Digital Dark Ages?

angkor writes "The digital dark age--Will all the information from this computer age slowly vanish as our delicate hardrives expire? That's what it looks like. Better start printing everything out."

Comments

This Is An Ancient Problem

[sqlzealot]

The problem of saving old data has existed as long as there has been writing. More than 90% of the works of ancient the more famous Roman or Greek authors have vanished, to say nothing of the more lesser known writers. We know this because they are mentioned in other texts but the actual text is lost.

The solution to both saving ancient works on paper can work just as well for digital media. Keep copying the work to the latest storage media! None of the original texts that we do have have survied. They are all copies made from generation to generation. Thus with digital media. The best of the web (lets say, research articles) will be preserved and transferred to new storage media as it develops. Your blog about your day at the beach prolly won't.

Re:No because...

[analog_line]

You obviously haven't been on an archaelogical expidition ever. Most of what archaeologists and the anthropologists who tag along with them are concerned with, is the trash of past societies and cultures. Most often, the shards of pottery that they laboriously extract from the ground are in so many shards because they were discarded by their original owners/makers.

Your trash says an awful lot about you, as does the random splay of stuff strewn around your room. Future archaeologists may not be interested in the porn on your hard drive (unless they have to dig it out), but future anthropologists would find it very interesting (and not in the normal manner people find porn interesting, though that may be there too, never know). It says alot about you, an inhabitant of wherever you are, living in the year 2002, as does all the collected sundry data on your drive. It may certainly seem boring as hell to anyone else, but historians and anthropologists can get a whole lot of useful information out of it. It's no less boring than reading through book after book, or letter after letter in the dead tree sense, and in some ways it's alot easier, as you can't write a regular expression to pull whatever interesting tidbits you are looking for out of a book.

Hard drive DRM - consequences

[DaveWood]

There are several ways this could go. Obviously, we have to be circumspect, since the U.S. gov't is literally considering copy-control legislation that would make Linux illegal.

You can say it'll never succeed - won't all Linux's rich patrons prevent it? But I would have said the same about quite a few other things that have already happened... and it's in our interests to act as thought it might.

However, assuming something slightly less than the worst, DRM will of necessity be something which you can enable or not. IOW, as long as they'll let you, buy all the fast, new DRM drives you want, and use Linux to run them. Linux will simply ignore the DRM features and use the drive normally.

The problems come when you're forced to use a DRM operating system with your DRM hardware (quite a reversal from the old antitrust days, eh?); you will find it very difficult to take some/all of your data back to Linux/other non-DRM OS.

You can probably see why MS loves this now; DRM technologies, even optional ones, will have the nice effect of preventing interoperability with open source operating systems, thereby locking everyone in even further. Let alone the myriad other possibilities for abuse, censorship, and bottlenecking...

If we allow our government to do this, both in the context of MS's current status as a monopolist, and in the ongoing (anti-) regulation of the media industries, we are doing the gravest disservice to future generations.

Eon-long sotrage options...

[Lumpy]

first, we need to think logically.. Every bit of information we have discovered that is aincent was discovered by sheer luck and accident. NOONE back in 985 BC set aside the stone tablets thinking that "someone will want to read this in 3000 years. EVERYTHING we find out about the past has been accidental. Nothing has ever been intentional archives preserved for the distant future.... If there were we might have a whole bunch more knowledge than we do today. (we re-invent things every 50 years.. because we lose how it was done 100 years ago.. My great grandfather's workshop was filled with things that were over 100 years old yet I have seen marketed today as "A TOOL BREAKTHROUGH! The Self Ajdusting wrench!")

I take EVERY digital photograph I shoot and burn it to CDROM. nothing ever get's deleted in my photography.... Even the blurry shots of the floor (Hey it might make a good background) Granted, CDROM's will be non-existant in 20 years.. but it's replacement will be here BEFORE it goes away.... so I transfer it... or my kids will or my grandchildren... Just like how I transferred my parent's and grandparents legacy media to current (Film, photos, Encode a Edison phonograph tube to mp3.... etc...)

It takes PEOPLE to make information survive... no magical device or media will.

Re:Ferrous based magnetic tapes last FOREVER!

[AnalogBoy]

Floppy Disks.

Yes, They will still be 1.44 MB. They will still be included in all computers. They will still work slowly. But they're reliable! And they will still use FAT12..

*gag* isn't it time this particular media format died

File formats are the core problem

[tomem]

Hardware isn't really a problem. Anything important can be put on a CD-ROM and preserved for eternity with some confidence; except that today the files may largely be in proprietary unpublished formats (e.g., just about any common format you use) that will take significant effort to read fully at an arbitrary point in the future.

The solution is straightforward and well underway, courtesy of the internet and WWW: published open data formats. The only reason for using a proprietary format these days is the effort that software makers put us through to do otherwise. Have you gotten tired of dismissing MS Word's objections to the use of RTF yet?

When we just say no to software that uses anything but open published formats, we'll get the software we need.

The digital dark age is about to begin...

[SaturnTim]

Now, sure things are stored on HD's, but they are easly copied to new media... such as DVD-roms, etc. Any technology today has to be able to take data currently written to a HD.

