[ih] Internet History Lives on the Internet?
Miles Fidelman
mfidelman at meetinghouse.net
Mon Feb 25 08:55:11 PST 2019
Jack,
There have been attempts at this, before - Oceanstore and Publius come
to mind. The problem is that people come and go, and the Federations
disappear. There's also a scaling problem.
My take is that, at some point, things have to become institutionalized,
and maybe money has to change hands.
Miles
On 2/24/19 9:33 PM, Jack Haverty 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
>> <mailto: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
>>> <mailto: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
>>> <mailto:touch at strayalpha.com>> writes:
>>> >
>>> >> On Feb 23, 2019, at 12:42 PM, Jack Haverty
>>> <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>> wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> But "internet-history at postel.org
>>> <mailto: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
>>> <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
>>> >> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> >> Contact list-owner at postel.org
>>> <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for assistance.
>>> _______
>>> internet-history mailing list
>>> internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto: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.
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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