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The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

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Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#41

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #21
tw4l wrote: post #18

As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in any kind of realistic disaster scenario: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/11/seeds-or-code.html That said, the rest of the project, which focuses on preserving several independent copies of repositories hosted on GitHub with a handful of partner organizations, is qui…

>> They drag the 200 platters out into the 24hr sunshine, plug the solar panel into the Raspberry Pi, point its camera through a magnifying glass at the first frame, and let the QR app they happen to have on the Pi's micro--SD card do its thing. A couple of seconds later they have the first 2,900 bytes on the USB drive. It takes another couple of seconds to move to the next frame by hand. So they sit there for 383 da…

The Pi isn't going to work after 200 years. Its flash will be wiped. Never mind aging on all the other parts.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#42

Post by jcahill »

ca_parody wrote: post #33

Honestly, for however much this project either (a) is a genuine archeological move for the preservation of information or (b) to get good press, all I genuinely thought when this happened is "aw shucks - wish i fixed those bugs before they zapped it onto film and flew it to santa clause".

I am a web archivist with an archival project on Svalbard that predates this GitHub initiative.

Additionally, large-scale github-specific projects like https://gharchive.org (formerly GitHub Archive) have existed for some time.

In my experience, code is more likely than not to be preserved in a stale revision, if at all.

The most common forms of preservation are (a) simple tarballing and (b) git bundles.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#44

Post by ralph84 »

saagarjha wrote: post #40
awb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much space you'd save if you excluded repos with only 1 star or only 1 commit.

They’ve excluded pretty much everything below a hundred stars, from what I see.

The inclusion criteria[0] were:

> The snapshot will include every repo with any commits between the announcement at GitHub Universe on November 13th and 02/02/2020, every repo with at least 1 star and any commits from the year before the snapshot (02/03/2019 - 02/02/2020), and every repo with at least 250 stars.

[0] https://archiveprogram.github.com

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#45

Post by userbinator »

rwky wrote: post #28

This means that after the apocalypse people will be able to reclaim the Linux source code but not Windows. I find it poetic that open source may one day be the norm.

There are copies of leaked Windows source code floating around... I've even seen it on GitHub but they probably get DMCA'd pretty quickly.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#46

Post by 1337shadow »

atonse wrote: post #23

This is so awesome, but the most surprising to me is that all the public source code on GitHub only totals 21 TB. I forget that they do fundamentally host text, and not video etc. I somehow thought it would be petabytes. The private repos might be more than that but those are historically paid.

They've just archived the HEAD of the 6000 most popular repos

> We’ve archived 6,000 of the world’s most popular repositories as a proof of concept for future archives.

> The snapshot will consist of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#48

Post by un_montagnard »

> The next morning, it traveled to the decommissioned coal mine set in the mountain, and then to a chamber deep inside hundreds of meters of permafrost, where the code now resides fulfilling their mission of preserving the world’s open source code for over 1,000 years.

What is the probability that we still have the required tech to read that code in 1,000 years?

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#49

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #21
tw4l wrote: post #18

As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in any kind of realistic disaster scenario: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/11/seeds-or-code.html That said, the rest of the project, which focuses on preserving several independent copies of repositories hosted on GitHub with a handful of partner organizations, is qui…

>> They drag the 200 platters out into the 24hr sunshine, plug the solar panel into the Raspberry Pi, point its camera through a magnifying glass at the first frame, and let the QR app they happen to have on the Pi's micro--SD card do its thing. A couple of seconds later they have the first 2,900 bytes on the USB drive. It takes another couple of seconds to move to the next frame by hand. So they sit there for 383 da…

> "But what about 200 years after the apocalypse? Or maybe just 1,000 years from now, no apocalypse needed?"

-Thanks to flash memory cell charge leakage, I'd be surprised if the micro-SD card or USB drive kept its data for more than 3-5 years. They're designed for low cost, not longevity.

-The electrolytic caps will probably have dried out and failed by 50-100 years.

-The plasticizers used will have evaporated away by a century, leaving any plastic or rubber components brittle and crumbly.

-The lead free solders used in modern electronics are prone to the "tin whiskers" phenomenon. Not sure about the mitigations or timeframe for growth but a couple centuries is far, far longer than any reasonable design timeframe, making it a distinct possibility in my mind.

-At 1000 years, I'd wonder about diffusion effects in chips wrecking the circuits. It would be interesting to do a calculation to see how long that would take for an unpowered chip at room temperature.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#50

Post by jedieaston »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #41
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> They drag the 200 platters out into the 24hr sunshine, plug the solar panel into the Raspberry Pi, point its camera through a magnifying glass at the first frame, and let the QR app they happen to have on the Pi's micro--SD card do its thing. A couple of seconds later they have the first 2,900 bytes on the USB drive. It takes another couple of seconds to move to the next frame by hand. So they sit there for 383 da…

The Pi isn't going to work after 200 years. Its flash will be wiped. Never mind aging on all the other parts.

Presumptively, the Tech Tree will have some way of bootstrapping a system capable of decoding the tapes. They say in the introduction that it’s nearly useless to access the tapes without a computer and that they expect whoever is reading this is to have a computer that is centuries more advanced than we have now.

Maybe they just zip tied a ThinkPad to the tape reader and pray that it can eat whatever happens to it in the vault.

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