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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.
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 actually bought a license for VMWare 1.0 when it came out, dates back to 1/7/1999. My V2.0 license is from 2000. I also still have the executables from back then. Hmmm. Wonder if I can get them to run on today's Linux kernels.
Which actually shows a prime issue with modern data and executables. There are a growing number of external dependencies. Stuff that is only accessible if DRM keys are available online, or when license activation servers are up and running. I have some stuff that only runs on Windows-XP. Even though I have a valid license, I may not be able to re-install it in 2025 or beyond, even in a backward compatible VM environment.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
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
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.