[ih] Internet History Lives on the Internet?

John Day jeanjour at comcast.net
Mon Feb 25 09:33:12 PST 2019 

Not really related to this discussion.  The head of the Internet Archive and the head of Boston Public Library were on Boston Public Radio last week. They were announcing a cooperation where you can check-out material in the BPL collection through the Internet Archive and only one person has access to the material at a time. Just like it was checked out.  What I didn’t hear them talk about was when the ‘book’ or whatever is returned, how is it they ensure the borrower doesn’t still have a copy?

Any thoughts?
John

> On Feb 25, 2019, at 11:14, Andrew G. Malis <agmalis at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Jack,
> 
> In addition to the Internet Archive (already mentioned), you should also check out https://decentralizedweb.net <https://decentralizedweb.net/> .
> 
> Cheers,
> Andy
> 
> 
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 9:58 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto: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 <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 <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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>>> >> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history <http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>>> >> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for assistance.
>>> _______
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>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history <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
> _______
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> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history <http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for assistance.
> _______
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