<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">For the timescales we need, we need something that lasts longer than even governments. In some of my other research, I am handling documents that are 400-800 years old. (Some work with even older stuff.) We can’t assume even governments will last that long.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">John<br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Feb 24, 2019, at 15:09, Richard Bennett <<a href="mailto:richard@bennett.com" class="">richard@bennett.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">It’s probably most reliable to pass a bill appropriating some money to the Lib. of Congress to host something like the Internet Archive database. Volunteer efforts always have a limited lifespan but government is forever.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">RB<br class=""><div class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Feb 24, 2019, at 12:36 PM, Miles Fidelman <<a href="mailto:mfidelman@meetinghouse.net" class="">mfidelman@meetinghouse.net</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class="">The whole question of persistent storage remains an unsolved problem.<br class=""><br class="">There have been models of distributed publication - like oceanstore and <br class="">publius (huge, distributed hash tables) - but they tend to fall down if <br class="">lots of people don't keep maintaining disk space.<br class=""><br class="">I keep thinking of the notion of a federation of storage providers where <br class="">one pays once for either a block of replicated storage, or for <br class="">publication of a file/document. These days, a 1TB disk costs $100 <br class="">(retail) - so 10cents/GB. Multiply by 5 for replicated copies, and <br class="">assume a 2-year disk life, and we're talking 25cents/year for a Gig of <br class="">reliable storage (leaving out networking costs). $25, at 1% interest, <br class="">would "endow" a Gig of reliable storage, "forever" (think about how we <br class="">pay for perpetual care of a gravesite.<br class=""><br class="">What's missing is a legal & accounting mechanism for handling the <br class="">money. Folks pay to self-publish an e-book - it sure would be nice to <br class="">be able pay, say $50, once, to make a document available for the life of <br class="">the Internet.<br class=""><br class="">Miles<br class=""><br class="">On 2/24/19 1:39 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">[Changed the subject line]<br class=""><br class="">I read the recent messages on the forum just before going to sleep, and<br class="">then I had a dream....literally.<br class=""><br class="">There's a whole different perspective on Internet History that might be<br class="">very revealing. Instead of questions like "Who built the Internet?",<br class="">perhaps also ask "Who paid for the Internet?" If historians "followed<br class="">the money" like many other investigators, they might find some<br class="">interesting insights. I didn't realize until today that the IETF is<br class="">funded by ... Me! Through my payments for my .org domain, maybe by now<br class="">I've paid for an urn or two of coffee at an IETF meeting.<br class=""><br class="">But my dream was of how to fund some kind of Internet repository of<br class="">historical materials, not subject to the management whims or financial<br class="">success of an "institution". My dream reminded me that such mechanisms<br class="">already exist, have been running at scale for years, are self-funded,<br class="">and seem essentially impossible to excise even when governments or<br class="">industry giants try to do so.<br class=""><br class="">My dream is of a Benevolent BotNet (apologies to my alma mater, BBN).<br class="">Instead of hosting and propagating malware and viruses, or stealing<br class="">computer cycle to mine cryptocurrency, the BBN would simply store,<br class="">replicate, and distribute historical materials on demand. No doubt<br class="">Richard's comment on Pirate Bay triggered this part of the dream.<br class=""><br class="">Such technology obviously exists, and survives despite serious efforts<br class="">to eradicate it. Where the Internet was coopted for evil, perhaps the<br class="">evil could be coopted for good?<br class=""><br class="">Maybe even better would be a mechanism that didn't rely on theft and<br class="">subterfuge at all. Perhaps something akin to the SETI mechanisms, where<br class="">people voluntarily donate their computer resources to analyze radio<br class="">signals, by simply downloading a piece of code and allowing it to run on<br class="">their computers.<br class=""><br class="">So, my dream was that some new software appears, which is freely<br class="">downloaded by thousands or millions of people around the world, which<br class="">uses a few GB of the disk on their machines, and stores historical<br class="">material in a redundant, highly survivable, persistent, distrubuted<br class="">historical warehouse. One, or many, search engines (go Google!, Bing!,<br class="">DuckDuckGo!) would allow people to find material in the warehouse.<br class="">Anyone could contribute material to the historical archive by simply<br class="">placing a copy into the disk area of their machine that they've shared,<br class="">from where it would be automatically distributed and replicated.