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Vint Cerf Warns Against 'Digital Dark Age'
An anonymous reader writes: Vint Cerf, speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said we need better methods for preserving everything we do on computers. It's not just about finding better storage media — it's about recording all the aspects of modern software and operating systems so future generations can figure out how it all worked. Cerf says, "The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future." Cerf is also pushing for better data preservation standards: "The key here is when you move those bits from one place to another, that you still know how to unpack them to correctly interpret the different parts. That is all achievable if we standardize the descriptions."
A lot of the original web is gone, whats left is crowded out by seo bs. And I'd rather not have and ad company decide what part of the web is relevant to me.
Not everything needs to be preserved for future historians. Mortality and the oblivion of time are fundamental aspects of the human condition; therefore, the things that do escape oblivion, like better literature and song and monuments, serves as a kind of immortality for men who achieved something worthwhile. Your tweets don't deserve that kind of glory.
Well, I must say, that's a better argument for NOT preserving everything that's on the web than I was going to make,
That being said, from the second link:
The obsolescence of data is a real problem. Much of my old digital art is on Jaz discs, which are obsolete and very expensive to get transcribed.
Couldn't have been THAT important if you didn't make a copy to other media when you saw that Jaz disks were obsolete. Just like there were probably 1,000 floppies (5-1/4, 3-1/2) that I tossed while going through my "archives." Anything important was long moved to other media.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Anyone who's used Apple software for more than five years has been burned by forced format obsolescence - ClarisWorks, AppleWorks, old QuickTime codecs, the PICT format, SimpleText, Font Suitcases, the list goes on. And on. And that's just *one* platform and set of formats off the top of my head. I lose data to software "upgrades" so often that it's the single biggest determining factor in my upgrade cycle and a huge determining factor in the uptake and use of new software. We aren't heading for a digital dark age - we're in one already.
Quite right, in fact most of what gets posted to /. including this story could be responded to with a phrase Eben Moglen has been saying for years in his talks: "RMS was right". Richard Stallman had it right years ago and, equally importantly, for the right reasons. Not "Open Source" (the younger movement Brad Kuhn rightly points out is built to greenwash proprietary-supporting non-copylefted Free Software (copy 1, copy 2) but strongly copylefted Free Software released and developed for freedom.
The Affero GPL version 3 or later will keep software Free as in freedom and meet the needs of the future. Users will undoubtedly want to know how things work and benefit from software written by programmers allowed to understand how things work. This will help us avoid the very trap the grandparent post referred to (and you wisely advised against).
Digital Citizen