Floating data storage

There has been a long thread on Bugtraq about a paper released called Juggling with packets: floating data storage. In the paper, the authors explores the possibilities of using certain properties of the Internet or any other large network to create a reliable, volatile distributed data storage of a large capacity.

The idea is that as opposed to traditional methods of parasitic data storage (P2P abuse, open FTP servers, binary Usenet postings), the use of float data storage 'on the wire' may or may not leave a trail of data. In other words, you could throw your warez in a network stream and never fear getting caught. Turn the power off and it goes away.

This of course isn't completely true. You can easily record anything that touches the wire, but the theory is quite interesting. Instead of fretting about disk scrubbing data of your harddrive you can simply NOT store it. Not sure if I would appreciate a few gigs of data floating on my network, but hey, it's not my idea.

Would be interesting to see where this might lead. There has been various views on this on the Bugtraq list if you are interested.