[ih] Internet History Lives on the Internet?

Mon Feb 25 10:55:31 PST 2019

On 2019-02-25 10:30, Richard Bennett wrote:
> I seem to recall some lawsuits over the Internet Archive’s
> “lending library” system. It violates copyright law, of course.

Probably too off-topic, so feel free to ignore:
I thought the Internet Archive only scans books that are in the public 
domain?

> 
> RB
> 
>> On Feb 25, 2019, at 10:33 AM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>> 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 [1] .
>> 
>> 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
>>>> 
>>>> 
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>> --
>> 
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>> Google
>> 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
>> Reston, VA 20190
> 
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> —
> Richard Bennett
> High Tech Forum [2] Founder
> Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator
> 
> Internet Policy Consultant
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] https://decentralizedweb.net/
> [2] http://hightechforum.org
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