Shining a light on the digital dark age
11–20 of 137 posts
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#12Looks like the article in question is getting the hug of death. But information is being lost in droves even today. Entire YouTube channels can vanish overnight, for various reasons, taking years of content with them. Without any backups floating around out there this stuff is gone forever, and this is assuming we even know about any backups.
> Without any backups floating around out there this stuff is gone forever
I think part of the problem is that most backup efforts result in lawsuits. Related, I wonder how much the data stores, like those that OpenAI used, have preserved, and I wonder how much they will purge from their servers, to be lost forever, as the lawsuits increase.
For Youtube, it also has compression rot. It's not a storage solution, as I've learned. All the videos I uploaded have slowly reduced in resolution, bitrate, and quality, over the years. Those that are more than a decade old have become a blurry mess that I can barely see, at a fraction of the resolution. I can't blame them. They don't really have views, so they're a money sink.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#13The sites serving me up a 500 internal server error - which you know - I guess fits the title :)
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#14Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
Having forgotten the old world, how would we know?
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#15Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
Each generation thinks they are so much smarter than the previous.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#16Interesting how much data is being collected/stored nowadays, yet how fragile storage to store that data is.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#17I think it is important to focus on portability and archivability of our online spaces.
Using today's technology, it is possible to allow exporting all content as basic file formats such as txt + zip.
In addition, PKI (public/private key infrastructure) allows us to decouple a user's private and public identities, meaning the public identity can now be portable between servers.
What does all this mean for the average user or community operator?
It means your community can be completely transparent, auditable, and PORTABLE, allowing any user to archive the whole thing and clone it to another server -- right away or years later.
I've been writing a framework for this type of system for several years now, and if you're curious, you know where to look.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#18I think there is something to be said about what is worth archiving. I don't know what it is that should be said though. It seems weird to me that as a society we might be saving things such as a 10 hour video of white noise for another 100 years rather than some personal blogs. What is and isn't worth saving?
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#19Most paper, pen and pencil will outlive most digital media.
Most printed photos will outlive digital photos.
Most CD, DVD, VHS will outlive cloud stored videos.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#20And yet I suspect that digital information involving identification and tracking for the purpose of serving ads won't be lost, because there's money to be made and control to be exerted.
Oh please. You'd have to be naive to think otherwise.