[ih] Internet History Lives on the Internet?

Sun Feb 24 12:09:17 PST 2019

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.

RB

> On Feb 24, 2019, at 12:36 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> 
> The whole question of persistent storage remains an unsolved problem.
> 
> There have been models of distributed publication - like oceanstore and 
> publius (huge, distributed hash tables) - but they tend to fall down if 
> lots of people don't keep maintaining disk space.
> 
> I keep thinking of the notion of a federation of storage providers where 
> one pays once for either a block of replicated storage, or for 
> publication of a file/document.  These days, a 1TB disk costs $100 
> (retail) - so 10cents/GB.  Multiply by 5 for replicated copies, and 
> assume a 2-year disk life, and we're talking 25cents/year for a Gig of 
> reliable storage (leaving out networking costs).  $25, at 1% interest, 
> would "endow" a Gig of reliable storage, "forever" (think about how we 
> pay for perpetual care of a gravesite.
> 
> What's missing is a legal & accounting mechanism for handling the 
> money.  Folks pay to self-publish an e-book - it sure would be nice to 
> be able pay, say $50, once, to make a document available for the life of 
> the Internet.
> 
> Miles
> 
> On 2/24/19 1:39 PM, 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
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> _______
>>>> internet-history mailing list
>>>> internet-history at postel.org
>>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> 
> -- 
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.

—
Richard Bennett
High Tech Forum <http://hightechforum.org/> Founder
Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator

Internet Policy Consultant

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