Slashdot Mirror
We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories
Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.
First po
Wait, what were we talking abo
First Post!
and nothing of value was lost.
Archive.org has been doing this forever. Why is it taking other folks so long to do the same?
The Internet archive is (or was) meant to help ease this problem.
We also have sites like Furl that allow users to save a page for later.
The Google cache retains the contents of a site for a short time (that is, if it doesn't include noarchive tags)
Visitors to a site always have the option of saving a copy.
The issue isn't necessarily that copies don't exist, it's that there's no structured way that will ensure some copy of everything gets saved.
And when individuals "save" a copy of a website, there's no way that they make their saved copy available for historians to look at later.
The problem of personal archiving, declaring certain archives public, and making such snippets available has not been generally solved.
That's all I can say about that.
I wholeheartedly agree that there should be some mechanism for archiving millions, if not billions, of web pages. Someone should get right on that.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
How was history possible before email and the internet?
Well, for starters, I keep my memories in my head.. but if you're talking about records and history then I think copyright is a bigger culprit than digitization any day. Most of the culture of the 20th century is unavailable because the copyright holders have carte blanche to suppress it so it doesn't compete with their latest offerings.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Google - - archives
So, libraries have been charged with archiving web-sites... and? Libraries have been around for the introduction of newspapers, magazines, audio and video recording.
Someone, quick, post something insightful that will make me care about the centuries old story that libraries will archive whatever new medium comes along. This is even worse than the stories about how people break up over facebook. I mean, did Victorian newspapers run stories about how people would send "Dear John" letters by their new, fancy, twice-a-day postal service?
For some reason this topic has been on my mind lately. It's so true that paper is about the best way to preserve information. I hope a few libraries are printing out all the good stuff. But what about all the stuff that is going video now? Kinda freaky. And then again, what about all the TV and movie stock over all the decades that will be lost? Some of that stuff is really good... kinda worrisome isn't it? I mean, past human civilization isn't the most important thing ever. But some of it is pretty cool. And for nothing else, our offspring need to know a little history so they don't get stepped on by the rich and annoying.
The National Archives has versions up of all the Clinton White House pages. Here's one. I'm sure they'll get around to doing the same for Bush eventually. I seriously doubt the Obama team came in and pulled an 'rm -rf' on the old webpage.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website.
One could argue that was a good thing...
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
This is a very expensive undertaking. To archive all of the photos and videos alone would require massive disk space. Add to that the filtering of silly comments that are completely off-topic and you have one heck of a job. I'm glad someone's doing it, but does it have to be that detailed? we have far more data in our age than any other time in history.
Who can tell me where I come from? I have blood from all continents except Australia. But I would love to really know where I really come from.
Unlike other so called un-developed countries that have an unwritten code on how offspring are named, we have nothing of the sort. In these societies a similar surname automatically has meaning beyond just a simple relationship. It helps.
You find one Smith from Australia with no relationship to the Smith in Wales, who in turn has no relationship to the Smith in Zimbabwe. It's pathetic. So forgetting information has been going on for centuries folks. I wish I could reverse that.
...As always you managed to slip in the obligatory reference to your beloved Australia.
The National Archives has preserved the whole final state of the Bush White House site here: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
You have to cut down the noise somehow.
We don't need to save every teenager's text message.
I'm not willing to spend a lot of money to preserve my *own* memories. If they think it is so important, then they can kick in some money and free time to do it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
> Yeah, but who's archiving archive.org???
The turtles, of course. It's turtles all the way down.
Every era has suffered data loss. It isn't as though books never were damaged, papers never destroyed, etc. What's more, the ease of data generation has lead to far more useless data being generated. There is so much of it that really doesn't need to be preserved.
We are not headed for some disaster where we lose all our data. Rather we produce loads more and as with that there's going to be loads more crap as well as useful stuff. I mean while the actual website might have been taken down for the president, it isn't as though all records of him have gone.
