[ih] Internet History Lives on the Internet?

[Andrew G. Malis]

Jack,

In addition to the Internet Archive (already mentioned), you should also
check out https://decentralizedweb.net .

Cheers,
Andy


On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 9:58 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> True, but I think a first step is a persistent crowd-sourced public store,
> which is what I described.    Perhaps "restricted" material could be simply
> stored encrypted, and thus visible in search engines and accessible only to
> people with the appropriate key, or maybe "permission" credentials.
> Volunteers might be reluctant to participate if that became too common.
>
> There's also other considerations, e.g., tracking the provenance of an
> item, so you can tell whether or not something is authentic, where it came
> from, when it was created, etc.   Probably many more such things to
> ponder.
>
> IMHO those kinds of capabilities could be add-ons to a persistent store as
> meta-data mechanisms, possibly many of them all independent, associating
> their metadata with items in the warehouse by some kind of unique ID -
> perhaps just a large-enough hash of each of the contents.   They could be
> added as someone gets interested in doing so.
>
> Anybody could build a metadata mechanism "on top of" the persistent
> store.   Some might be built by volunteers and free, others by corporations
> and for sale.  This is almost what the Web is, except that the Web store
> isn't persistent - things on the Web disappear without warning.   Someone
> might put a web site "in front of" the persistent store and use today's web
> tools pretty much as is to access materials stored there.
>
> /Jack
> On 2/24/19 4:07 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
>
> not all data that we might want to preserve needs to be publicly
> accessible.
>
> v
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 6:23 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>
>> I don't know much about SOLID, but it appears to be addressing the
>> problem of handling individuals' personal private data, and controlling who
>> can access it.   What I described was somewhat of the inverse - making data
>> public, survivable, and accessible to everyone.  But maybe there's overlap
>> in any implementation.  Certainly there are lots of pieces already in place
>> somewhere, as evidenced by the success of viruses, pirated videos, and the
>> like.
>>
>> The Internet has made possible new sorts of social mechanisms.  What I'm
>> imagining is more like applying Internet-style "crowd-funding" to the
>> problem of a historical archive, where people contribute cycles and bytes
>> rather than euros and dollars.
>>
>> That wasn't possible pre-Internet, but it is now.   Thinking "outside the
>> box" is a lot easier.  The Internet made the box much bigger....
>>
>> /Jack
>>
>>
>> On 2/24/19 2:45 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
>>
>> isn't that what SOLID is supposed to do?
>>
>> v
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 1:47 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> 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.
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> New postal address:
>> Google
>> 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
>> Reston, VA 20190
>>
>>
>
> --
> New postal address:
> Google
> 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
> Reston, VA 20190
>
> _______
> 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.
>
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