[ih] Internet History Lives on the Internet?

[Michael Greenwald]

Not intending to spark a controversy, but has anyone who is trying
to promote some kind of repository for for historical materials
related to the development of the Internet, thought about having
that historical material being hosted by the Internet Archive? (I
mean, explicitly --- presumably some fraction is already covered
by the WayBack machine's 300million+ web pages).

(It is a non-profit, funded by donations, but I am unaware of details.
One issue I would guess, in my ignorance, that might come up is whether
people (who may have some moral or legal ownership of the documents)
may object to the Internet Archive's advocacy of an open Internet (or
Open Internet, or whatever).)

On 2019-02-24 10:39, Jack Haverty wrote:
> [Changed the subject line]
> 
> I read the recent messages on the forum just before going to sleep, and
> then I had a dream....literally.
> 
> There's a whole different perspective on Internet History that might be
> very revealing.  Instead of questions like "Who built the Internet?",
> perhaps also ask "Who paid for the Internet?"  If historians "followed
> the money" like many other investigators, they might find some
> interesting insights.  I didn't realize until today that the IETF is
> funded by ... Me!   Through my payments for my .org domain, maybe by 
> now
> I've paid for an urn or two of coffee at an IETF meeting.
> 
> But my dream was of how to fund some kind of Internet repository of
> historical materials, not subject to the management whims or financial
> success of an "institution".   My dream reminded me that such 
> mechanisms
> already exist, have been running at scale for years, are self-funded,
> and seem essentially impossible to excise even when governments or
> industry giants try to do so.
> 
> My dream is of a Benevolent BotNet (apologies to my alma mater, BBN). 
> Instead of hosting and propagating malware and viruses, or stealing
> computer cycle to mine cryptocurrency, the BBN would simply store,
> replicate, and distribute historical materials on demand.  No doubt
> Richard's comment on Pirate Bay triggered this part of the dream.
> 
> Such technology obviously exists, and survives despite serious efforts
> to eradicate it.  Where the Internet was coopted for evil, perhaps the
> evil could be coopted for good?
> 
> Maybe even better would be a mechanism that didn't rely on theft and
> subterfuge at all.  Perhaps something akin to the SETI mechanisms, 
> where
> people voluntarily donate their computer resources to analyze radio
> signals, by simply downloading a piece of code and allowing it to run 
> on
> their computers.
> 
> So, my dream was that some new software appears, which is freely
> downloaded by thousands or millions of people around the world, which
> uses a few GB of the disk on their machines, and stores historical
> material in a redundant, highly survivable, persistent, distrubuted
> historical warehouse.   One, or many, search engines (go Google!, 
> Bing!,
> DuckDuckGo!) would allow people to find material in the warehouse.  
> Anyone could contribute material to the historical archive by simply
> placing a copy into the disk area of their machine that they've shared,
> from where it would be automatically distributed and replicated.
> 
> Perhaps this is one or more apps that can be downloaded.  Or perhaps a
> plug in or extension to popular browsers.  Or maybe an addition to
> existing mechanisms like BitTorrent.  Much of the code already exists,
> as evidenced by the millions of computers unwittingly participating in 
> a
> Botnet, or willingly running code like SETI.
> 
> Dave's offer of disk space is just the start.  I suspect many people
> would contribute some unused chunk of their computers and network
> capacity.  I have a few Terabytes on my NAS that are empty...you
> probably do too.   With enough participants, the BBN becomes
> self-suficient even as people come and go.
> 
> All it would seem to take is for someone to sit down and write the
> code....in the classic Internet spirit of Rough Consensus and Running 
> Code.
> 
> Dave....?
> 
> /Jack Haverty
> 
> 
> 
> On 2/24/19 7:42 AM, Dave Taht wrote:
>> Joe Touch <touch at strayalpha.com> writes:
>> 
>>> On Feb 23, 2019, at 12:42 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>     But "internet-history at postel.org", and others like it, even RFC
>>>     repositories, likely exist at the whim of their sponsor.
>>> 
>>> Indeed - even assuming volunteers run them - they’re’s still the 
>>> issue
>>> of hosting and net access.
>>> 
>>> I have old repositories (end2end-interest, for one) that even the 
>>> ISOC
>>> has declined to host (even though the E2E-RG originated there).
>>> 
>>> Then again, if you want to see the worst of “free riders”, go attend
>>> an IETF. Companies send armies there for free training and free
>>> consulting.
>>> 
>>> PS - speaking as list admin, if anyone wants to offer a place to host
>>> this list more reliably and archivally, please do let me know 
>>> (contact
>>> me directly off-list).
>> My email list server currently lives on linode in the cloud. The cost 
>> is
>> $5/month for 25GB of SSD storage. ( https://www.linode.com/pricing
>> ). Has IPv6 and IPv4. It's paid for via a patreon donation.
>> 
>> It's not like I'm using much of that box - or the bandwidth available 
>> -
>> how big are these archives?
>> 
>> I wouldn't mind sharing that existing list server, but I long ago
>> switched to violating whatever RFC it was that said starttls was a
>> "should" - to *mandate* starttls only - which cuts down on spam (and
>> sigh, about 13% of my measured potential correspondents, still). The
>> biggest administrative cost I'd had was dealing with spam.
>> 
>> If that's not an acceptable policy for these lists/archives, well, go
>> burn the 5 bucks/mo on yer own.
>> 
>> 
>>> Joe
>>> 
>>> 
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