The capitalists try to destoy our memory of Marx
It's not perfect by any means but the WayBack machine on Archive.Org can find some pretty old stuff. Scary stuff too. Like that time I was into...... er forget it...
Plus if the Whitehouse doesn't get your fancy... there is tons of Grateful Dead Music there as well.
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
I have been preserving all music I can come across so that I can maintain an accurate record of the music that my generation had, for my kids.
Of course, I would never listen to all these MP3s I have archived from the web, they are just there for historical purposes, I promise.
Most the web can just be forgotten. its junk.
Bush and the Olympics have official archives that may even be in print-- although Bush's is lacking bunches of "lost" information that wouldn't have gotten on the website anyhow.
WORTHY information should be archived just as before; possible to even print it to paper should we knock ourselves backwards technologically (hey, I'm being positive and hoping somebody survives besides the insects.)
Do we need to remember Obama girl? There is more than enough mainstream coverage of that being archived already...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Many of those Sydney 2000 Olympics websites would have been just ticket sales and general advertising. Much as I lament the transient nature of websites, a lot of it is just promotional material ... to pick a name at random: black-shoes.com is a typical no-content "spam" website. It is valueless today, let alone in the future.
Exactly, the idea that there will be LESS information surviving from our current torrent (hehe) of data is simply stupid. The fact is we have a limited view of history in the form of first person accounts because it was so expensive (both in terms of time and resources) to create a personal account of an event. Today we have say 10M blog entries about Obama's inauguration. Even if 1/10th of 1% of those are preserved that means we still have 10K accounts, how many surviving accounts of say FDR's inauguration do we have? My father has a handful of 8mm films from his childhood, my wife has boxes of VHS tapes and my kids will have hundreds of gigs of photos and movies of their childhood, each generation has more chances to save significant amounts of data because storing it is ever cheaper.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I believe Google has had an initiative where they basically save web pages at points in time, building up a history of the evolution of websites. While it is Google and not the government, this is still a prominent initiative to archive and maintain our internet heritage. Maybe someone can elaborate further on the details of this work?
There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games
That's hardly surprising, considering the fascist content restriction that was in action during / after the games. Good luck trying to get a replay of anything if it wasn't provided to you by your local television station the day it occurred. Any sites that were up during the games were nothing more than commentary and thus are largely irrelevant after the fact.
I record my sleeptalking
we certainly should preserve that memory. until we find yet lower watermark.
This is NOT news. This is exactly why I've been rather obsessed with saving the actual content of anything online that has value to me. The Web is VOLATILE, period... there is no built-in version control system on the Internet. The Wayback Machine and such is great, but it's an isolated exception. Saving merely links to interesting things for future reference is a solution doomed to eventual failure.
What this article discusses, BTW, is something that the Free Market cannot solve. What we're discussing here requires prescriptive socialistic behavior to avoid (or solve belatedly); there is no economic benefit for doing this (that I can perceive). Descriptive capitalistic behavior can't create the consensus required to get jobs like this done. This requires cooperation, not competition.
These archives always neglect the porn sites. Our knowledge of Rome would have been much diminished without the preserved brothels of Herculaneum and Pompei.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Bandwidth, disk space, servers required, I suppose. The Wayback Machine alone has 85 billion pages, occupying 2 PB, growing at 20TB/month.
Anyone knows how many LoCs is that?
If you really want to save 'memories,' just learn to use wget and start mirroring whatever you think is important. But you'll need to hire a few lawyers for copyright and other issues, find some investors (read idiots) to give you the money needed for a data center.
"My name is Roger Smith. I perform a much-needed job here in this city of amnesia.
