From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 21:38:09 -0400 From: "William K. Josephson" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] compare-by-hash Message-ID: <20030601013809.GA94559@mero.morphisms.net> References: <4624842fa54a1aa9e4b1731a4779b82d@plan9.bell-labs.com> <3ED953A8.2020806@ameritech.net> <20030601002801.GA94089@mero.morphisms.net> <3ED95B04.2070707@ameritech.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <3ED95B04.2070707@ameritech.net> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i Topicbox-Message-UUID: c06f30e4-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 08:46:44PM -0500, northern snowfall wrote: > >For something like venti it is worth working > >out the numbers and probably worth detecting collisions, but > >the chances of silently losing/corrupting data due to disk > >firmware or driver bugs, for instance, seems much worse. > > That may be true, but, how can I know that without any facts? > If you admit that venti is worth working out the numbers, why > even make this rant? It isn't a rant. I'm just amused that people in general are often so worried about hash collisions but willing to tolerate common software systems which it is painfully obvious are far less reliable. For instance, where I have been working recently, people will trust important data to filesystems that are easily crashed and corrupted, but they worry more about sha1 hash collisions. I find fsck and failed disks much scarier since they can and do burn me with some regularity :-)