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Europeans Bury "Digital DNA" Inside a Mountain
adeelarshad82 writes "In a secret bunker deep in the Swiss Alps, European researchers deposited a 'digital genome' that will provide the blueprint for future generations to read data stored using defunct technology. The sealed box containing the key to unpick defunct digital formats will be locked away for the next quarter of a century behind a 3-1/2 ton door strong enough to resist nuclear attack at the data storage facility, known as the Swiss Fort Knox. The capsule is the culmination of the four-year 'Planets' project, which draws on the expertise of 16 European libraries, archives, and research institutions, to preserve the world's digital assets as hardware and software is superseded at a blistering pace. The project hopes to preserve 'data DNA,' the information and tools required to access and read historical digital material and prevent digital memory loss into the next century."
Future generations of purist can use it as a reference for "cleansings".
Would it have killed you to include the slightest mention of what "the key to unpick defunct digital formats" is in an article discussing how the Europeans have stashed one away?
If we are taking such precautions to insure that this data key will not be destroyed, would not in the worst case scenario virtually every piece of data that ISN'T buried under a mountain be gone too?
"The sealed box containing the key to unpick defunct digital formats will be locked away for the next quarter of a century behind a 3-1/2 ton door"..."the information and tools required to access and read historical digital material and prevent digital memory loss into the next century."
Perhaps they should include the calculations they used to equate 25 years with 90 years.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
What if future generations never find it after the apocalypse? After all, it is in a secret bunker deep in the Swiss Alps
So, will it include information on how to crack AACS and CSS? No wonder they are locking the door until we have a new format...
I think the "key" they're talking about, is basically a file format descriptor. Basically they're storing the opposite of what the patent-infringement-lobby in Hollywood (see: Why they went to California instead of paying Edison Company) does. Basically the anti-DRM.
Do they have Ogg Theora? I ask because I have some videos I transcoded a year or two ago and....
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Always been wondering what those Swiss are doing under those mountains. Storing information about data formats, sure. This is propaganda straight from Them - They want you to believe this to secure what is *really* down there. Data formats, right - They could as well hang out a sign reading "The content of this underground bunker complex is BORING. Don't go there, you'd only waste your time." Something up in Their propaganda department lately? I am used to better work.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's been done before, in various guises. The BBC Domesday project springs to mind, and numerous digital timecapsules.
It seems to me that such projects have a lot in common with SETI searches - somehow providing information to someone who may not have the capability to decode it until they understand the entire message anyway. It always gets me that in such projects they don't do simple things before they lock stuff away, or send a message, like: give a bunch of (non-computing) students the devices / data and don't tell them what it is, how it works. Make sure they've never heard of the project you're working on, then lock them in a room with the data / devices and see what they do. If they can't decode it completely, your project is too elaborate and will not meet its aims. If they only decode it because of their knowledge of the area, then get someone else. Until an average mathematician / physicist / whatever can decode it, it's too complicated to be decoded by a post-nuclear generation and / or ET considering their inherent communication problems in some circumstances anyway.
I have a good feeling that the Voyager golden records would never be completely decoded in such circumstances.
Does this include the DRM keys to all the defunct DRM schemes that were supposed to let you access the songs, video and books that you had bought, but went out of business and took the keys to your data with them! Or is this just a copy of the DVD Rebook and other such information on the various and sundry formats!
I guess they will stash a copy of AnyDVD somewhere in the vault as well...
Did they remember to include information on how to read the BBC Doomsday project laserdiscs?
I believe the required laserdisc players went out of production something more than 10 years ago and spare parts stopped being manufactured something like 5 years ago.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
...pretty much everything today can be stored on a home server in 8yrs.
With distributed technology, cloud servers, and bit torrent, to spend a few million to store a few formats and keycodes on moving tectonic plates seems a bit illogical. Humans didn't do it 10000 years ago and we still figured out what happened back then.
We have heard of cloning by grabbing the DNA from a cell and putting it into an embryo or stem cell or whatever. But have we ever sequenced DNA, transferred the data, used it to replicate a DNA molecule, and then make a living organism from it? If we can do that, then recording DNA is good. If we can't, perhaps we ought to first work on the restoration process. We could literally seed and populate distant worlds with DNA from our planet by building a tiny factory with a database and sending it out to land on various planets in other star systems and galaxies.
I can just imaging after the next war / asteroid / depression / pandemic all these people standing outside this massive steel door, wondering what the hell was inside it?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Let the great age of Apple IIe emulation last forevermore.