"This place, Paradigm City, is a town of forgetfulness. One day, forty years ago, every person here lost all memory of anything which had occurred before that day. But humans are adaptable creatures. They make do and go on with life. If they're smart enough to figure out how to operate machinery and get electricity, they can still have something like a civilization even without a history. People can survive without knowing what did or didn't happen in the past, and each day they try their hardest to do just that. The only ones who regret the loss of these memories are the city's elderly. But memories, like nightmares, sometimes come when you least expect them."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Seriously...is anyone upset that all traces of the George W. Bush Whitehouse vanished? I think most people can agree, American or not, that we would all like to forget that as much as possible.
It is also strangely appropriate given so much other information regarding George W. Bush and his activities have vanished as well...
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Really, does anyone want to remember that eight-year nightmare?
Thank you, that was very well-said! The "official" versions of history often require a lot of reading between the lines, and when compared with other, first-hand information from the "common folk" can paint a much more clear picture of what was really going on.
While it will be daunting for future historians to sift through the vast amount of personal stories published in the 21st century, it will be invaluable in understanding life in our times.
You know, when robots dig our frozen corpses and archives out of the vast glaciers of the second great ice age and want to learn how to be more human.
The people in the White House are as eager to get rid of Bush as we are!
So I RTFA and I have several salient points to make. Firstly... uh. Um. Well it seems I've kinda forgotten what it's about, now that I think about it...
"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
Like those of us who voted for President Bush the first time to reverse the previous administration's policies (but really didn't), when will the Obama guys get frustrated when he fails to end the so-called "Patriot" Act and warrantless wiretapping which he supposedly opposed?
He will not, because the "Patriot" Act was composed in pieces by the Bush I/Clinton administrations. He already caved on the warrantless wiretapping so that's already a done deal.
This is great stuff, and I'm relieved to see it hit Slashdot.
I'm writing a speculative fiction book, and in that story I have introduced something called the "Preservation of Information Act," in which even cc camera logs are reduced to transcripts, and stored in low volatility storage mediums, which is cheap enough to do this. A whole new class of cataloging workers, Catalog Recognition And Preservation workers (jokingly called 'crap shooters') makes it possible.
Basically, they figure out that it is easier to keyword mine a transcript, than the video, and it is easier to just store and index *everything* to those text files, than to worry about the and ethical and legal issues of a "disappearing" and ephemeral data based culture.
The concept of privacy under POIA has become a very different thing. You have a right to privacy *only* if you don't cause trouble. If you become a "Person Of Interest" anything you have ever done can be called up in a wink, and that is the accepted norm.
Working title "Person of Disinterest." Thought I'd share with y'all.
Bravo on this story. We've got some ethics and consequences to sort out, and I'm not sure this book is going to remain "speculative" for very long at all.
--
Toro
Oh please. The "digital black hole" argument has been fodder on Slashdot for at least a decade. And it probably goes back to at least the 80's when users noticed that their floppy formats kept changing every few years and there wasn't always an easy and obvious way to migrate applications from one to the other.
As others have already pointed out, the government and many others are keeping full archives of whitehouse.gov. Archive.org, while admittedly not perfect, is another good example of a site that keeps snapshots of web content in perpetuity. Google has a huge index of more information than we can possibly imagine and while it may not be complete (no web archive solution can be), it's there and it will provide more than enough context for historians in the future. And these are not by any stretch the only ones scraping the web.
The digital black hole is 100% science fiction. Sure, you can find examples of applications, data, or websites that appear to have vanished completely but chances are exceedingly good that either you're wrong and weren't looking hard enough, or the content wasn't deemed important enough by anyone to keep around. Survival of the fittest applies to information as well.
And finally, it should be noted that we have the opposite problem of a digital black hole. That is, data which we don't necessarily want to be available publicly forever. When I was a teenager, I was quite active on mailing lists and IRC channels and I was simultaneously excited and dismayed that quite a lot of my old communication has survived in various forms. It's neat to look back and see what I wrote 10-15 years later, not so neat to discover the some of the things I wish I could now take back. (Thank goodness for disposable pseudonyms, at least.)
Yes, but I think the point is, can you play your VHS today? How about next year? And then the year after?
What about the poor sods who committed their memories to Betamax or laserdisc? I don't know whether any players for them exist anymore - too young to have seen them in action to be honest. I think that's the "technology black hole" they're worried about in TFA.
We're not doing so well on first-term memories either. Obama's version of http://whitehouse.org/ has no press room. There's a blog which is getting occasional press information, but no more daily briefing transcripts. There's no info on what happened in the Press Room on Tuesday, nor most of last week. And several days ago Obama stopped by the Press Room and chatted... but that's not mentioned on the official site.
It's been 15 years since the last Betamax tape deck was produced yet a quick ebay search brings up 100 hits right now, most are for tapes but there are quite a few decks for sale. Laserdisc is just as old and an ebay search for laserdisc player also results in over 100 hits today. This is not to mention that there are numerous commercial services that will convert your betamax tapes to DVD for you.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
information is biological from an evolutionary perspective: if it's not fit, it dies
I know it's a little dated but...how about just writing down what you want to keep?
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
But instead people are talking about it all at once, sometimes stridently or incoherently, always passionately, and from positions ranging from complete authority to total ignorance, as the case may be.
You must be new here. Welcome to the Slashdot, buddy. ;^)
--
Toro
How can I apply this removal technique to my biological memory of Bush also?
Table-ized A.I.
Thanks to Internet Pirates, a majority of the information and software lost was shared over BitTorrent networks.
I am sure they well documented what George W. Bush put on his website and what he did as President and put it into a PDF file named "GWB Legacy" or something. Maybe with a few MP3 files of his speeches and some video files as well. If not check with MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, Moveon.org and other Liberal organizations who backed that stuff up on microfilm and DAT storage tape and video backups. After all they all kept close eyes on George W. Bush during his eight years as President. Now that Barack Obama is President we got Fox News, Red State.com, Little Green Footballs, Lou Dobbs at CNNHL, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative organizations making record of everything that Barack Obama does as well.
Most of the "blogs" that covered Bush are still up and running with "copy and paste" or copypasta of what the whitehouse.gov web site put up, so you can pull the text from those Bush bashing blogs who cooked up some delicious copypasta along with some trolls who trolled liberals on Usenet and Internet forums by cooking up some copypasta from the Whitehouse to get knee-jerk reactions of liberals calling them morons and idiots for repeating what Bush and other neocons said.
The digital black hole happens because when a web site is changed, nobody bothers to back up the old data. Your best bet is Archive.org aka the Wayback Machine and hope they cached a copy of the web page there.
But most media usually finds its way on BitTorrent web sites. So when Microsoft stops selling Windows XP, you'll need a Demonoid invite code or invite code to some BitTorrent web site that offers a cracked version or be legal and use Windows Vista or Windows 7.0 instead and hope that the software you need gets rewritten for Vista and above, because the current software only works with Windows XP and not Vista and 7.0 and above.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
...of the scene from the original Rollerball movie, "we've lost the 16th century, oh the poor 16th century."
Maybe Google can remember The Bush Administration for us. I think the rest of us wold rather forget it as soon as possible.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What is the cost per terabyte these days?
How many seconds of, say, the Iraq war would that cost if the Library of Congress or the National Archives were to keep a backup or two in some salt mines somewhere?
Seastead this.
The "memories" of today have been better preserved than any generation before. In the past, only those wealthy, educated, and friendly to the current power got to "preserve" their memories.
Like the library that burned down and lost the records of my ancestors who immigrated to the US? Libraries like that?
Maybe information wasn't meant to last forever.
and as it is becoming cheaper, it is also becoming more brittle. This is true even with your example. 8mm film will outlast VHS tape which will outlast CDs / flash / hard drives.
