This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.
This is why stuff like the internet archive exist: to try and preserve this content. The problem is that governments are trying to shut down the internet archive…
Source?
IA blog. There’s an ongoing court case. What has happened is that IA has a digital book lending service. Typically they restrict loaning to 1-user per physical book, which is the norm for digital book lending. However, at one point during the pandemic, IA did a “crisis library” event for a day or two in which they allowed infinitely many people to download/loan a book despite only having one or two copies. Publishers who own the copyright on those books then pursued a copyright violation case against IA, which has now put the entire library in jeopardy.
Theoretically, this case should only affect the digital book lending side of their library, but it may end up shutting down their service and library as a whole depending on how the court case goes. There’s been a lot of efforts by companies and governments to shut down IA, so they’d always been very cautious about their operations.
IA’s big legal issues stem from their novel ‘web archive’, and their digital book lending. They’ve also been host to roms of old software/games that may still fall under copyright. Philosophically, IMO IA did nothing wrong. However, their crisis library event did violate copyright law which kinda put them under the microscope.
Theoretically the web archive service and general digital archives of old public domain content should be safe. But we’ll have to see how things go.
This is an annoying event that happened. I don’t like that the copyright works in this way but fuck man, IA had to know that what they were doing was not even remotely in the grey area. It was a dumb move from them.
Oh wow. That’s concerning, at minimum. Thank you.
Probably referencing this lawsuit that the internet archive lost recently, related to the online library they launched during the pandemic.
oh did the court stuff pass already? I haven’t kept up.
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This comment gave me a really tough moral dilemma. On one side I want the best for you on the other I want a rule to preserve everything even if this is illegal, dangerous and uncomfortable.
There are multiple examples that I can think of that are dangerous for the individual (in power and without power) but it’s not like you are in serfdom and must tile ground for your master. You are free enough man to move where you live. Maybe you are held hostage by your friends, family, house and job but that aren’t things that can’t be work around.
Also who should decide if something should be preserved? Is this game that has 50 players at it’s peak and nobody has heard of it, and is two years old should be preserved? No? Then among us wouldn’t be preserved.
I sadly conclude that to prevent the harm of many people by individual in power I need to allow a danger to an individual by archiving everything that is possible to archive.
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I don’t think sacrificing other people for some imaginary tomorrow is worthwhile, to be honest.
If this statement was without context I would 100% agree.
Bur reality isn’t black and white. The consequences of this particular case are totally preventable without changing any rules about archiving.
Your imaginary danger exists the same way as my imaginary future. But you won’t change place of living due to unfavorable cost benefit calculation but I also calculate cost benefit for the whole of humanity in keeping archives.
I think you are scared of loosing everything that you build up in your town. (Friends, family, house) due to to something that isn’t happend yet. And you would secrafice a lot just to not feel scared of being forcefully driven out.
But I don’t know you and might be wrong in the details but definitely I can Imagine someone in similar situation.
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Yeah it’s funny how I always got warned about how “the internet is forever” when it comes to being care about what you post on social media, which isn’t bad advice and is kinda true, but also really kinda not true. So many things I’ve wanted to find on the internet that I experienced like 5-15 years ago are just gone without a trace.
Things you want to disappear will last forever but things you want to keep will vanish
The internet can be forever. If you mess up publicly enough, it will be forever (e.g. the aerial picture of Barbara Streisand’s villa)
It should be revised to “the Internet can be forever”. There’s no control over what persists and what doesn’t, but some things really do get copied everywhere and live on in infamy.
Capitalism has no interest in preservation except where it is profitable. Thinking about the long-term future, archaeologist’s success and acting on it is not profitiable.
Its not just capitalism lol
Preserving things costs money/resources/time. This happens in a lot of societies.
And a non-capitalist society could decide to invest resources into preservation even if it’s not profitable.
So could a capitalist society?
Could it? Yeah, sure it could, and in some cases it will, but only if someone up the chain thinks it’s profitable. Profit motive should never dictate how archaeology is practiced.
Isn’t that like a lot of older television shows? Lots of shows are lost as no one wanted to pay for tape storage.
This is a very good point and one that is not discussed enough. Archive.org is doing amazing work but there is absolutely not enough of that and they have very limited resources.
The whole internet is extremely ephemeral, more than people realize, and it’s concerning in my opinion. Funny enough, I actually think that federation/decentralization might be the solution. A distributed system to back-up the internet that anyone can contribute storage and bandwidth to might be the only sustainable solution. I wonder.if anyone has thought about it already.
I’d argue that it can help or hurt to decentralize, depending on how it’s handled. If most sites are caching/backing up data that’s found elsewhere, that’s both good for resilience and for preservation, but if the data in question is centralized by its home server, then instead of backing up one site we’re stuck backing up a thousand, not to mention the potential issues with discovery
@strainedl0ve There is always https://ipfs.tech
Remember a few years ago when MySpace did a faceplant during a server migration, and lost literally every single piece of music that had ever been uploaded? It was one of the single-largest losses of Internet history and it’s just… not talked about at all anymore.
Things seems to be forgotten as quickly as they were lost.
Another problem is that even if sites and their content stay up they often reorganize it for various reasons - often by importing old content into some new platform - and don’t care about the URLs the content is available at. Which breaks all links to it.
Some pages at least try to show you a page with suggestions what you might’ve been going for, but I’ve also seen those less and less over the years.
For my stuff I’ve been making sure to keep links working for over two decades now - on my personal page you can still access everything similary to /cgi-bin/script.cgi?page even though that script and the cgi-bin directory as a whole has been gone for over a decade. But I seem to be pretty alone in efforts trying to keep things at stable locations.
edit: I just noticed matrix.org broke all links coming from google search at least for bridges. They should’ve known better.