In twenty-five years, there will be no way to decode the data format they used to store their data about decoding data formats. :P
we may as well have decided to pack unicorn farts into old lorries and drive them through candy mountain to the fairy princess....apply the word 'digital' 'cloud' or 'virtualization' anywhere in the aformentioned statement you feel it will produce the most revenue.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Since TFA was a bit light on the details, who wants to do some speculating on how they would preserve digital data for the long term?
With modern CNC/rapid prototyping tech, stone or fired clay tablets could actually be surprisingly painless, if still rather bulky. Printing with good toner on high quality paper(or something paper-esque but more durable, like Tyvek) would last pretty well, and be a lot smaller.
The more important decision would probably be how to express yourself: You'd probably want to use common world languages and math as much as possible. If you have to include binaries, you might even describe your own simple VM. If you needed better storage density, you could plaintext a description of, say, a barcode format, assuming that the future will have optical sensors good enough for the purpose, and then store the rest as barcodes printed/etched onto tablets...
to hide the pass key to the door somewhere safe.
This is mostly a joke, but not 100% a joke. I sincerely hope it's not true. However, the thought occurs to me that maybe this "key" is nothing more than, say, a copy of Windows 98 on floppy discs. Seriously, without more information about this supposed "key" we have no way to know if those involved actually did include something that might really be useful to future generations who want to get at the data or if they did something as stupid as what I suggested.
The only flaw in their plan: the documents describing how to read these formats are stored on eight-inch floppies.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
In 3010 AD, archaeologists discovered a sealed vault hidden deep under the Earth - full of technologies that are defective by design, algorithms engineered to restrict the users on how they can enjoy their own media, even rootkits disguised as music CDs.
What did they find? DRM Hell.
Perhaps even a mountain range with stored keys. A single cosmic meteor could take out a mountain with no redundancy.
The internet was initially designed to keep working in the event of a nuclear war, as it avoids having a single point of failure. Why not do the same with the "digital genome"? Distribute the "capsule" amongst thousands - millions? - of computers and update it every few months or so. Invite volunteers to participate SETI@Home style. Each participating PC / smartphone / game console / etc. etc. could hold manageable portions if it that could be readily reassembled. Store copies offline in the storage media of your choice. Deposit the instructions on assembling and using the capsule in both digital format, paper, and microfiche in libraries worldwide.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I've been thinking about long term storage solutions for a while, and if we're looking at solutions that would survive floods, EMPs etc., pretty much all methods we have available today are done for. Also they require access to readers that may be ruined for whatever reasons.
Essentially I keep coming back to punch-cards or similar. Not into paper, but into something like anodized titanium. The colour spectrum available there could allow something like 4 or 8 bit encoding per dot. Not entirely sure about how small you can make the dots, nor how close together you can put them if you want more than just two colours.
It'd be somewhat human readable, in that you just need a microscope to view the dots, and then it's just the usual translation method of course. And you could store a simple "dictionary" of cards with large dots + words/characters to make it easy to translate (a Rosetta Stone). And since it's titanium it's unlikely to be affected by the usual disasters. It doesn't melt until 1,668 C, so it's probably going to be quite stable in most types of fires, it pretty resistant to acids, the anodizing should go through the metal, so even sandblasting it won't remove the information (unless you cut through it of course).
Depending on the size of the dots, I think you could even make a simple credit card sized object, that you could show to a web cam to use as a private key for private/public key encryption, logging on to your workstation, getting in to a secure facility and so on.
And if done properly, you could probably disguise the key if necessary. You can already get custom backs/covers for your iPod/iPhone. Why not get one with this kind of back on it? Hide the key via something like steganography, making every n pixel a part of the key.
for one, I highly doubt that documentation for existing format will disappear, especially in an increasingly connected world where digital versions of documentations allow copying multiple times of that documentation in a perfect way in many different location... this is better-and-more-redundant-than-raid storage.
further, let's suppose that some catastrophe destroys the file format spec... well there is a high probability that the data will be destroyed too
even further... I highly doubt that the same brilliant minds that dwelve in the crypto analysis realm would not be able to reverse engineer simple formats if it came to that.
further, the library would be obsolete if it is not continuously updated
now, having multiple redundant copies of the library of congress (and other countries equivalents) at several locations (including file format), continuously being updated, that's something we could strive for... especially since storage is becoming cheaper. we just need to make sure it is stored on a durable storage medium
ideally we'd include storage somewhere off the planet, that way even if a disaster messed up all our archive on earth, future generations would be able to retrieve it
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
at the data storage facility, known as the Swiss Fort Knox.