Hmm, VHS vs 8mm I think VHS wins. Celluloid film tends to break down after 40-60 years if not stored in exactly the right conditions, the plastic tape that VHS tapes are made of should last forever in not exposed to extremes of heat, light, or moisture and the binding agent for the magnetic material should last quite a while. I know of plenty of VHS tapes that are older than I am (I'm 30).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Why do some people assume something is worse just because people die in it? The DMCA is a serious and possibly permanent threat to the freedom of not just the US citizens, but those abroad too, and as such a lot worse than a little natural disaster or a minor war.
And as my sibling posts point out (please mod them up) the democrats haven't been doing a lot better on that front either.
Elections: when the people decide which clique of rich people will rule them. Or perhaps rather: which clique is going to represent those who actually do run the country? Let's not pretend that the US is free of curruption. It doesn't matter who holds office, most senators have been bought anyway.
The right of first sale loses badly to the combination of DRM and the DMCA.
We can only hope that eventually most other media will follow the anti-DRM trend music is currently setting. But I doubt that it will ever happen to software. Music and video are different in that the consumer expects to be able to transfer them between umpteen zillions of different kinds of player hardware. Less so for video now, because of the price of video players relative to music players, and the size of video content relative to current storage technology.
I've always supported a law such that terminating a DRM activation server or discontinuing selling or licensing specific DRM technology requires releasing technology for consumers to unlock their bought media. Ditto with server-based multiuser games, the game marketer should be force to release server binaries, at the very minimum, if not server source code. And protocol documentation. And all this should be put in escrow at some kind of government agency before any sales can occur. And updated periodically if any of the software is patched over time.
>The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage
Now there's an oxymoron if ever I read one.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
computerization makes "looping" occuring at super speeds
pre-computerization = pre-historic times
online = historic times
web site offline = end of THAT worlds......
we make things occur virtually at the speed of light
before people start writing books about the state of the Internet. And as long as people write books about regular history, I don't mind if every comment I ever wrote on the Internet is forgotten.
Even assuming the data is captured and preserved in a reasonably indelible format, will it be really readible? There's alot of concern regarding physical formats, but little consideration to the greater problem the software and systems to read and process it. Preserve the data, but what about the software and systems to use it? Fortunately software emulation and visualization is probably the key here since one architecture can emulate another in a straightforward fashion. I presently virtualise old DOS apps from within a windows/linux machine. In the future I could virtualise any extra layer deep my old machines on whatever current platform and virtualisation software. So I'm not too concerned
I'm not surprised at the tone of complacency, something to consider is that the internet, as a cloud of data, has been around such a short time, we haven't really seen much old content start to disappear into oblivion, let alone start to worry about preserving it. Indeed popularity keeps things alive, links go dead when people don't care anymore. But there must already be a mind boggling large ammount lot of unique content that has vanished from the cloud, not to mention usenet & forums which may be sitting on backup tapes somewhere.
What we really need, is a international organization immune to (flawed) copyright and patent law that archives preserves data, documentation and most importantly software source code for future generations.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Just force each site admin to keep archives of all previous content.
and Wayback machine is your only hope !
somethings are best left unsaid , I am one of those things
Because when someone implements a thing poorly, others usually just say "that's been done" or "see? I knew it was a stupid idea." Few will actually spend the time to do it better, certain that they can convince the public their system is superior to the flawed one. Free Software is an exception here, which has been able to keep going, trying to convince people of an alternative, because it's largely independent of individual companies' profit margins.
Do we really have to archive everything? Does it serve a purpose, besides just wanting to do it because we can?
Seriously, I found that regarding my personal affairs, the less stuff I keep around, the better things work out. Yeah, every once in a blue moon I might need that e-mail from last month. But frankly, the damage of keeping thousands of mails I'll never look at again is higher than the damage of not finding an old one every now and then.
Same for physical papers.
Memorablia can be a nice touch to your flat, but if there are too many, they too burden you down. I'd rather get new things into my life than spending it managing all the old things.
