what technology they use to "NOT" save users Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail passwords "In order for people to access their address books, they need to log in to those address books, so yes, they enter their email and password, but we do not save anyone’s passwords. ". Read Goodtree CEO reply here.

updates

1. Some employees from Goodtree left their comments here, I will try to counter their arguments

• "Your post says that "the real story today" is about a Google warning about a GoodTree invitation email. I'm looking at the email and it's from Oct 23rd, the time of your original post. That's not today's story." - Google made sure that even old emails from Goodtree are labeled properly with phishing warning. That is why the mail I got from Goodtree on Oct 23rd got that label when I opened it last week. To make it really clear, when I first got the mail on Oct 23rd that phishing warning was not there.

• " James *did* address your question of how Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and Ask search results are involved: GoodTree gets its search feed from InfoSpace, a public company in Seattle, which aggregates all those feeds under contract, and then we are under contract with InfoSpace." - No James did NOT answer my question, when you license/use Infospace technology why you use the following words in your email "Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are contributing their technology to a new website called GoodTree that gives money to charity when you use it"

• " The warning label that appears on the screen shot is a result of the fact that we send out GoodTree invitations from our own SMTP server with the email address of the inviter in the 'from' field. Gmail's servers, using SPF authentication, are smart enough to realize that the 'from' address and the originating mail server probably don't match, and dutifully warns the user."- Sorry to disappoint, Google has started to label any invitation mail *talking* about Goodtree as phishing, if you look carefully at the "from" address of the screenshot of the mail you can see that it was an invitation mail my friend got from Goodtree and because he was suspicious he forwarded it to me and the SMTP server is not of Goodtree's its of asianetindia.com an ISP in India. So its *not* because of the SMTP issue. Secondly sending mail by changing the "from" address is not good business practice, be bold and say that the mail is from Goodtree.

• "I'd also like to note that if Gmail/Google had somehow "identified" us as scammers, we'd be ending up in your spam box, not your inbox. Please watch the alarmist language."- I get the comments in my blog as email in Gmail, even the comments these Goodtree employees leave has been marked by Gmail with phishing warning!! see the screenshot below

2. If Goodtree really want to do charity (anything for charity is good), they should stop asking users their email passwords, stop sending spam emails.
If Goodtree wants to email someone say that the mail is from Goodtree, don't cheat people by editing the "from" field. Basically what they need to do is do their business ethically. You cannot promote a good cause by spamming people.

Technorati Tags: scams, phishing, Goodtree

Goodtree Scam

Today I got a mail from a friend,

He was inviting me to a new website called GoodTree www.goodtree.com

"I just found out that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are contributing their technology to a new website called GoodTree that gives money to charity when you use it.

It's invitation only. I thought you'd love it"





From the wording I was sure that it was an automated mail. But the wording also made me nervous, it has that touch of a scam. So I clicked the "Accept" button

And I got this website. update: see the encircled (red) area, they are making people believe that this is some venture by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft!.




I checked "Women" and clicked continue and got to this page..

This was it! Yet another scam to get their personal information. Im pretty sure, by this time scores of people must have submitted their personal information here. But I hope this post will convince some to stay away from this website.

I written a new post on Goodtree here