This could be done by the Internet Archive.
Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
11–20 of 47 posts
Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
#12There are companies out there today (like https://www.mykeeper.com) doing something similar in this space with Digital/online memorials where you can create pages for documenting & sharing people's lives. Would be interesting though to have some sort of way of guaranteeing digital perpetuity for these memorials so that they could exist independently of the specific service they were created on.
Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody knows, because the memorial page and Google Tombstone sunset announcement were both hosted on the service, and the only mirror was on Wave.
They announced this in a Google Buzz post.
I remember being super excited when I first read about it in Google Reader, in my feed of Google services that were going to improve the lives of humanity from hereon in.
Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
#14I’ve been interested in doing this for some time. I haven’t looked into How to do it heavily yet; however my hunch is, it can be done with one or a combination of these: - IPFS - Dat ( https://dat.foundation/ ) - Ethereum - Prepaying for Hosting and Domains + Archive.org Would be curious to hear how others have gone about this. It would be interesting if there were a service where you could pay in $5,000 worth of Eth…
How about Bittorrent?
Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
#15For additional context: the author of this page, Neil Sloane, is the creator and maintainer of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Sloane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Intege...
Coincidentally I just watched a video featuring him on Numberphile (Amazing Graphs, Part 1 or something like that).
Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
#16It's one thing to have the data around for centuries, it's another to be able to view it. Some content (Flash) is already very difficult to view just a few decades after it was created, let alone centuries.
Who is going to be able to view a JPEG file 500 years from now? It requires not only the data, but also all the software infrastructure to be able to interpret this data. To me it seems a stretch that all software required to view it is still usable in a century, let alone 5 centuries.
So even if you keep these home pages around "forever", it seems unlikely to me that anyone wants to invest time in transcoding everything when the world moves on to different storage formats. So what you end up might be little more than a bag of bytes? Though I guess the textual content within the HTML still has some chance of still being readable.
It will be fun times for Internet Historians in 2496 when they try to compile the historical copies of gcc, cmake, nasm and libjpeg.
Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
#17It's one thing to have the data around for centuries, it's another to be able to view it. Some content (Flash) is already very difficult to view just a few decades after it was created, let alone centuries. Who is going to be able to view a JPEG file 500 years from now? It requires not only the data, but also all the software infrastructure to be able to interpret this data. To me it seems a stretch that all software…
Isn't that the whole point, that the service would make sure to upgrade the formats as needed, so it's always viewable?
Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
#18Good idea but impossible with a centralized service, because as soon as the hosting company goes down the page goes down with it. Only now that decentralization is starting to be a thing this will finally be possible.
As long as this company would be around, they could keep the website up and running. That's the point of the service.
Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
#19It's one thing to have the data around for centuries, it's another to be able to view it. Some content (Flash) is already very difficult to view just a few decades after it was created, let alone centuries. Who is going to be able to view a JPEG file 500 years from now? It requires not only the data, but also all the software infrastructure to be able to interpret this data. To me it seems a stretch that all software…
Isn't that the whole point, that the service would make sure to upgrade the formats as needed, so it's always viewable?
Maybe... It could be a sort of digital restoration?
It's not mentioned at all in the article though, which I found surprising. My first reaction was that I don't think storage is the only problem, maybe not even the most difficult problem.
Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
#20This could be done by the Internet Archive.
This is actually a plausible service for them.
Assuming a long-term return of 3%, in exchange for a $200 one-time donation, they could afford to spend $3 a year on maintaining a page and get another $3 a year to fund their operations. Right now, that's enough for 2GB of disk and more cpu and bandwidth than will be used long-term.
The biggest costs are likely to be customer service and abuse prevention. That could sink this.