And the one thing about the Web that I like is that it can be so easily changed, that I can go to the same URL every day and always get current information. That's what makes it more useful than a newspaper or most books, except for the convenience factor sometimes (books are still better to read than screens).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
.
Not necessarily A Good Thing. I mean, nothing is a complete failure, since it can always serve as a bad example...
When I get my 50 bucks from last summer?
Relax, it's all in the google cache.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
Socrates was getting his toga in a twist about writing as a new media causing forgetfulness.
This is the same kind of crap.
"this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust external written characters.." -Phaedrus
Strictly speaking when Barack Hussein Obama became President, not all George Walker Bush traces disappeared. Here's one. Indeed, all ex Presidents have some representation, including the arrogant incompetent inarticulate moronic lying ones.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
Welcome to Digital World. My wife is an archivist and family historian, and has been worried about similar things for years now. All of the digital cameras, digital documents, digital whatever are not being backed up in an archives safe manner. We will lose a large part of our personal as well as business history because of things not being backed up.
We both work a the local University, me in IT, she in Archives. I personally know of no plans to do anything about all of the syllabi, meeting minutes, and who knows what else that are not being stored somewhere. People don't bother to keep printed copies because it's on the computer. People delete things because "somebody has a printed copy somewhere", that gets tossed a year from now.
Yes, we will lose a generation or more of our history if we don't figure out good, open source (or at least well documented) means of storing things now. we already have, I'm sure.
... are doomed to repeat it. How can you learn if you can not read about it. Of course, that begs the question Does the student comprehend it? Nixon committed crimes by lying and covering it up. The dems fumbled vietnam by trying to control the war against the advice of top generals. Carter tried to control the rescue hostage situation to the point of telling the planners what equipment to take in. And reagan ran up monster deficits, had then the most corrupt admin of the last 100 years, ran up monster deficits, and allowed large amounts of pork on both sides of aisle while speaking against it.
ALL are sins of W in far worse degree which either means that he did not study at all (also indicated by his grades), or is means that he did learn what to cover up FIRST.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
we are dooooooooooooooooomed
oh wait, i think there were other olympics before the internet era. But...how can I possibly now if they existed, if there are no websites available today about it? perhaps there is another method that can be used to capture history...hmmmm
If the websites , all of them were set up to be able to sell memorabilia for the Olympics, who cares if they are down. If they were historical websites, I agree, but it should be more Google that could do a sort of historical cash.
If we keep them for the sake of information, and the information is questionable, also we tend to lose sight of the full picture. Wiki will always be up, so putting the Olympic information there is a safe guard, instead of relying on mom and pop websites.
This is really old news -- see the 1961 (!) short story by Hal Draper: MS Fnd in a Lbry
Fortunately (or not), the problem is only with information. Knowledge and wisdom do not seem to increase at the same exponential rate. Or at all ....
When lost memories and black holes were mentioned... all I could think about was me trying not to remember the black hole of goats.ex.
Things of value will always be duplicated and treated with more respect. There will be some families that lose critical photos and stuff due to poor backup practices but that will correct itself with time.
Seems to me we're probably keeping a lot more ephemeral data around than ever before, IMs, SMS messages, emails with context that will be lost to history.
nobody has ever remembered anything that wasn't on a website. Without the web, we'd have to invent some other way to preserve our collective memory. Perhaps some sort of flat, fiber based non-volatile memory with pigment-based markings.
All trace of who disappeared?
The whitehouse.gov archive is hosted by the National Archives at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
Is a waste of space anyway.
Seriously, how important is it in the grand scheme of mankind's history that Brittany shaved her hair, or OJ got away with murder.. Or that the MPAA and ASCAP wont let us copy 'hey Jude'.
The important stuff will be just fine and be passed along. ( if we don't extinguish ourselves first )
Sure, 15 years later.... What about 500 years from now?
Ya sure, maybe there is more to lose now with the internet, but we're not really going to forget more than before. There is still print news (for now) and TV news, both of which I am sure are properly archived. Yes there is a new medium and it would be valuable to archive this, but we're not at risk of forgetting history.
