Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service

perma.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 86 posts

Re: Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service

#61

Post by pbhjpbhj »

true_religion wrote: post #15
dylan604 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Please note that this is a statement of Perma.cc’s present intent in the event the project winds down. Perma.cc may revise or amend this page at any time. Nothing on this page is intended to, nor may it be read to, create a legal or contractual right for users or obligation for Perma.cc, under the Perma.cc Terms of Use or otherwise." So, yeah, nothing is different than anyone else, other than they have a "cunning pl…

You can’t actually create a contractual right without consideration and they appear to be a free service. They can only promise to do their best.

You can create an obligation for yourself or make a binding statement of intent.

Indeed memoranda in the UK, created when registering a company, require it. You state the intended services. Companies weasel around it by making broad milquetoast claims.

A statement binding the organisation to release their data and cede all copyright should the site be terminated, for example, would demonstrate good faith and go a long way to reassuring people that it wasn't wasted effort.

Re: Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service

#63

Post by pbhjpbhj »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #10
bananapub wrote: post #8

95% of the work for a useful product like this is figuring out how to ensure it survives your dumb business model or the idiocy of the tech industry, and yet none of the words on this landing page explain what work they've done on that. did they not understand that at all? did they just not do any work on it? or did they understand it and do great work but just fail to but it in 100pt text as item 0 on the list? who…

This isn’t a tech product. It’s a decentralized archive organized by Harvard Law School Library. Being literal librarians, I am fairly sure the creators of this service have thought through how it will remain accessible in the long term.

"Fairly sure", well why didn't they say that in their blurb!?

The site copywriters seem to have very carefully made associations with Harvard whilst maintaining perma.cc as a separate entity to which they, Harvard, owe no obligations.

"Perma.cc was built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and is backed by the power of libraries."

They built it, they organise it, but what they don't seem to do is provide any guarantees with/through/towards it.

Sure, who wants to take on obligations, make promises. Much easier to hide behind vague expressions of how great librarians are (it's a noble calling). 'Trust me bro' is pretty hard to go with for commercial enterprises regardless of who started them.

They clearly thought through the future, hence the 'we don't owe you anything when we sell the service to X/Alphabet/Meta or whoever' language.

How much budget have Harvard set aside for long-term maintenance?

It looks useful.

Re: Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service

#64

Post by JackC »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #21
JackC wrote: post #18

Hi! Perma is made by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, which I direct, and I wrote a bunch of the early code for it back in 2015 or so. For HN readers, I'd suggest checking out https://tools.perma.cc/ , where we post a bunch of the open source work that backs this. Due to the shift from warc to wacz, (a zipped-web-archive format developed by WebRecorder), it's now possible to pass around fully interactive high fide…

I think the main question is: - Why is it better than internet archive? I personally see the benefit as potentially having internet archive stopping being the only game in town, but even that comes with certain costs ( which may not be great to the community as a whole -- depending on who you ask ). I would love to hear your perspective on where you stand as related to other providers of similar services.

I think the biggest distinction is between archiving platforms made primarily for authors and primarily for web crawlers.

If you're an author (say, of a court decision) and you archive example.com/foo, Perma makes a fresh copy of example.com/foo as its own wacz file, with a CPU-intensive headless browser, gives it a unique short URL, and puts it in a folder tree for you. So you get a higher quality capture than most crawls can afford, including a screenshot and pdf; you get a URL that's easy to cite in print; you can find your copy later; you get "temporal integrity" (it's not possible for replays to pull in assets from other crawls, which can result in frankenstein playbacks); and you can independently respond to things like DMCA takedowns. It's all tuned to offer a great experience for that author.

IA is primarily tuned for preserving everything regardless of whether the author cared to preserve it or not, through massive web crawls. Which is often the better strategy -- most authors don't care as much as judges about the longterm integrity of their citations.

This is what I'm getting at about the specific benefits of having multiple archives. It's not just redundancy, it's that you can do better for different users that way.

Re: Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service

#65

Post by JackC »

lrvick wrote: post #56
JackC wrote: post #18

Hi! Perma is made by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, which I direct, and I wrote a bunch of the early code for it back in 2015 or so. For HN readers, I'd suggest checking out https://tools.perma.cc/ , where we post a bunch of the open source work that backs this. Due to the shift from warc to wacz, (a zipped-web-archive format developed by WebRecorder), it's now possible to pass around fully interactive high fide…

Is there any concept of signing data at time of archive, and verification at time of access, to prove it is not later tampered with, say by a bribed sysadmin? Similarly are there any general supply chain integrity measures in place, such as code review of dependencies, reproducible builds, or creating archives reproducibly in independently administrated enclaves? You note archives could be used for instances like Sup…

We're coauthors on the wacz-auth spec, which is designed to solve this sort of thing by signing archives with the domain cert of the archive that created them. If you cross-sign with a private cert you can do pretty well with this approach against various threat models, though it has to be part of a whole PKI security design.

I think the best approach for high stakes archiving is to have a standard for "witness APIs" so that you could fetch archives from independent archiving institutions. That also solves for the web looking different from different places. That hasn't gelled yet, though.

Re: Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service

#67

Post by JackC »

jedberg wrote: post #57
JackC wrote: post #18

Hi! Perma is made by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, which I direct, and I wrote a bunch of the early code for it back in 2015 or so. For HN readers, I'd suggest checking out https://tools.perma.cc/ , where we post a bunch of the open source work that backs this. Due to the shift from warc to wacz, (a zipped-web-archive format developed by WebRecorder), it's now possible to pass around fully interactive high fide…

My first question was "If this is a free service, how do I know it will still be around in even a few years?". This was answered by your comment that it is (or at least appears to be?) funded by Harvard. In which case, why isn't this prominently displayed on the main page? Or why not use a Harvard library URL, which will significantly boost the trust level? Especially vs a CC TLD which are known to be problematic?

It is on core Harvard funds, and we also have paid accounts used by law firms and journalists.

As an innovation lab we often minimize Harvard branding with project websites because it's more instructive to win or lose on our own merits than based on how people feel about Harvard, in either direction.

Re: Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service

#68

Post by aghilmort »

moralestapia wrote: post #25
aghilmort wrote: post #17

how does this compare contrast with DOI - complements, replaces, etc.?

They're very different things. DOI is pretty much a giant, curated, hash table. DOI does not store any data, it's only a map of numbers to strings.

ah so DOI meets archive.org in a participatory opt-in sort of way?

Re: Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service

#69

Post by husam212 »

russellbeattie wrote: post #46
JackC wrote: post #18

Hi! Perma is made by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, which I direct, and I wrote a bunch of the early code for it back in 2015 or so. For HN readers, I'd suggest checking out https://tools.perma.cc/ , where we post a bunch of the open source work that backs this. Due to the shift from warc to wacz, (a zipped-web-archive format developed by WebRecorder), it's now possible to pass around fully interactive high fide…

Since you own the "perma.link" domain name (I just looked it up) why don't you use that instead of .cc which has issues?

It's really annoying that domain is not the main one, it's so much better!

Re: Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service

#70

Post by Onavo »

JackC wrote: post #18

Hi! Perma is made by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, which I direct, and I wrote a bunch of the early code for it back in 2015 or so. For HN readers, I'd suggest checking out https://tools.perma.cc/ , where we post a bunch of the open source work that backs this. Due to the shift from warc to wacz, (a zipped-web-archive format developed by WebRecorder), it's now possible to pass around fully interactive high fide…

What happens if you get a lawsuit or injunction demanding information removal or alteration? What if somebody archives a born secret or something sensitive?
Post reply on HN