-Donate to a university and make them use the interest to achieve whatever you want.
-Take a screenshot and submit it to the patent office
Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
51–60 of 101 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
#52carve it as QR codes in stone
And then people looking for the info can travel to the location of the stones and scan them? That doesn't sound very convenient.
Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
#53Multiple git repositories.
Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
#54I doubt that people will know what to do with the "2D barcode" in 100 years. Someone who is willing to investigate will figure it out. But it is not something that will be convenient. I for example wouldn't know what to do with a barcode even today.
You can use your phone+ an app to scan it, just because you can't figure that out doesn't mean people in 100 years are going to be morons.
Are you 100% convinced that QR codes will be common enough in a 100 years for common people to figure it out?
I’m not.
Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
#55Your problem isnt so much "content storage" as it is "addressing". For example, you could carve the info into a rock, and instruct an immediate descendent to maintain it, and have them tell their children, etc. Or create a religion that maintains The Rock.
But lets imagine you found a crystalline web server that ran off sun light and was backed by rock storage. Who is to be assured that the https scheme will still exist in 100 years? Or that DNS is still the resolution method? FTP had a 20 year run before dying. Gopher lasted under a decade. Http is dying out under the weight of security and corporatization. Even DNS is under pressure to be centralized and otherwise fiddled with in the name of convenience (eg locality). So your descendents might not be able to resolve your URN locator scheme, or have a usable client to reach it, no matter how good your long term storage is.
Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
#56If you are willing to relinquish copyright claims on your work, for example by including a copyleft statement in the book’s preface, an organization like Project Gutenberg may be willing to host it, ostensibly in perpetuity. Other considerations are whether the book can stand alone as text-only, or will it rely on additional media to convey its message to the reader? More about Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.org
Just to clarify, I'm asking where to host a static page that would be a modified introduction, addendum, errata, "if you like this try these", "The author died by wooden badger attack", etc Not the entire book. I wouldn't have to copyleft the entire thing, right? My current static page is just an "I like this book, please give me this free thing and put me on a mailing list" kind of thing. But that's not really the p…
Traditionally, the answer would be "Use PURLs". The Internet Archive happens to operate the purl.org resolver.
Unfortunately, with the recent attack, the purl.org resolver went offline and remains so. All the purl data is still there and is accessible to the public, you just don't get resolvable URLs for them.
Nowadays, it seems like ARKs are the better way to go, anyway, and the attack on archive.org proved it perfectly. Look into https://arks.org/>
(The Internet Archive mints ARKs for every item uploaded to its collections. You may have noticed them in the infobox below the fold when looking at a given item.)
As for your latter remarks, the Internet Archive will take just about anything. Create an account and start uploading. Ted Nelson has a huge chunk of his papers on there.
Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
#57A perpetual trust is a legal instrument that is designed to ensure an asset is passed down generations and dispersed in a particular, pre-determined way. Hire a lawyer to help put some non-coastal real estate and some inert metals and some extremely safe index funds and bonds in that and have it rebalance and reinvest every so often and periodically draw off enough from the accumulating interest to pay for whatever a domain and static hosting costs, into the future, plus maybe a little to cover translating a text file into whatever the hell our AI overlords are serving after they’re done with all the genociding.
Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
#58Just a suggestion, and I suspect I might have overlooked some drawbacks: what about hosting it on SEVERAL of those websites/platforms/services/communication systems (probably with a version "number" or a last updated date), and inside the book, provide several backup links, in case the first one was dead by the time they visited it?
Basically spreading the risk to maybe 10 platforms instead of 1, hoping that at least 1 always survives.
One issue would be that if you lose the login access to one of those platforms, their content might be deprecated on that page, and more recent content would be displayed on others. But that might be a small enough problem to ignore it. You could also encourage readers to visit 2-3 of the links, instead of 1, to increase the chances they read the one with the most recently updated content.
And/or maybe each of those pages could embed a system that "fetches" the status of the other 9 pages, and display the version number of the content of each of them, so that the reader can navigate to other pages if they see that another one has more recently updated content.
And/or you (the author) could manually have to go on the 10 pages every month/year and "confirm" that the content is still up-to-date. Each page would display: "the author has last confirmed the validity of this page on date X". This stops working after you pass away, though, but since all pages would show the same last confirmed date, that might be ok. You could also add a warning on those platforms: "If you see that I haven't confirmed the validity of the content in more than X months, I have either lost access to this page or passed away. Please check some of the other links from the book to see if their "last confirmed by author date" is the same, and if so, please try and check online whether I have passed away".
In any case, a fun problem to think about, thank you!
Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
#59Your problem isnt so much "content storage" as it is "addressing". For example, you could carve the info into a rock, and instruct an immediate descendent to maintain it, and have them tell their children, etc. Or create a religion that maintains The Rock. But lets imagine you found a crystalline web server that ran off sun light and was backed by rock storage. Who is to be assured that the https scheme will still ex…
Quietly create a retrovirus which will write your data into the DNA of every living human.
Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
#60[deleted]