First post! (just in case I am...)
That's OK, Bush only looked good in IE6 anyway
I'm thinking that there is still plenty of evidence of the 8 year administration of GWB without the tightly controlled version provided by the offical whitehouse site. PLus, doesn't Google cache everything forever?
Keep passing the open windows...
Nature abhors a naked Singularity. Perhaps this is a necessary step for humanity to reach the Singularity. An event horizon must form across which no information can pass.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
"all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website"
And this is bad, why?
We just need Slashdot editors to repost this next week as a new story, and we'll be good.
-Styopa
"As soon as something stops being available for sale (or maybe after some reasonable time, like a couple months), then it should enter the public domain."
A good idea for popular works (e.g. cool movies or video games) but as other posts have noted, these are not necessarily the information resources we might find valuable in the future. More likely to be highly specialised data from an Earth Sciences laboratory (future research into global warming), tax returns for a large population (economics advisors trying to predict the future based on past activities) and obscure census information (trying to find out where famous people lived and worked: famous in the future but possibly insignificant right now).
I understand you might willing to store 1000 cool movies and underground music tracks at home, but would you volunteer to store a couple of terabytes of tax returns from Belgium or census returns from Kazahkstan for the benefit of humanity?
Main issue is a formal storage procedure and resources to do so on national and international levels.
... when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website.
Ah, hmm... we're in danger of forgetting George W. Bush?
I can't quite figure out the downside.
My bicyles
We've never preserved 100% of everything that happened. In fact, historically, only very select information has survived. Now, even if only 0.0001% of all the digital information survives, that will be more information than from any earlier time in history.
I couldn't give a damn whether any of those 150 web sites about the 2000 Olympics survive. There's probably more printed materials alone on the 2000 Olympics than any previous Olympics, and in addition, there's a lot of preserved digital information. Ditto for George W Bush.
We can agree that electronic recording of history tends to be temporary. But consider the alternatives. There are no long term compatibility plans for data storage. So any media we use will need to be replaced every few years at an astoundingly high cost.
Then we have the standard, time honored, method.We could print everything out on acid free paper and store it in a special inert gas, environment. Obviously that would take every tree on the planet to provide paper pulp and the pollution would be overwhelming.
The point being that we have absolutely no way of storing the amount of data that modern recordings can produce for any substantial period of time.
What about the redacted bits?
They are Quantum Bits so they are in all possible states at any one time. They only become real bits when Darth Cheney inputs the correct Quantum Entangled Key to unlock them setting them to whatever he wants to rewrite history as the need arises during his upcoming War Crimes trial.
When Darth Cheney was in "an undisclosed location" did he still exist? Unfortunately yes...
Yeah, but that's part of his point. You have so many people recording something that even if only a small fraction of the stuff survives, you'll still have tons of copies. It's like if 10 million people recorded Reagan's inauguration on their VHS/Betamax machines back in 1980. Even if only only a fraction of a percent of these recordings survive by being transfered to new media, we'd still have hundreds if not thousands of copies.
The switch to non-paper, non-printed records must be accelerated, if anything. We must be able to forget the past and move forward.
Too many things in the past are inconvenient, unpleasant, ugly, and horrid. Many mistakes were made, even by right-thinking and well-intentioned people. It serves no purpose to those memories and regrets.
There are a lot of things that are best forgotten: The Holocaust, the Crusades, George Bush, The fall of the Soviet Union, et cetera.
If there must be a past, then change it into something better. Rewrite it and make all the bad things go away. It is very easy as long as everything is not printed.
Perhaps there might be a true record kept but it should not be made public, accessible to the masses. It will serve no good purpose for the masses to know the truth and inconvenient for the leadership. It will only serve to hinder progress with needless comparisons and deceptions.
