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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.
just put the system in a VM image, save it, and there you go. Problem solved.
A lot of people have been thinking about this problem of digital preservation for a long time. archive.org has a library of software which can run under emulation in Javascript on a browser. Basically the answer to his question is to work on emulation and archival.
Google has done several steps backwards in their digital preservation projects lately.
Or whenever the first person warned about the same thing. Which was a loong time ago...
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.
Pretty much this. It is going to take millions of years to sort through the crap that is already here. Just wait until Web 3 or whatever is coming down the pike.
We need to hit the delete key even harder.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I remember our Mayor presided over the opening of a 25 year old time capsule put there by the local schools. Inside was a lazer disc. When he asked to view the contents of it, nobody could find a device to play it. Vint is right. And its not just a DRM thing, its a lack of standards thing too.
Not everything needs to be preserved for future historians
With respect, what is and what isn't worth preserving is up to future historians to decide. A bit chicken and eggish but there you are.
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.
I can fire up a TI-99/4A emulator or an Amiga emulator and run all my old software from three decades ago. Can someone name a general purpose computing platform (IE not including mainframes or supercomputers or other exotic low-volume hardware) whose software we cannot execute using an emulator?
Better known as 318230.
Nothing to do with DRM. If the DRM scheme/keys are preserved then whats the difference. And besides in 50 years time refrigerators will have more computing power than todays data centers and devices will crush todays DRM like it was nothing.
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.
Luckily I saved it to a floppy.
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.
If we survive as a society, in 500 years, our technology will be so advanced there will be systems we cannot even conceive of that capable of analyzing pretty much any data or bytecode you throw at it. Documentation or support systems will most likely serve a more historical than practical purpose.
Library of Congress seems like the logical place to set up to archive old OS's, hardware, emulation and other items needed to read, archive, restore & recover old media. That is what the LoC does for 'documents.'
I think this is Mr. Cerf speaking as the man who was instrumental in the Internet's creation, not as a Google employee.
This is a great idea. Preserve previous generations of software & data, emulate old hardware . Then we will be able to enjoy all the goodies from the Apple ][, IBM 360 and Commodore 64 era!
But wait, we can already emulate just about any old equipment. Most of what was worthwhile on floppy disks or tape is now online, available to most of us. Even our government, slow though they may be, has found ways of bringing old software & data to modern machines. Cloud storage and networking brings more interoperability over time and the future looks bright. Movies from the 1920s are available on modern media as well as Edison's cylinder recordings. So what's the problem? Oh, your dad's home movies. Sorry about that.
...omphaloskepsis often...
>. You obviously do not understand encryption. Unless a weakness in the underlying algorithms is found, "a faster computer" will never be sufficient to break modern encryption.
Indeed you seem to be completely ignorant of the subject. The whole science of encryption is all about finding operations that a) can be done quickly by a smart phone yet b) cannot be undone slowly by a cluster. That's far from a solved problem. In fact it's funny you mention "modern encryption" because ALL modern methods of encryption have been broken within about 10-30 years. The ONLY unbreakable encryption is an old method, the one-time-pad. It's unbreakable because the key is at least as long as the combined total of all of the messages it will ever encrypt. That makes it not particularly useful in most cases. Any and all other methods of encryption are subject to at least brute-force attack, which means they can be broken almost instantly, given sufficient computing power.
A strong cipher is one which takes a lot of computing power to break. That can calculated as (resources required to brute force) / (shortcuts known). Both of those factors always get less secure over time. The cost of the computing resources required to break it drops quickly, while at the same time new methods are discovered to break it with smaller amounts of resources.
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
There is no good excuse for Apple, Microsoft and others making the OS's not compatible with legacy software.
Sure there is. It costs a lot of money to keep everything compatible.
Any and all other methods of encryption are subject to at least brute-force attack, which means they can be broken almost instantly, given sufficient computing power.
I think you may be underestimating how much computing power is required to brute-force attack modern encryption, especially when using a sufficiently long key. At the moment, we're talking about a modern PC operating until the heat death of the universe timeframe to break the encryption of a 2048-bit SSL certificate. Many of the early encryption schemes were broken because of flaws in the algorithms which allowed massive shortcuts to be taken or were weakened with very short keys (remember 48-bit keys?). Remember, with every bit added to the key, we double the inherent strength of the encryption, and cryptologists have gotten much, much better at creating incredibly secure algorithms as well.
It really isn't just a matter of waiting for hardware to catch up. Even with exponential speed increases in computing power (which isn't happening anymore, btw), in 30 years, we'll still be nowhere close to breaking today's state of the art encryption unless breakthroughs have been made that allow us to shorten the compute time via a weakness in the algorithms. It would take an unbelievable leap in computational efficiency (say, quantum computing) before we can even dream of brute forcing keywords of today's most secure algorithms, even within our lifetimes.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yeah! 200 years from now, all the music of today will be considered classical and be played on future-NPR with the same pretentious tones they play Mozart in today. "That was Dr. Dre's 'All My Bitches' in D-Minor. After the break we'll be playing 'Smell Yo Dick' and 'What What, In The Butt?'"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Some of mine are over 50 years old and still work perfectly. Reproduction doesn't even require electricity. They are very low maintenance, but not very space efficient.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
reading thaqt post in a low monotone NPR voice just made my day
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I used to really like the Tempest game for that, and the card game wasn't too bad.
I wanted to get Monopoly and Mahjong for it and some other games but by then they stopped selling them on the iTunes store. There was a pirate torrent going around but the apps were encrypted and no way to install them on another device. Finally they just stopped making them.
Apps like that... gone forever.
iOS 3.0 apps that got the App store going... gone forever. I still remember playing the unofficial lights off game, beat all 150 levels. (Wrote a program to solve them)
Unless someone wants to make an emulator for the original iPhone you could do it by downloading the ROMs just like old Apple emulators, but how would you approve the apps without a 3.0 app store around?
In theory someone could crack Apple's old signing keys and have a local "FakeAppStore" program that validates them and allows installation on the emulator.
The "cease and desist" letter would probably arrive less that one minute after putting such project online.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz