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We need archives built on decentralized storage. Don't get me wrong, I really like and support the work Internet Archive is doing, but preserving history is too important to entrust it solely to singular entities, which means singular points of failure.
The IA has tried distributing their stores, but nowhere near enough people actually put their storage where their mouths are.
We need archives built on decentralized storage. Don't get me wrong, I really like and support the work Internet Archive is doing, but preserving history is too important to entrust it solely to singular entities, which means singular points of failure.
The Internet Archive has a management problem. They seem to be more comfortable disrupting libraries than managing an online, publicly accessible database of disputed, disorganized material. Despite all of the positive self-talk, I don't know if they realize how important they are, or how easy it would be for them to find good help and advice if their management were transparent and everything was debated in public.…
Don't forget the time Brewster tried to run a bank -- Internet Archive Federal Credit Union. Or that the physical archives are stored on an active fault line and unlikely to receive prompt support during an emergency. Or that, when someone told him that archives are often stored in salt mines he replied, "cool, where can I buy one?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a terrible solution. The Wayback Machine takes down their snapshots at the request of whoever controls the domain. That's not archival. If the state of a webpage in the past matters to you, you need a record that won't cease to exist when your opposition asks it to. This is the concept behind perma.cc.
Ooo, excellent. Yes, hiding items is imperfect, but I understood that it was legally required or something. (IANAL and IDFK, TBH) I wonder how perma.cc gets around that.
We need archives built on decentralized storage. Don't get me wrong, I really like and support the work Internet Archive is doing, but preserving history is too important to entrust it solely to singular entities, which means singular points of failure.
This seems to get brought at least once in the comments for every one of these articles that pops up. The IA has tried distributing their stores, but nowhere near enough people actually put their storage where their mouths are.
We need archives built on decentralized storage. Don't get me wrong, I really like and support the work Internet Archive is doing, but preserving history is too important to entrust it solely to singular entities, which means singular points of failure.
There's no real financial incentive for people to archive the data as a singular entity so even less for a distributed collection. Also it's probably easier to fund a single entity sufficiently so they can have security/code audits than a bunch of entities all trying to work together.
Restating my love for Internet Archive and my plea to put a grownup in charge of the thing. Washington Post: The organization has “industry standard” security systems, Kahle said, but he added that, until this year, the group had largely stayed out of the crosshairs of cybercriminals. Kahle said he’d opted not to prioritize additional investments in cybersecurity out of the Internet Archive’s limited budget of around…
In security, industry standard seems to be about the same as military grade: the cheapest possible option that still checks all the boxes for SOC.
I'd like to imagine a world where every lawyer, when their case is helped by a Wayback Machine snapshot of something, flips a few bucks to IA. They could afford a world-class admin team in no time flat.
That's a terrible solution. The Wayback Machine takes down their snapshots at the request of whoever controls the domain. That's not archival. If the state of a webpage in the past matters to you, you need a record that won't cease to exist when your opposition asks it to. This is the concept behind perma.cc.
Restating my love for Internet Archive and my plea to put a grownup in charge of the thing. Washington Post: The organization has “industry standard” security systems, Kahle said, but he added that, until this year, the group had largely stayed out of the crosshairs of cybercriminals. Kahle said he’d opted not to prioritize additional investments in cybersecurity out of the Internet Archive’s limited budget of around…
In security, industry standard seems to be about the same as military grade: the cheapest possible option that still checks all the boxes for SOC.
Security by its very nature has a problem of knowing when to stop. There's always better security for an ever increasing amount of money and companies don't sign off on budgets of infinity dollars and projects of indefinite length. If you want security at all you have bound the cost and have well-defined stopping points.
And since 5 security experts in a room will have 10 different opinions on what those stopping points should be— what constitutes "good-enough" they only become meaningful when there's industry wide agreement on them.