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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

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Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#171

Post by thruway516 »

bergie wrote: post #140
codazoda wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently saw headstones with photos on them. Now I’m thinking about writing a bunch of stuff and encoding it in a QR code on a headstone. The QR code is likely to be replaced with something else, but maybe if it says “QR Code” under it they could snap a picture and figure it out.

I can see future archaeologists classifying QR Codes as an “ornamental technique popular in early Plastic Age cultures“. Somewhere a crackpot conspiracy theorist group will be trying to claim that the QR Codes contain messages from this long-lost civilisation…

An alien civilization of giant lizard men that once roamed the earth whose dietary habits were superior and everyone should emulate (by buying and reading my book - "The Paleo-Plastic Diet for modern man").

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#172

Post by leephillips »

arcticbull wrote: post #40
Trias11 wrote: post #38

If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations. Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page. So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.

The Github arctic code vault appears to have created TAR archives and turned them into a sequence of QR codes on a kind of film. And then thrown them in a hole under 250 meters of permafrost in Svalbard.

Black & white photographic film is the most stable practical storage medium that we have.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#174

Post by joshfraser »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #163
jazzyjackson wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious what this would cost and found a thorough stackexchange post [0] that puts the price at 0.032 ETH per KB stored on-chain. Comes out to around 12,000 USD for a small 100kb static site. I would guess this cost is competitive with carving binary data into stone, not bad for permenant storage, reading the data is free. [0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...

Better would be an ENS name pointing to an IPFS address. Then just hope that IPFS sticks around. EDIT: ENS expiry would bite you. Maybe just IPFS then.

You need to make sure someone continues pinning the data for it to exist on the network. You need to create the right financial incentives for that to happen, which is what Filecoin is supposed to solve.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#175

Post by titzer »

taftster wrote: post #70
arcticbull wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Github arctic code vault appears to have created TAR archives and turned them into a sequence of QR codes on a kind of film. And then thrown them in a hole under 250 meters of permafrost in Svalbard.

I honestly thought you were being silly. Wow! https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

I noticed that Virgil got the arctic code vault badge, and thought it was funny, but I never checked what the conditions or criteria were. So I looked.

> The snapshot consists of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size. (Repos with 250+ stars retained their binaries.) Each was packaged as a single TAR file.

Virgil bootstraps from compiler binaries checked into the repo--there is literally no other way to get a PL off the ground without a compiler or interpreter binary in some language another computer understands--so I guess the archive has a completely useless source-only copy. That is, unless future historians want to write a new interpreter in order to run the source that's checked in :D

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#177

Post by Retr0spectrum »

vortico wrote: post #60

Host the content/pages on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/ There's a pretty good chance their collection (and possibly the organization themselves) will be around in 500 yrs. 1 EB in 100 yrs will be trivial to host (probably the price of a loaf of bread), and your content will be accessible by anyone with a copy of that archive.

This requires the assumption that storage will continue to exponentially (or at the very least, linearly) decrease in cost. It also requires a certain amount of good luck. I would hope the IA has a reasonable amount of data resilience, but you never know.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#178

Post by denton-scratch »

500 years ago, the USA didn't exist.

I'd be disinclined to rely on the internet surviving for more than another hundred years; too many influential people would like it to disappear.

I don't really know who my ancestors were, 500 years ago, despite my father researching his ancestry for a decade. I certainly don't know what they might have written down.

If my ancient ancestor had invested 1M in preserving his thoughts, I think I would regard him as incredibly vain, to think I wouldn't prefer the cash over the chance to read his personal page.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#179

Post by sillysaurusx »

NoGravitas wrote: post #155

Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the same instructions. If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a…

As entertaining as this is, I have a bit more faith in archive.org.
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