PaperBack is a free application that allows you to back up your precious files on the ordinary paper in the form of the oversized bitmaps. If you have a good laser printer with the 600 dpi resolution, you can save up to 500,000 bytes of uncompressed data on the single A4/Letter sheet. Integrated packer allows for much better data density - up to 3,000,000+ (three megabytes) of C code per page.

You may ask - why? Why, for heaven’s sake, do I need to make paper backups, if there are so many alternative possibilities like CD-R’s, DVD±R’s, memory sticks, flash cards, hard disks, streamer tapes, ZIP drives, network storages, magnetooptical cartridges, and even 8-inch double-sided floppy disks formatted for DEC PDP-11? (I still have some). The answer is simple: you don’t. However, by looking on CD or magnetic tape, you are not able to tell whether your data is readable or not. You must insert your medium into the drive (if you have one!) and try to read it.

Paper is different. Do you remember the punched cards? EBCDIC and all this stuff. For years, cards were the main storage medium for the source code. I agree that 100K+ programs were… unhandly, but hey, only real programmers dared to write applications of this size. And used cards were good as notepads, too. Punched tapes were also common. And even the most weird codings, like CDC or EBCDIC, were readable by humans (I mean, by real programmers).

Read the whole thing here.

Because DPI can drill down into packet headers and then further into the actual content being pumped through the tubes, it raises all sorts of questions from privacy advocates concerned about the easy collection of private personal information. Current gear is so sophisticated that it can reconstitute e-mails and IM conversations out of asymmetric traffic flows and it can essentially peek “under the hood” of any non-encrypted packet to take a look at what it contains.

Bell Canada’s use of DPI gear has now ensnared the company in a pair of government actions over net neutrality concerns and privacy. Bell, apparently sensitive to such concerns, has made clear in its own responses to the network neutrality proceeding that its DPI gear looks at packet headers and traffic flows as a means of identifying various applications and protocols. Bell does not use DPI to actually peer at packet contents, however. “The content itself is not actually reviewed, analyzed or stored,” Bell says.

Ars Technica has the story.