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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
101–110 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#102If your kids think it is something their kids will want to see, your kids will preserve it (or copy it) and pass it on.
I have old pictures from my great grandparents. I have them on my phone as jpegs. They took no steps to preserve the actual film for 120 years or otherwise figure out how their great grandchildren would see it.
In short, if it’s worth preserving, it will be preserved (or copied to whatever medium is currently in use) by your successive generations. If it’s not worth preserving, it will be tossed and ignored regardless of steps you take.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#103Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.
do it with ethereum or some other blockchain in a single tx
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#104The only practical enough way I can think of is:
(1) create static documents in the simplest and most standard lossless (as far as possible) format.
(2) store them on a durable enough, yet simple enough medium. Today that would probably be something simple like an USB stick.
(3) transfer to new medium periodically, and take the opportunity to convert obsolete media files to new formats, if needed (you could keep the originals and each 'generation' as historical reference).
(4) train your children, grandchildren, etc to perform (3) and perhaps to rewrite the instruction in their own words (to cater for technology and language changes)
This also allows for multiple copies for easy backups and to entrust to each descendant individually.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#105This type of question is asked semi-frequently and the answers tend to be around physical preservation.
So here's a thought. Why not build a "Computational Knowledge Bootloader" that contained enough information to build a sequence of computational devices of increasing complexity starting with the absolute basics of math and language.
If we had that, then all of these types of questions of digital preservation could be answered with something like "Go to the website and upload your information into a Tier 20 CKB device. Enter your shipping address and payment information. A collection of etched titanium plates will arrive in 3-4 weeks. Put them in a safe."
500 years later, decoding might look like finding or building up to a Tier 20 CKB device and scanning the plates. If the instructions were standardized, there should be lots of lower tier devices scattered around.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#106Really boring answer: Make provisions for it in your will, which likely will mean creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission of doing this. If the personal page is useful and/or hosts some creative work keeping that alive can be the entire goal of it, otherwise the foundation might have to do some actual charity and the preservation of the page would be a quirk in the statutes.
"small" things like this I assume end up really expensive in wills. Making a page of text available to the public for 500 years might involve 25 people (each person being responsible for 20 years), and each of them has to be paid enough to care. To ensure each is paid enough, there needs to be a fund to pay them, and that itself needs to be managed by someone, who will also want paying for their troubles. Also consid…
put the rest in an index fund , which helps pay future salary. there are probably ways to do it
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#107Host 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.
yeah that could work too
same also for upload to wikimedia
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#108Print it in a book, on good archival quality ink and paper. Make a couple of copies stored in various locations in case of natural disaster. Look the English language is a lot different today than it was in 1621 and with the pace that technology changes I strongly doubt that anything web related will be able to run. (Assuming that civilization will still be standing, they still have a way to power technology) So, tha…
books can be eaisly lost though
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#109If 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.
Reminds me of the Rosetta Disk that some folks in the futurist community came up with 15 years ago:
The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.
The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’
On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#110I fully expect my blog on GitHub Pages to outlive me.
They're stored in the Arctic Code Vault, as well as more replicas than you can imagine, because git, so I could imagine there's very little risk of data corruption, and because of the amount of knowledge stored in this standard format of static HTML, there's strong incentive for people to preserve it and keep hosting it if Microsoft becomes evil again and decides its not profitable. Moreover, if you PGP-sign your git commits with a 4096-but RSA key, you can be fairly sure nobody will edit your commits (perhaps for at least for the first 200 years). I believe the key here is lumping your data in with other high-value data.