When I read that, I immediately thought that must be journalist speak with the intelligence level turned way down for the mass media. However, it seems to really exist:
http://www.swissfortknox.ch/swissfortknox-english/index.html
"highest protection against ... " Blah blah blah long list of unlikely events. But it seems to exclude the extremely likely event of landslides and avalanches.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Vatican library closed, library books being sent down to mines, seed banks and DNA in mountains. Must be pretty bad, whatever is coming! ;-)
Those future alien researchers will recognize that the key is stored in ADF, as 880% of the alternate universes settled on the Amiga as platform of choice about 2.8 billion years ago. The earthly phenomenon of the Amiga was actually an accidental technology transfer brought about by a bizarre gardening accident.
Researchers reported that the combination to the door has been misplaced, possibly inside the vault itself. When asked, the grad-student replied, "Dude, I though you had it."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Single safe = single point of failure. Distribute the information as noncoding dna in the genomes of cockroaches. That'll last.
Crystal skull anyone?
The Long Now Foundation is thinking about and working on projects like The Rosetta Disk, which crams a bunch of languages onto a 4 inch metal disk. "This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation. The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’" That's just part of their "10,000 year library."
"Digital DNA" I don't know if I should snicker or barf. Hey Reuters, Don't give up your day job... Uh oh.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
I was at my parents' house over the weekend helping clean out the garage, and we found boxes and boxes of 5.25 and 3.5 floppies, in single, double, and high density, containing all kinds of memories of my childhood, including hundreds of disks of files I downloaded from BBSes, utilities, programs, games, school papers written in Deskmate and Scripsit (on my COCO3!), and so on.
I've spent the last 3 days trying to recover data from them, but only about 5% of the disks are still readable. I wish I had done something like this as technology advanced over the years. I currently have all of my data going back to about 1996... but not much before that.
The summary says they are trying to preserve data into the next century. It seems to me if you want to ensure the availability of information into the next century, the least efficient thing you could do is lock it in a highly-protected vault deep under a mountain that nobody can get to. Instead you ought to be distributing the information far and wide in as many formats as possible. Post it on Wikipedia and various other sites that are likely to be preserved and distributed themselves. Print lots of physical copies and put them in all the libraries around the world. Otherwise you're just hoarding it.
I've buried DNA inside a mountain before too - isn't that your job when you're the wingman?
Do they know something we don't know?
How the hell they're going to open the bunker?
They talk of digital DNA as if that's in contrast to biological DNA being analog or something, but DNA is digital, represented in quaternary (base 4).
... in the form of my C64, and Apple IIe. They are 25 years old, still work, and their floppies still work.
And via emulators I can access the same programs on my modern computer. In fact, I have all the software released for both those platforms (and others).
Sorry, 25 years isn't that big of a deal.
Be seeing you...
Vaporize Planet Earth.
There, problem solved.
Non-supporter of Online Activation and any other draconian DRM
...with more digital data. Because all digital media becomes obsolete, it is impossible to guarantee that hardware will be extant at the point in the future when you wish to read the data. It may even be the case that the media is no longer even recognizable by future generations as something that contains information. How many 10 year olds can identify a potential information source simply by looking at an 8-inch floppy?
No, the *only* way to back up digital information is to make it non-digital - i.e. to make it eye-readable by a human. Think paper or perhaps microfilm. Stone. Clay tablets. These things are even today instantly recognizable as a means of storing information, even when the actual language has fallen into disuse. Once it has been recognized as an important source of information (think hieroglyphics), humans will expend effort to decipher the data. But it must be recognized as an information source first, and no digital medium meets that criteria over the long term.
Digital media does not store information, it simply acts as a slow conveyance mechanism to the next conveyance mechanism (think transfers from bus to train to plane), and if the cycle is interrupted, the data is lost.
I would think that it would be more productive to put a copy of this "digital key" online as a community accessible and editable (with moderation) resource. Open source programs that read these old formats (i.e., a library of sorts), ASCII documentation on each one, schematics of reference hardware, and the fostering of a community to maintain such a library (perhaps with funding) would probably go a longer way to ensure that an *.odt or *.xlsx document from today is still easily readable in 25 years.
That being said, good paper documentation is probably good too.
(I'm afraid my password protected FREDWriter documents on AppleII disks from 198* are long gone even if I could find the disks...)
So in order to provide information to future generations, this generation's laws had to be somewhat ignored.
Thankfully, the whole thing is happening in Switzerland.
Given the backup/archival/musem nature of the project, it might be tolerated under the fair-use provision of the swiss copyright law.
And according the local DMCA-clone, if it is done in order to produce a legal copy, you're free to break any DRM standing in your way.
(although I find the legality of providing tools for such protection-removal ambiguous due to bad wording).
For software patents the situation seems to me less clear, although some of them are indeed prevented.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Oh this is all well and good to bury a digital copy of prized data.. What happens when everyone forgets it exists. Is anyone going around and passing out titanium plates with maps of where this data is to all libraries for the future?
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.