[ih] Internet History Lives on the Internet?

[Richard Bennett]

The Red Cross has a serious fundraising department, government contracts, and a large professional staff. It takes all of that to ensure you have volunteers in the pipeline. Wikipedia has a similar apparatus. Regular-old volunteer efforts generally consist of a very small number of unpaid (or underpaid) workers and an army of critics.

The botnet idea makes me wonder what happens when a bad actor decides to hijack the network for his or her own purposes. Presumably you’re asking people to run botnet code as well as to host documents. That’s the kind of issue that didn’t get much thought - or have any design impact - on the schemes that were developed during the Internet’s rainbows and unicorns phase. 

RB

> On Feb 24, 2019, at 7:13 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> I think it's the nature of volunteerism that benefits flow in all sorts
> of directions.  Whether people volunteer their time, or employers
> volunteer their employees' time, the benefits aren't restricted to the
> volunteers.  But they do it anyway, "for the cause", whatever that might
> be.   I was a Red Cross volunteer for many years, spent lots of time
> trudging through rainstorms to reach fire victims (the proper Red Cross
> term is "client"), and all of the benefits went to them.  It just felt
> good, and that was enough payback.
> 
> That's what I find intriguing about my Benevolent BotNet notion.  Rather
> than depending on finding an institution interested in, competent at,
> and willing to save history, and hoping that it has longevity, you rely
> on a network of volunteers to provide that survivable infrastructure by
> volunteering their excess computing resources.    After reaching a big
> enough population, it could survive wildfires, earthquakes, floods, or
> even collapse of government - as long as the Internet continues to
> work.  Of course if all, or almost all, of the volunteers lose interest
> in history, the system dies.  But if there's ever that few people
> interested in something, it probably deserves to die.
> 
> There's decades of history of the needed technology already.  The first
> prototype I can recall was the Altos at Xerox PARC back in the 80s.  I
> remember John Schoch describing the maintenance program they had created
> which self-replicated to any Alto it could find to keep itself alive and
> running diagnostics.   The only way to kill it was to power down all the
> machines -- probably not possible on the Internet today, so such a
> mechanism would survive today as long as there was enough interest in
> it.    Botnets, crypto-miners, blockchains, BitTorrents -- seems like a
> lot of pieces already exist.
> 
> The Internet enabled social networking, crowdfunding, and other such
> innovations that have supplanted traditional mechanisms by empowering
> volunteers to act in consort.  Sometimes good, sometimes bad.  Why not
> preserving history?
> 
> An institution on the Internet doesn't have to host an archive and
> struggle to survive.   The Internet can become The Archive.
> 
> /Jack
> 
> On 2/24/19 11:33 AM, Joe Touch wrote:
>> 
>>> On Feb 24, 2019, at 10:39 AM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I didn't realize until today that the IETF is
>>> funded by ... Me!
>> You don’t pay for the people who attend or those who work online throughout the year on lists, area directorates, etc. or advise IANA. 
>> 
>> Those disproportionate financially benefit those who reap the revenues, IMO. The $1 tax on .orgs was a great start, but there ought to be quite different registration fees for for-profits. And other taxes to fund the support services that currently are a silent tax on us all. 
>> 
>> Joe
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—
Richard Bennett
High Tech Forum <http://hightechforum.org/> Founder
Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator

Internet Policy Consultant

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