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Shining a light on the digital dark age

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Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#121

Post by Roark66 »

cj wrote: post #37
rolobio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will probably end up being the most popular things, the most viewed or read. More copies of it, more likely to be archived. This reminds me of books. I’m sure the majority of books from over a hundred years ago are lost because they weren’t popular. We haven’t really noticed their absence…

> I’m sure the majority of books from over a hundred years ago are lost Especially if you include independently published books that weren't widely circulated. I wonder what percentage of total books this is. My grandfather published a book before he passed away. It was never sold online or in any big retail stores. Once the last hard copy is lost, it's gone forever.

That's interesting, many countries have laws(or customs) to submit everything published in a form of a book to the national library. I know here in Poland this is done too, because my partner was having her book published by a small publisher and "providing a copy of the book to the national library" was one of the publisher's responsibilities. I have no idea if it's a law or just a custom.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#122

Post by Roark66 »

aziaziazi wrote: post #45
rolobio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will probably end up being the most popular things, the most viewed or read. More copies of it, more likely to be archived. This reminds me of books. I’m sure the majority of books from over a hundred years ago are lost because they weren’t popular. We haven’t really noticed their absence…

When you publish a book or magazine in France you’re required to give 2 copies to the national library for archive purpose. Doesn't something like that exist in other countries?

It certainly does in Poland. My partner's publishing contract contained a provision for the publisher to do it.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#123

Post by radicality »

cobertos wrote: post #30

Just ran into this. Many companies I request my data from have retention periods and would rather be rid of it. Rare are a couple that do seem to keep _everything_ though

For backup, I do a manual data export across various online sites every few months. And some of them heavily nerf the data.

Example: my Netflix data exports from two years ago include much more detail than the recent ones. Netflix is just now providing overall less details.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#124

Post by Merrill »

Most writing on paper is short lived, and it is generally inaccessible while it is retained. For example, a lot of writings authored by lawyers such as contracts, mortgage documents, etc. have specific retention requirements, and they are destroyed upon expiration.

Even in categories such as fiction, there is no reason to keep every novel written. Only a tiny percentage have enduring literary value.

For society, as for the individual, forgetting is an important process in maintaining sanity.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#125

Post by MereInterest »

RetroTechie wrote: post #86
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #39

I live in a small country with a weird language and with a lot of our local pop music... The new music is fine, everything is on youtube.... for now! ... but the older songs are disappearing. Years ago, we had a bunch of "mp3 sites" (websites where you could download pirated mp3s), that disappeared, a huge local torrent tracker, focusing also on local stuff, that lost most of the data in the OVH datacenter fire and s…

"I'm sure that there are data hoarders somewhere, that have mp3s of all those songs somewhere, but unless we get some p2p type of service like gnutella/ed2k/kazaa working again, I won't be able to find them anymore." Such archives would need to be kept online though. If only archived (or hoarded), it's just data in a box that no-one can access. Current internet is really poor at handling this long tail. Eg. a movie c…

For a long time, “So This is Paris” (1954 starring Tony Curtis) was my white whale, as I could not find a copy anywhere, legally or otherwise. I had seen a clip that somebody had posted on youtube, and wanted to see the full movie. The clip was taken down by a copyright claim, and still the movie was unavailable.

Eventually, after searching on and off for a few years, I found a copy on a Russian streaming site, but the movie has effectively been erased from availability.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#126

Post by rohfle »

sholladay wrote: post #108

When I was a kid, The Brave Little Toaster was easy to find and watch. Now it seems to be in some kind of void, where no streaming service has the rights and few places have physical copies. In my opinion, it’s an amazing piece of work that deserves better. And it is an early work from some very famous animators. If that can be lost to time in just a few decades, there must be a lot of work that is disappearing.

Someone on youtube was working on a raw 35mm scan of this earlier in the year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=octCLWQqf1A

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#127

Post by abwizz »

nomel wrote: post #12
noarchy wrote: post #9

Looks 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…

> all the videos I uploaded have slowly reduced in resolution, bitrate, and quality, over the years.

i know that feeling when i watch "old" stuff too, did you confirm this in any way or is just subjective?

asking because after a while of watching pal/ntsc style content it becomes normal again.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#128

Post by ogurechny »

maverick2007 wrote: post #4

I've been noticing this a lot lately in one of my little hobbies of Halloween events. There's so much history from events in the early 2000s that has been lost. So many links in ancient web forums that 404 and aren't in the Internet archive. Info from the 2010s is much better but still missing a lot of media. As an individual, I certainly don't have the resources of some of the organizations listed in this article bu…

Install Firefox ESR 52 (or one of various Palemoon offsprings still supporting Netscape plugins) and Flash Plugin 32.0.0.371. That's it, you have a dedicated browser with Flash working the exact same way it worked. As long as that software remains compatible with newer operating systems, you don't even need to start a virtual machine. Of course, flash content that requires data from external servers won't work without them (can sometimes be fixed with a proxy server and manual fiddling), and some old Flash versions can be partially incompatible with final plugin, but that's a deeper dive into that technology.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#129

Post by TeMPOraL »

justrealist wrote: post #85
TeMPOraL wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the cities that are most expensive and worst to live in, because they didn't have relics of the past putting brakes on the greed of real estate owners and developers?

This is word salad.

Let me simplify then: modern cities suck. They're soul-crushing, sad places to live in. A lot of that has to do with modern construction and economic philosophy which you so praise.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#130

Post by ogurechny »

aziaziazi wrote: post #45
rolobio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will probably end up being the most popular things, the most viewed or read. More copies of it, more likely to be archived. This reminds me of books. I’m sure the majority of books from over a hundred years ago are lost because they weren’t popular. We haven’t really noticed their absence…

When you publish a book or magazine in France you’re required to give 2 copies to the national library for archive purpose. Doesn't something like that exist in other countries?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

Not all books in the state libraries are equal. Historical copies and popular authors (popular among researchers, a much bigger set already) are exhibited and get attention, John Doe's book of family recipes gets sent to some giant dark warehouse people rarely visit.

It is easy to forget that it is an 18th century solution born from 18th century approach to knowledge. Back then, bibliographies of everything printed in certain year in certain country could be compiled, and they were supposed to be more than just lists, to help other men of books keep up with Progress.

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