<br class=""><br class="">Perhaps this is one or more apps that can be downloaded. Or perhaps a<br class="">plug in or extension to popular browsers. Or maybe an addition to<br class="">existing mechanisms like BitTorrent. Much of the code already exists,<br class="">as evidenced by the millions of computers unwittingly participating in a<br class="">Botnet, or willingly running code like SETI.<br class=""><br class="">Dave's offer of disk space is just the start. I suspect many people<br class="">would contribute some unused chunk of their computers and network<br class="">capacity. I have a few Terabytes on my NAS that are empty...you<br class="">probably do too. With enough participants, the BBN becomes<br class="">self-suficient even as people come and go.<br class=""><br class="">All it would seem to take is for someone to sit down and write the<br class="">code....in the classic Internet spirit of Rough Consensus and Running Code.<br class=""><br class="">Dave....?<br class=""><br class="">/Jack Haverty<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">On 2/24/19 7:42 AM, Dave Taht wrote:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">Joe Touch <<a href="mailto:touch@strayalpha.com" class="">touch@strayalpha.com</a>> writes:<br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">On Feb 23, 2019, at 12:42 PM, Jack Haverty <<a href="mailto:jack@3kitty.org" class="">jack@3kitty.org</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class=""> But "<a href="mailto:internet-history@postel.org" class="">internet-history@postel.org</a>", and others like it, even RFC<br class=""> repositories, likely exist at the whim of their sponsor.<br class=""><br class="">Indeed - even assuming volunteers run them - they’re’s still the issue<br class="">of hosting and net access.<br class=""><br class="">I have old repositories (end2end-interest, for one) that even the ISOC<br class="">has declined to host (even though the E2E-RG originated there).<br class=""><br class="">Then again, if you want to see the worst of “free riders”, go attend<br class="">an IETF. Companies send armies there for free training and free<br class="">consulting.<br class=""><br class="">PS - speaking as list admin, if anyone wants to offer a place to host<br class="">this list more reliably and archivally, please do let me know (contact<br class="">me directly off-list).<br class=""></blockquote>My email list server currently lives on linode in the cloud. The cost is<br class="">$5/month for 25GB of SSD storage. ( <a href="https://www.linode.com/pricing" class="">https://www.linode.com/pricing</a><br class="">). Has IPv6 and IPv4. It's paid for via a patreon donation.<br class=""><br class="">It's not like I'm using much of that box - or the bandwidth available -<br class="">how big are these archives?<br class=""><br class="">I wouldn't mind sharing that existing list server, but I long ago<br class="">switched to violating whatever RFC it was that said starttls was a<br class="">"should" - to *mandate* starttls only - which cuts down on spam (and<br class="">sigh, about 13% of my measured potential correspondents, still). The<br class="">biggest administrative cost I'd had was dealing with spam.<br class=""><br class="">If that's not an acceptable policy for these lists/archives, well, go<br class="">burn the 5 bucks/mo on yer own.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">Joe<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">_______<br class="">internet-history mailing list<br class=""><a href="mailto:internet-history@postel.org" class="">internet-history@postel.org</a><br class=""><a href="http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history" class="">http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history</a><br class="">Contact list-owner@postel.org for assistance.<br class=""></blockquote></blockquote>_______<br class="">internet-history mailing list<br class=""><a href="mailto:internet-history@postel.org" class="">internet-history@postel.org</a><br class=""><a href="http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history" class="">http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history</a><br class="">Contact list-owner@postel.org for assistance.<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">-- <br class="">In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.<br class="">In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra<br class=""><br class="">_______<br class="">internet-history mailing list<br class=""><a href="mailto:internet-history@postel.org" class="">internet-history@postel.org</a><br class=""><a href="http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history" class="">http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history</a><br class="">Contact list-owner@postel.org for assistance.<br class=""></div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">
<div style="letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">—<br class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Richard Bennett<br class=""><a href="http://hightechforum.org/" class="">High Tech Forum</a> Founder</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Internet Policy Consultant</div></div></div>
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