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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

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Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#411

Post by marcosdumay »

NoGravitas wrote: post #155

Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the same instructions. If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a…

I see no technical reason for why we can't create some e-reader that will keep your library much safer for much longer than paper. I see no reason why we can't make some that last for a millennium, if the power supply and storage aren't included and it's kept off in some dry place, out of the Sun's light and never overheat.

But well, there is no demand for tech that will last for a millennium. In fact, people are pushing for degradable tech that won't stay as waste after it stops being useful instead.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#412

Post by necovek »

mywittyname wrote: post #311
theandrewbailey wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Unicode was already replacing ASCII.

Sure, but that is backwards compatible / a superset of ASCII. What I meant to say, is that it's totally possible that, in the coming few centuries, even basic ASCII won't be readily understood. As in the character mapping in modern systems will break down, i.e., int 97 is no longer 'a', but some glyph from a language not yet conceived. We take for granted backwards comparability. Just because ASCII has been readable…

We do not take it for granted.

Instead, we design systems to be such because it makes many things much simpler.

This is the reason why UTF-8 has basically "won" over UTF-16 or UCS-4 when it comes to encoding Unicode characters.

If anything, with the amount of data we have today, unless there is a big reason (probably political, but even they exist today for eg. China not to want to use an Unicode transformation based on American Standard Code for Information Interchange) to re-encode all historical data, backwards compatibility will be maintained with the computers of the future (if they still exist). Yes, even if we move their bytes to be 13-qubit qubytes :D

To elaborate on the cost: re-encoding all data from 2050 is probably not going to be too expensive in 2400, but by then you'll need to re-encode data from up to 2400. To me this seems like a reason that backwards compatibility will make sense to be kept because there is not much to be gained. Eg. UTF-8 approach has shown us the best way forward.

The trickiest is going to be to keep all video/audio encoding algorithms, especially as they are patent encumbered.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#413

Post by idiotsecant »

rsj_hn wrote: post #389
markstos wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States government studied this question and came to the conclusion of... acid free paper. So it's now law that "permanent" documents in the US are to be stored on acid free paper: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr.... Some of us who remember the 5.25" floppy disks, the 3" "floppy" disks, the HUGE Zipdisks, the 5.25" spinning platter drives, the 2.5" spinning platter drives, then t…

Acid free paper is a big improvement, but it's not gonna last 500 years. It's expected to last 200 years. Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents.…

I'm not sure the latter argument summarized "in liberal societies cultural values change, so no information can be preserved" makes sense. We certainly can access certain culturally preserved texts that are thousands of years old with a pretty high fidelity, even when those texts may contain positive depictions of acts that are considered morally abhorrent today (slavery, genocide, murder, rape, etc) or simply physically falsifiable worldviews.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#414

Post by oceanplexian »

rossdavidh wrote: post #5

Look at what has lasted 500 years, and use those media. Websites are not among them. 1) stone 2) books if printed on the right kind of paper 3) metal if it's not something subject to rust Even if it is possible to make a website that lasts 500 years, I expect we haven't figured out how yet. I'm sure it took people a while to figure out how to make long-lasting tombstones; early North American ones were often made out…

Earth is a terrible place to store things for hundreds of years. I bet you could draw your website into Moon dust and come back hundreds of years later and it would still be there right next to your footprints.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#415

Post by laurent123456 »

t-writescode wrote: post #338
novaRom wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.

Nintendo is over 100. There are breweries with *thousand* year leases to the British Monarchy. Lots of kinds of companies have survived major world transformations.

Looks like many of the oldest companies in the word are indeed Japanese. Kongo Gumi, a construction firm, dates back from 578. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#417

Post by yayr »

You could publish the site on IPFS. Then you could device a solidity contract that awards ETH to someone hosting / pinning it. There are multiple ways to organise the latter. The easiest could be to provide your heirs the means to change the hosting provider reward address of that contract, in case he discontinues to deliver.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#418

Post by idiotsecant »

goatlover wrote: post #269
LadyCailin wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was very young at the time, but I was absolutely convinced that the world would end at 2020. It didn’t, and that deeply ingrained in me a very substantial amount of skepticism from doomsdaysayers. The only doomsday I believe in now for absolute certainty is the heat death of the universe, but no one reading this will be around for that.

There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold War, and there has been periodic environmental doomsday predictions since the 60s, starting with overpopulation and chemicals like DDT. Interspersed with that was AI and nanotech apocalyptic concerns. Climate change is the latest. The idea that civilization will manage to avoid the worst case scenarios and find its way through is not as exciting. You probably won…

This is a little bit like the bird who avoids the cat for 3 days in a row using that as evidence that cats can't eat birds. Be careful extrapolating possible futures only by sampling past events. That's why we have physics, because we are notoriously bad at doing that with just our intuition.

Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which means more heat is trapped within the atmosphere. We can measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That atmosphere will obey physics. More heat will be trapped.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#419

Post by WorldMaker »

mlinsey wrote: post #330

Other comments have given ways to physically archive the webpage. Continually hosting it is a much trickier endeavor. Beyond just keeping the servers up, technologies will shift such that eventually html webpages, servers that talk using tcp/ip, datacenters that connect via fiber cables, etc will all be deprecated. That said, if we have a very liberal definition of the word "website" to include any successor technolo…

Another benefit to Universities is that they have some of the oldest, most culturally focused DNS zones. EDU is the most likely of just about any root TLD today to avoid succumbing to for-profit pressure and is one of the stablest managed TLDs, so an address on an EDU domain perhaps has the highest likelihood of not changing deep into the future (assuming properly managed by the University itself). (There's still signs that ICANN itself can be bought and redelegate EDU at which point all bets are off.)

It might not even take that big of an Endowment to get the University to do something like that. Universities are pretty good at Endowment (Annuity) math (because they have to be), University web hosting is still relatively cheap (easy access to low cost labor from "passionate" students, a DNS TLD that mostly can't just raise prices for arbitrary profit reasons) and no signs that it wouldn't be so in perpetuity. (Just keeping mind the risks of data loss of cheap labor.)

A quick search didn't find me an Annuity calculator that can calculate past 100 years (and I don't have the Excel fu to do it by hand because I'm not an accountant), but just experimenting with some numbers: let's say $25/month covers expected hosting costs and a tiny bit of funds for other web needs (maybe a pizza allowance for students) to cover that $25/month for a full century at a somewhat low expected annual growth rate of 1% you only need to start with at least $19k endowment today to cover the annuity. You probably don't want to start that small for sociopolitical reasons (to give them more reasons to abide by the terms of the annuity for the full length of it), but on the flipside you probably don't need anything at all close to a $1B dollars to do such a thing either.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#420

Post by necovek »

999900000999 wrote: post #145

I would probably create some type of small self-contained unit, that's battery powered, and can recharge itself via solar panels. I'd have this device periodically try to fetch data from the internet. Once the internet goes down it goes down, and you'd have the local cached copy. I'd also have this mystical device print out the entire website in paper form every year or so, and then it would automatically shove the b…

I'd replace the battery with a hand-cranked (or pedal-powered) electric motor to generate electricity, but I am not sure if magnets or brushes can survive 500 years.
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