Slashdot Mirror
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libraries, archives, and research institutions, to preserve the world's digital assets as hardware and software is superseded at a blistering pace.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."
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
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!
...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.
Let's be real here. We're doing this so that anthropologists from other spacefaring civilizations will be able to read all the stories about us plowing ourselves to hell.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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
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...
Ok, but this begs a simple question: how is the information describing the file formats itself encoded?
It's printed on surplus thermal fax paper from the 70's. That stuff will last forever!
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.
Let's just say that you wouldn't want Monsanto's license server to go offline...
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.
Well, naturally we'll also archive a copy of all the Rosetta Stone(tm) language packages.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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."
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.
Do they know something we don't know?