Eliminate paper, keep everything on computers where anything can be kept hidden or changed as necessary to serve our enlightened leaders' purposes.
Actually, NOT! Keeping everything on computers is a really , really stupid idea.
me. --a by-product of public education
This is really a problem that keeps me awake at night, and archive.org doesn't make me feel any better. Look back ten years and see what storage media the world was using. In 300 years or 1000 years, will they even know what voltage of AC electricity to feed to the machines we used? If they are lucky enough to have some physical exemplar of these, it certainly won't be working, and the "cloud" will of course be long dissipated. What's worse, the storage media we have are not all that well-equipped to survive that long.
The US deficit spiralled out of control during his mandate, mostly by feeding the makers of military equipment.
You guys in the US have a monumental moral problem: you are making a living out of the misery of other people. Many of you take a pay cheque after helping build some of the most detestable weapons humankind has known, and your economy is heavily reliant on that kind of industry.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
SDI was pork barrel for the military industry.
There was only one country that may have been capable of using space for nuclear strikes, the USSR, so SDI was not conceived to act as a deterrent for crackpots as you put it.
Most importantly the idea was flawed since there was no way to guarantee the system would work.
Any approach to security different from stopping nuclear proliferation is snake oil.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
UNT's CyberCemetery to preserve Internet sites from Bush administration
See http://web3.unt.edu/news/story.cfm?story=11317
Your point (A) is perfectly correct, yet totally unconnected to the efficacy (or lack thereof) of DRM. There also do not exist unbreakable cryptosystems, yet this does not prevent cryptography from being useful. Why? Because risk/security is not a binary concept in the real world, it is a relative, economic one. If breaking a particular DRM system would cost more than the economic benefit to the breaker, it is unlikely to happen, assuming it has significant costs to do so, as some hardware-based DRM systems have.
Your point (B) is perfectly correct also. The DMCA only makes breaking DRM schemes more expensive (see above) because of higher risks.
If you reread my post, I do not connect the DMCA with fair use full-work copying as initially put out in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., supported in Recording Indus. Ass'n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc., and echoed in part (for literary works) in the explicit exceptions to the DMCA.
My observation was that distribution of a space-shifted copy, even to one's heirs, is not necessarily supported by the wording "Such copying is a paradigmatic noncommercial personal use." (emphasis mine) used in Recording Indus. Ass'n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc. AFAIK, the courts have not decided this issue, as it has not come to trial, and a simple reading of the decision, I claim, would not seem to support such distribution.
Interesting. Why don't you do your own 10 minutes of research before replying, next time?
"compilations of portions"
I fail to see how this is going to help to preserve full-length works, eh? LOL
So the assertion that little snippits of everyday
detritus are of value to the not so casual
archeologist or anthropologist. Some here even
claim that possibly preserving text messaging
"content" is of value.
I look at the completely polarized opinions posted
here from those who claim to be neutral (I have my
doubts) as well as those that are unabashedly
partesan, and I know that if this particular
Slashdot post and the ensuing discussion were
to be analyzed by some hapless archeologist
or anthropologist, they would be completely unable
to discern the truth about history, much less the
quality of any of the presidents discussed here.
...Unfortunately you missed the first half where all DRM of any significance has and will continue to be circumvented.
No, I largely ceded the point to you, and presented an argument which is based on the gray area of the legal uses of space-shifted content. You're just not listening.
And even if the librarian of congress never decides to legalize, carte blanche archival, as he is required to consider every 3 years under 17.1201.1, the DMCA only applies to the US not the rest of the world where almost all other countries are free to bypass DRM as they wish, nor is cracking at the digital level required for historical purposes, echo, echo.
And now even ignore yourself, as you correctly stated (and also I totally agreed with you) that the DMCA has nothing to do with fair use copying and space-shifting.
Let me summarize the argument up to now.
After I replied with "DRM + DMCA" to your "right of first sale", I conceded that point to you, and presented the following argument which you haven't considered at all.