But here comes "Digital Rights Management" or DRM. a hardware and software based double punch to our fair use rights. This is what could prevent us from making back-ups, keep us from moving to new forms of media.
It is the beginning of the digital dark age.

--T

Pretty ridiculous...

[binarybits]

I think these folks misunderestimate the sheer volume of information we have collected about ourselves. Modern historians have been able to piece together a more or less complete history of the Greek and Roman worlds 2500 years ago using a few thousand written documents and archeological digs. We have more information than we can possibly process for every era of American history for at least 200 years back.

So yes, 99.99% of all information in existence today will probaly be lost 1000 years from now. The remaining .01% will still probably dwarf the information we currently posess about the world 1000 years from now.

For starters, we still publish about as many books as any other society in history. There are books available on literally every topic available, and most of them have thousands of copies in circulation. So imagine that 99.9% of all books are nuked, chances are the majority of those books will still survive, and historians only need 1 copy to make use of it.

Finally, this article massively underestimates how easy it is to preserve digital information. 10 years from now, terrabyte hard drives will be commonplace, and no doubt second-generation DVD-R's will hold tens of gigabytes of data. All you have to do is copy those files en masse to the latest format every 10 or 20 years, and you've preserved the information. One person can do that in his spare time quite easily. Furthermore, file formats aren't *that* hard to reverse-engineer. Even if the world forgot what a Microsoft Word document looked like (which is extremely unlikely) they should be able to look at the raw data and figure it out well enough to at least read the plaintext. And I doubt we'll ever forget what ASCII means.

As for people losing their personal correspondance-- perhaps 99.99% of people will lose their email correspondance at some point in their lives. So in a nation of 300 million people, that leaves only 30,000 complete email correspondances for future historians to peruse. Imagine how much we'd know about Greek or Roman times if we had the complete correspondance of 30,000 average Greek or Roman citizens...

In conclusion, I think quite the opposite is true. Historians 1000 years from now will have more material than they can possibly process about the early 21st century. The trick will be in assimilating all that information into something useful, not finding enough to work with.

Re:Problems are legal, not technical

[HiThere]

Not entirely. 20 years ago, perhaps 30 by now, we wrote a bunch of specialized census information onto 556 BPI 7-track odd parity tapes, and some onto 556 BPI 7-track even parity tapes. And some tapes that were mixed mode, with specialized software to read them. The IBM 7094 goes away, and we switch to an emulator running on a 360. Slowly, and without much plan, we start switching over to programs that run native on the 360. Finally there's OS change, and the emulator goes away (i.e., we aren't willing to pay the service bureau enough to keep it's license current). Some of the tapes haven't been converted yet, but that's no problem. 7-Track tapes are a long established standard, and everyone has a bunch of drives, even though the new 9-Track drives can't read them. Put the tapes into storage. Fast forward a decade. Lots of the documentation has been lost, but surely we could read them if we needed to. Another decade .. it turns out that tapes become unreadable if left to themselves even in a temperature controlled vault, we'd better pull them out an check, probably copy them all over. But where do we find a 7-track tape drive? There are a few places, but nobody even half-way close. And they're expensive. And we don't really know for sure that we can read the tapes. And ... we dither. But we aren't really paying much attention to the problem either, we just aren't deciding what to do, so we keep the tapes in storage while the number of 7-track tape drives dwindles, and the magnetic domains become weaker, and the documentation becomes sparser....

So when it comes time to do a time series study, 1960 doesn't get included. Nobody knows how to get at the information. Or whether or not it even still exists.

There may be legal problems, but there are also both organizational and technical problems. And they are all significant. In this case all of the factors would have needed to cooperate to get the problem solved. And to maintain their cooperation over time.

And we still don't know how important the loss of that data was. We may never know. It could have been worth multiple millions, or nothing. We can't even tell. So everyone is just ignoring the event, because it's too uncomfortable to think about. And while we ignore it, there are the tape cartridges from an IBM 3330 that are sitting around in storage, because somebody wanted them cleared off his desk. And that kind of tape cartridge was only in use for a few years, and was never widely popular. Nobody knows what's on those cartridges, but it probably isn't as important as the census data might have been. And it's probably unreadable too. And I have a box of 5 1/4 single density floppies that have the original source code for one of our major projects. If there is a version that got converted, I don't know where it is. And I don't have a 5 1/4 inch drive. When I got them, I has a Mac (made great sense to give them to me, huh?), and by the time I was coerced into a PC, the PCs only had 3 1/2 inch drives. So it never made sense for me to have them, and I don't even use the project. But I have the only copy that I know about. Maybe it won't be important.

Data is already evaporating right and left. I see it happening every day. Most times it doesn't matter much, but you can't always tell at the time. And often the reasons that it evaporates are technical. And organizational. Legal problems are rarely the issue, though they can be in unusual circumstances, like proprietary software that the company stops maintaining for some reason (like going out of business).

What a piece of reactionary fluff

[forkboy]

I mean, not to flame this guy, but his mom loses some email and suddenly there's going to be a time where all digital information stored on hard drives is lost?

Jesus, it's not like every hard drive on the planet is going to die simultaneously at an unknown future date....and in the meantime, new hard drives are manufactured and new storage media ara invented, did it ever occur to him that people might migrate their data along the way?

Horrible, horrible article.