Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria

I don't know enough about biology to comment on their storage-density claims, but as to the encryption, I'm getting a strong whiff of snake oil from "only the client would know the function to derive the checksum". If you want to convince me that bioinformatics has something to offer cryptology, then you need to explain to me what property wetware has that silicon doesn't which causes it to be unlike a classical Turing machine.

Don't bacteria die, reproduce, and mutate? How is it possible to store anything long term in room temperature conditions?

Also interesting: they contributed their technique to the BioBricks Foundation: <a href="http://bbf.openwetware.org" rel="nofollow">http://bbf.openwetware.org</a><p>Very exciting things coming as we get the protein expression laws down well. I can't wait to use <a href="http://mrgene.com" rel="nofollow">http://mrgene.com</a> to sequence DNA and a BioBrick Assembly kit to put it all together.<p><a href="http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE0546.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE0546.asp</a>

My anti-virus software just deleted all my data!

I have to admit that I think that the grand prize winner Slovenia brought up in my perspective a really simple but genious idea to the competition. Which might be a lot more worth discussing :)

Wonder if they can replicate data with binary fission (barring mutation.)

Finally, storage that increases in size faster than your data.

Cloning data takes on a whole new meaning.

hopefully no one leaves a cheese laying around to infect the hard drives!

So, sick people will have more storage space?