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University of Tübingen archaeologists headed by Professor Peter Pfälzner have made sensational finds in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. The researchers from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies found a cuneiform archive of 93 clay tablets dating from 1250 BCE -- the period of the Middle Assyrian Empire. What the tablets record remains a mystery for the time being. The researchers will have to decipher them -- a long and difficult task.
The tablets were found at the Bronze Age city site of Bassetki, which was only discovered in 2013 by archaeologists from the Tübingen collaborative research center 1070, ResourceCultures. The Tübingen archaeologists continued their work undisturbed even in September and October of this year -- despite the turbulence caused by the Kurdish independence referendum and the sharp responses of governments in the region. In recent months, the researchers excavated layers of settlement dating from the Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age, as well as from the subsequent Assyrian period. "Our finds provide evidence that this early urban center in northern Mesopotamia was settled almost continuously from approximately 3000 to 600 BCE. That indicates that Bassetki was of key significance on important trade routes," Pfälzner says.
Year 2350, archaeologists have uncovered a trove of information on an ancient format: zip disk. After many arduous months, they have managed to decipher the content...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday October 25 2017, @06:07AM (2 children)
Anyone from the future ain't getting jack from any of our digital crap. Assume it isn't even physically damaged, which is a bad assumption but lets be optimistic.
Optical media? Have you actually looked in the Red Book? Give a team of the best and brightest a CD right now without a drive or the book and offer a fabulous prize to them if they get anything useful inside a month. They get a lab with anything they want but no Internet to look up the format with. No way, and a team of the brightest probably have at least read something about the antics going on with a CD. Post kaboom that knowledge probably gets lost or at least a lot fuzzier. And that assumes it is music on the disc, data is even more obfuscated; see the Yellow Book for that insanity. Haven't seen the books for DVD or BD-ROM but odds are it didn't get better, Hell Sony worked on CD and BD.
Flash drive? No way, the data fades away from flash pretty quickly. Even the stuff in a microcontroller like an AVR only promises a century if only written one time and maintained under good thermal conditions, good luck with the three or more bits per cell a current flash drive uses and the trend is toward higher density with less life.
Spinning rust? Maybe if the electronics are still intact but the firmware is on a flash chip so see above. Decoding a modern hard drive with all of the probabilistic read and such would be an impossible task without a copy of the firmware and enough of the electronics and head to figure out what to even look for. If it spins up somebody might rediscover how to talk SATA without wiping everything on the drive in the process.
And of course all the above forgets the elephant in the room, the trend toward pervasive encryption of everything. So after you pull off the miracle of recovering the data you have to break AES and/or RSA or worse.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @01:55PM
I've been thinking that encryption explains the Fermi paradox quite well for awhile now. Eventually everyone wants their communications to be indistinguishable from "noise" to everyone but the intended recipients.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:35PM
Oh please. If people from the future with very advanced technology found some DVD-ROMs or hard drives, it wouldn't be that hard for them to figure it out, though it'd take them a little time. The encoding on optical discs isn't that complicated, and for hard drives they wouldn't try to power them, they'd use their technology to scan the platters and save the magnetic pattern, then figure out how to decode that, which admittedly would be harder than optical discs. And just like it's no big deal to crack 40-bit encryption these days, they'll have no trouble with our current encryption schemes.