[ih] Archiving Internet history

[vinton cerf]

re: books - you have surely heard "out of print" for economic/demand
reasons...
v


On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 1:37 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> My best thought for proactive archiving is based on a business model,
> involving giving an "archive" some value.   My "print everything and
> make a book" suggestion was only partly whimsical. If a book exists,
> someone will sell it (priced low enough so anyone can afford it).   The
> bookseller(s) du jour (e.g., Amazon) will treat it as part of their
> SKUs, and presumably preserve it as long as there is interest in it
> (i.e., buyers).   Even if a company shifts priorities or goes out of
> business, their "assets" remain, including the books they've been
> selling, and will likely be sold to someone else.   This has been
> happening with various kinds of media, e.g., movies, TV shows,
> recordings, etc.  When no one cares about the book any more it may
> disappear.  But if no one cares...
>
> My second choice is to simply transmit all of the content into deep
> space.   It will travel forever at the speed of light, and can preserve
> an enormous amount of content.  Future researchers will be able to
> access the archive once they've solved the technical problem of how to
> catch up to it, and capture and decode the contents. Just like today's
> researchers are now able to look at what happened just after the Big
> Bang by looking at the signals that are just getting here using the JWST.
>
> Jack Haverty
>
>
> On 2/16/23 10:08, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote:
> > FYI, even cemeteries don’t preserve things “forever”. Plots are leased,
> not sold. Libraries disappear, universities dissolve, and churches are sold
> and rebuilt.
> >
> > I don’t think this group will find a new solution.
> >
> >> On Feb 16, 2023, at 10:03 AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> John,
> >> thanks for your thoughtful intervention. Your conclusion leads me to
> wonder
> >> about business models that might produce the desired resilience.
> >> Preservation by accident is not a plan and so often that's all that we
> >> achieve.
> >>
> >> v
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 1:08 AM John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> vinton cerf via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> wrote:
> >>>> wow thanks for this lengthy history. So many familiar names. I sure
> hope
> >>>> this mailing list does get archived properly as it contains a wealth
> of
> >>>> information it would be hard to re-create in the future.
> >>> Besides the internet-history mailing list's archives here:
> >>>
> >>>   https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/
> >>>
> >>> I have also been using an Archive-It account to make periodic copies of
> >>> that web site in the Internet Archive here:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> https://wayback.archive-it.org/15071/20230114211520/https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/
> >>>
> >>> These are accessible via the Wayback Machine as well as via
> >>> the page for this collection, here:
> >>>
> >>>   Internet and Unix History
> >>>   https://archive-it.org/collections/15071
> >>>
> >>> As you can see there, it's set up to periodically scan various other
> URLs;
> >>> please suggest others that are of historic interest, and I can add
> them.
> >>>
> >>> FYI, the Wayback Machine does not necessarily get deep copies of every
> >>> web site.  Their focus is on breadth, so if a website has a thousand
> web
> >>> pages, perhaps they will get 50 or 100 of them in each crawl.  Also,
> >>> there are enough websites which are designed to "trap" a web crawler
> and
> >>> cause it to waste a lot of its time, storage and bandwidth uselessly,
> so
> >>> the main crawler doesn't keep going.  So, if there's a deep collection
> >>> (for example, ALL the source code to reproduce a popular Linux
> >>> distribution) that you think is worth saving for the future,
> >>> Archive-It.org is one way to get it saved for posterity.
> >>>
> >>> Also FYI, the Internet Archive is an example of the philosophy of
> >>> putting all your eggs in one basket and watching that basket intently.
> >>> The (untested) theory is that the collection will be too valuable to
> let
> >>> it fall apart later.  A distributed system (like LOCKSS for example)
> >>> would provide higher likelihood of stuff surviving the next hundred,
> >>> thousand or 10,000 years.  The Archive is keeping two or three
> >>> replicated copies of each item they have, and copying them forward onto
> >>> newer and fatter drives, but all of them are under the same
> >>> administration and owned by the same nonprofit.  Brewster Kahle is the
> >>> sparkplug and the main funding source; control of that nonprofit will
> be
> >>> in the hands of a small number of probably-less-competent-and-virtuous
> >>> people after Brewster is no more.  Hell, during the pandemic, ONE GUY
> >>> was responsible for swapping out failed disk drives before the only
> >>> second copy of a failed drive happened to also fail.  Bit-rot sets in
> >>> quickly, and five or ten years of merely incompetent system
> >>> administration would make a shambles of this finely tuned machine.  Not
> >>> to mention the possibility of malicious intrusion, particularly by
> >>> people or governments who want to destroy the historical evidence of
> >>> whatever bad stuff they've been up to.
> >>>
> >>> It would be better if there were ten Internet Archive nonprofits (or
> >>> government agencies) scattered around the planet.  Each of them would
> >>> ideally be taking copies of each others' full holdings, as well as
> doing
> >>> their own crawls of the live web, and scanning in whatever physical
> >>> cultural works they are particularly interested in.  Anybody know any
> >>> Internet billionaires or spy-agency VP's who want to catalyze and endow
> >>> a second Internet Archive?  The big advantage for spy agencies is
> >>> stealth; you can look anywhere you want in your own archive, and nobody
> >>> knows where you are looking.
> >>>
> >>>         John
> >>>
> >>>
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