Long ago the saying was “be careful - anything you post on the internet is forever”. Well, time has certainly proven that to be false.
There’s things like /r/datahoarder (not sure if they have a new community here) that run their own petabyte storage archiving projects, some people are doing their part.
I worry about this too. I’ve always said and thought that I feel more like a citizen of the Internet then of my country, state, or town, so its history is important to me.
Yeah and unless someone has the exact knowledge of what hard drive to look for in a server rack somewhere, tracing an individual site’s contents that went 404 is practically impossible.
I wonder though if Cloud applications would be more robust than individual websites since they tend to be managed by larger organizations (AWS, Azure, etc).
Maybe we need a Svalbard Seed Vault extension just to house gigantic redundant RAID arrays. 😄
We’re actually well beyond RAID arrays. Google CEPH. It’s actually both super complicated and kind of simple to grow to really large storage amounts with LOTS of redundancy. It’s trickier for global scale redundancy, I think you’d need multiple clusters using something else to sync them.
I also always come back to some of the stuff freenet used to do in older versions where everyone who was a client also contributed disk space that was opaque to them, but kept a copy of what you went and looked at, and what you relayed via it for others. The more people looking at content, the more copies you ended up with in the system, and it would only lose data if no one was interested in it for some period of time.
This isn’t directly related to your comment, but you seem so smart, and I got to say that is definitely one thing I’m enjoying on this website over Reddit! :-)
Thanks _ I don’t consider myself brilliant or anything but I appreciate your compliment! The thing I like the most is that everyone is so friendly around here, yourself included ☺️
It’s important here to think about a few large issues with this data.
First Data Storage. Other people in here are talking about decentralizing and creating fully redundant arrays so multiple copies are always online and can be easily migrated from one storage tech to the next. There’s a lot of work here not just in getting all the data, but making sure it continues to move forward as we develop new technologies and new storage techniques. This won’t be a cheap endeavor, but it’s one we should try to keep up with. Hard drives die, bit rot happens. Even off, a spinning drive will fail, as will an SSD with time. CD’s I’ve written 15+ years ago aren’t 100% readable.
Second, there’s data organization. How can you find what you want later when all you have are images of systems, backups of databases, static flat files of websites? A lot of sites now require JavaScript and other browser operations to be able to view/use the site. You’ll just have a flat file with a bunch of rendered HTML, can you really still find the one you want? Search boxes wont work, API calls will fail without the real site up and running. Databases have to be restored to be queried and if they’re relational, who will know how to connect those dots?
Third, formats. Sort of like the previous, but what happens when JPG is deprecated in favor of something better? Can you currently open up that file you wrote in 1985? Will there still be a program available to decode it? We’ll have to back those up as well… along with the OSes that they run on. And if there’s no processors left that can run on, we’ll need emulators. Obviously standards are great here, we may not forget how to read a PCX or GIF or JPG file for a while, but more niche things will definitely fall by the wayside.
Fourth, Timescale. Can we keep this stuff for 50 yrs? 100 yrs? 1000 yrs? What happens when our great*30-grand-children want to find this info. We regularly find things from a few thousand years ago here on earth with archeological digsites and such. There’s a difference between backing something up for use in a few months, and for use in a few years, what about a few hundred or thousand? Data storage will be vastly different, as will processors and displays and such. … Or what happens in a Horizon Zero Dawn scenario where all the secrets are locked up in a vault of technology left to rot that no one knows how to use because we’ve nuked ourselves into regression.
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Actually I think TIFF or Adobe DNG are the lossless formats for photos.
TIFF is a classic storage format, but PNG is common for web images and isn’t going away either. DNG is for RAW sensor output from professional cameras and is not used for edited and published images. However if you’re archiving your photo collection or something than keep the DNGs!
There is an experimental storage format that can store large amounts of data in a fused quartz disc. The data will not degrade with time since the bits are physically burned into the quartz.
This is fascinating, I wonder if it’ll take off eventually
I think preservation is happening, the issue lies in accessibility. Projects like Archive.org are the public ones, but it is certain that private organizations are doing the same, just not making it public.
This is also something that is my biggest worry about the Fediverse. It has tools to deal with it, but they are self-contained. No search engine is crawling the Fediverse as far as I’ve looked, and no initiative to archive, index and overall make the content of the Fediverse accessible is currently in place, and that’s a big risk. I’m sure we will soon be seeing loss of information for this reason, if not already happened.
It’s still fairly new, I’m confident we’ll see fediverse crawlers before too long. Especially with all the attention it’s getting and more developers turning their interests here. I also saw some talk about instance mirroring that would allow backups should an instance go down. Things are in motion.
Absolutely a problem at the moment but I’m not too worried for the future tbh.
For my own stuff I try really hard to host it myself and the oldest still surviving thing is from 2003 and it’s still online https://paradies.jeena.net/artikel/webdesign
I don’t think it’s a problem. If everything or most of internet would be somehow preserved, future antropologists would have explonentially more material to go through, which will be impossible. Unless the number of antropologists grows exponentially, similarily how internet does. But then there’s a problem, if the amount of antropologists grow exponentially, it’s beceause the overall human population grows exponentially. If human population grows exponentially, then also its produced content on internet grows even more exponentialier.
You see, the content on the internet will always grow faster than the discipline of antropology. And it’s nothing new - think about all the lost “history” that was not preserved and we don’t know about. The good news is that the most important things will be preserved naturally.
the most important things will be preserved naturally.
I believe this is a fallacy. Things get preserved haphazardly or randomly, and “importance” is relative anyway.
In addition, who decides “importance”? Currently importance seems very tied to profitability, and knowledge is often not profitable.
It is relative, but it only takes one chain of transmission.
AskHistorians on Reddit had an answer about this. Stuff is flimsy but also really easy and cheap to make copies of now.
