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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?

#81

Post by trinovantes »

tekknik wrote: post #16

How do you know what the internet will look like in 500 years? Sites from 20 years ago are broken, you can expect that unless you’re using plain text and html that standards will change in 500 years and people will not be able to access your site. Then there’s issues with domains. You’d have to setup a trust and again assume we will still be using domains in 500 years. If you use something like S3 then you’ll have to…

There's also the fact that human language will also change over the course of 500 years

500 year old English is nothing like English today

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

#82

Post by orangepurple »

hobbes78 wrote: post #66
orangepurple wrote: post #31

20x overspec'd solar panel. No battery. Broadcast a wifi hotspot at minimum radio power. Keep the components cold just above freezing and never allow them to freeze. You can accomplish this by using geothermal engineering to your benefit and burying the device with an appropriate heat exchanger so the planet can regulate the server temperature. Add in high availability and failover by using multiple buried devices co…

One system based on semiconductors will eventually fail, as their failure rate follows the bathtub curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve As much as I call cryptocurrencies a cancer, I admit storing on Bitcoin blockchain is probably the most resilient way, as its constantly being replicated across a huge amount of machines around the planet...

You can do a lot to mitigate semiconductor failure rate over time by controlling temperature and humidity and temperature swings

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

#84

Post by codazoda »

Trias11 wrote: post #38

If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations. Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page. So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.

There was a post here on hacker news of a service that would convert a static page and contain the entire page in a URL. That, in turn, could be converted to a QR code. I didn’t notice if it relied on something like bit.ly to store data, but it didn’t seem like it.

Unfortunately, I can’t find it again at the moment.

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

#85

Post by orangepurple »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #75
orangepurple wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be 500 year old seeded torrents

“There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines” —someone in 1985, probably

The thing is there can't be more than one internet, ever. The moment someone invents a new internet, someone will create a gateway to the old internet, and the internet will live on.

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

#86

Post by codetrotter »

tetha wrote: post #17

Hm. I think your best bet is to make it easy for archive.org to archive. archive.org will work on making your legacy technology work, as they are doing for flash, for example. Or they will find projects to make that work. That has a higher probability to work, opposed to finding a silver bullet now. Though, the silver bullet there would be to minimize technological complexity. Make a simple static site with hugo, for…

Regarding archive.org, it’s worth to note that you can submit an URL for archival through their site. Here: http://web.archive.org/save

Another thing to note is that in the past they would retroactively apply robots.txt, such that if a previously archived URL was matched by a disallow directive in a later crawl of robots.txt, the page would be removed from public view. Fortunately they began reconsidering this behavior in 2017 though, and started not applying later robots.txt for some domains. Not sure about the current status of that though. Here’s a a blog post they wrote about it, from 2017: http://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sear...

Meanwhile, even Google does not interpret robots.txt the way they used to: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/in...

So hopefully crawled robots.txt etc will not prevent public access to archived pages in the future the way that it used to.

The main problem, aside from original owner putting directives in robots.txt that would cause archive.org to remove a page from public view, was that if a domain expired and someone else picked up the domain and made a robots.txt, then that one would be retroactively applied as well. And even if the new owner did not intend to remove anything from public view on archive.org, they could do so unintentionally simply by having a strict robots.txt and not being aware of what this would mean to archive.org when they crawled the domain again.

Another question though is, how are ancestors 500 years into the future going to know to look at the Internet Archive for the pages that OP made? And how will they know what URLs to look for? Though this same thing applies for most of the other solutions as well anyhow.

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

#87

Post by Comevius »

Ask Piql to archive it, they are the company behind the Arctic World Archive.

If the website must be available on the internet than you are mistaken, the planet is becoming inhabitable and fast. This is a scientific fact. A civilization as unsustainable as ours don't get to be around for 500 years. The next one however should learn from our mistakes, so archiving is a worthwhile effort.

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

#88

Post by lioeters »

claudiulodro wrote: post #13

You've missed the boat (literally and figuratively), but GitHub's Arctic Code vault would have been a solid solution: https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

Interestingly, GitHub partnered with a company called Piql for the Arctic Vault.

https://www.piql.com/

> Keep your information alive, secure and accessible for the future

> Long-term information storage - We can ensure your valuable information is archived appropriately for any length of time, with guaranteed accessibility.

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

#90

Post by pvaldes »

Trias11 wrote: post #38

If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations. Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page. So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.

This practically grants that the titanium plate will be sold and melted being much more valuable as material than the information encoded.
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