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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?

#311

Post by mywittyname »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #245
mywittyname wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even plain text is no guarantee. This assumes that future people will read/understand/use latin characters. ASCII could very well be replaced in the medium-term future

I thought Unicode was already replacing ASCII.

Sure, but that is backwards compatible / a superset of ASCII.

What I meant to say, is that it's totally possible that, in the coming few centuries, even basic ASCII won't be readily understood. As in the character mapping in modern systems will break down, i.e., int 97 is no longer 'a', but some glyph from a language not yet conceived.

We take for granted backwards comparability. Just because ASCII has been readable for the past 60 or so years, doesn't mean it will continue to be for the next 60.

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

#312

Post by akkartik »

I used to wonder about questions like this, but somewhere along the line they've become unimportant. I'm not sure why that is, or whether that's a good thing, but my best guess is that I've grown less delusional about how much others care about me.

It's an interesting thought experiment to ask how important such a page about your father or grandfather would be to you. It seems much less important to me than my own page. So it will be for others.

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

#314

Post by kingcharles »

Who is going to pay for your domain name? I was in jail and luckily had someone pay for one of my domains, but all the others I owned got recycled because I couldn't get to the Internet to pay for them.

How many years in advance can you pay? What does ICANN support? 10 years?

"maximum remaining unexpired term shall not exceed ten years" https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/faqs-84-2012-02-25-en#...

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

#315

Post by agumonkey »

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.

Funny, I was just reading about this https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-paper-data-storage-option/ a few hours earlier.

Trying to find paper storage schemes for digital information.

ps: oh and the main linked site is dead (sic) so https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3...

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

#316

Post by denton-scratch »

jmptable wrote: post #230

Cut the data into the surface of a chunk of highly reflective and stable metal. Lob that into a high orbit. It will blink out your data from on high with nothing more than the incident light of the sun to anyone with a basic telescope, or even their naked eyes if it's big enough. Obviously the details would be rather complicated. How is the data encoded? Morse code? Maybe ok for 500 years assuming the language it dec…

> How is the data encoded?

Well, any contemporary and well-understood encoding would work very well.

Perhaps the presence of such an object in the sky, visible to anyone, would automatically preserve knowledge of the encoding (people have always been interested in the stars). So if the encoding was US-ASCII in Cockney English, knowledge of cockney rhyming slang might well be conserved (at least among some "priesthoods") for hundreds or thousands of years.

$DEITY, I hope people don't start engraving their tweets on huge rolls of tinfoil, and having them unfurled by Bezos in upper orbit.

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

#318

Post by hellbannedguy »

crooked-v wrote: post #209

Go to a big legal firm that's been around for at least a few hundred years. With them, set up a trust with a sufficient endowment to be run indefinitely (barring total societal or economic collapse), with the mission of maintaining this specific website in accessible format (including updates and format shifts as necessary). It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used by various organizations wit…

I know of one that was over a hundred years old, and was gone in a few months.

One of the grandsons took most of the money, and it folded.

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

#319

Post by grey-area »

omarhaneef wrote: post #295

Thought experiment: imagine it is 1985 and you asked the equivalent question. Something along the lines of: how would I preserve an electronic game/message/piece of media for posterity? What would the answer be? Make sure you copy your floppy on to a tape on the commodore 64? Make sure that you post the message to at least 4 different bulletin boards? The tech is evolving so fast that a website, or today's hardware,…

Funny you should ask that. Because in 1986, the hilarious answer the BBC came up with was 2 Videodiscs, which were obsolete almost as soon as they were introduced:

https://atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html

The latest way to preserve the content from those disks, since nobody can read them any more, is on the internet, so perhaps the OP is on to something - perhaps the internet will survive 500 years in some form, given its obvious utility.

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

#320

Post by paulpauper »

LAMike wrote: post #265
paulpauper wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do it with ethereum or some other blockchain in a single tx

Then what happens when AWS goes down? Bye bye Ethereum. There is only 2,500 ETH nodes today, most run on "cloud" services which cost hundreds of dollars a month, soon to be thousands

the blockchain will still be permanent offline and on repositories
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