One use case it is you can share different number of key shard to individuals. Thus, they have more "power" based on how much you trust them.<p>If this is your will, you can give 3 shards to your sister (that you trust absolutely) and requires 4 shards to decrypt it. Your "semi-trusted" friends needs to be 4 to decrypt it, but your sister only needs to know one of your friend to access.<p>Written in rust for extra HN creds /s
The problem is that QR codes are not information dense enough to encode large amounts of data efficiently. I have been trying to build something similar to this and using various encoding methods. So far, I have trouble getting more than about 64k on a printed page such that it can be optically recognized. The number of symbols in your encoding alphabet is important, and this reduces recognition.<p>I like this project and gives me some ideas on how to enhance my solution.
Thank you!
The image of an example document says something like “To recover the content, download the latest version of paperback from <URL>“.<p>I have a few questions about that.<p>1. Would that link even work after 10 or 20 or 30 years? What’s the fallback if the link is broken?<p>2. Is the “latest version” always guaranteed to be compatible with the scheme used by the document in question (again consider that the document is created now but is being attempted to be recovered a few decades from now)?<p>3. Based on the above questions, what’s a reasonable expected age for this system to work (I’m referring to the software)?<p>It would be useful to have these questions and their answers added in an FAQ on the site and in the repo.
Some documentation about how to go about decoding and inputting a document should be done.... I still haven't figured out how to do this after spending some time first trying to get it build (didn't build on debian stable, needed a debian testing chroot).<p>Now I can get the base64-strings from the qr-codes, but it's not clear how to pass this to paperback to decode the main document.
Surely there's a better medium for long-term storage than paper? I can see this working for small documents, but if you have to print out thousands of pages you mine as well store the data on some kind of USB and maybe just print out the key shards.
It's a thousand pages, give or take a few.
I'll be writing more in a week or two.
I could make it longer if you like the style.
I can change it 'round,
And I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer
It would be really cool if a small decoding binary could be printed on the back as a massive QR code. Then the paper would be all you'd need to recover the original document.