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Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

neilsloane.com

21–30 of 47 posts

Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

#21
There are a few services like this today, some are fairly simple like memorial web pages or find-a-grave where you can add photos about the people named on the tombstones.

Expanding beyond that (and I think more useful) are eternal digital archives such as https://www.permanent.org/ which is a non-profit that charges you per gigabyte for perpetual storage. They store copies of your data with multiple providers (AWS and Backblaze right now) and promise to transcode formats as technologies change. you can make the archives public (letting you have the "eternal home page") or private so only certain people can view or update it. The money you pay goes into an endowment and the earnings from the endowment pay the storage costs.

Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

#23
post #19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I didn’t read it carefully, i just presumed that was the idea. Anyone can put up a website or tombstone, the job to be done here is to make sure it stays up and stays readable, otherwise it’s pointless... So maybe there is a business waiting to be launched here!

Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

#24
post #11

This could be done by the Internet Archive.

You can already do this with the Internet Archive, just create a web page, submit it to the wayback machine, then publish the resulting archive link. Like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20210302145655/https://news.ycom...

Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

#25

I’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…

Why would this service need a significantly different business model from the way cemeteries currently operate?

Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

#26
post #14

I’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?

And AI, it's gotta have some AI /s

Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

#27

I’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…

If you could somehow get the Clock of the Long Now to also be a web server...

Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

#29

I’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…

But why would transhuman AI overlords care about cryptocurrency. Or any other form of currency or valuable stuff. If they are our overlords then what ever they want they can take, they don’t need currency to pay for it.

Presumably if there are multiple overlords they need some accounting mechanism to allocate resources among themselves.

Re: Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

#30
post #28

If you want to preserve digital content for long time, you also probably better stick to boring standards such as plain text files or some static HTML instead of something fancy.

Or even better, print it out in a book, wrap it in acid-free tissue paper, and put it on a shelf, somewhere dry.
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