For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
When I was in Amsterdam I was really impressed with the code that Rose was writing and I encouraged her to share it. Here it is: drop this script into a web page with a form to have its values automatically saved into local storage (and automatically loaded into the form if something goes wrong before the form is submitted).
A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.
Time capsules on the moon, using NanoFiche as the storage medium.
This sounds like an interesting long-term storage project, but colour me extremely sceptical of their hand-wavey vagueness around their supposedly flawless technical solution:
This technology will be revealed to the world in the near future.
Also, they keep hyping up the Svalbard location as though it were purpose-built for this project, rather than the global seed bank (which they don’t even mention).
This might be a good way to do marketing, but it’s a shitty way to go about digital preservation.
Brewster Kahle:
The World Wide Web at its best is a mechanism for people to share what they know, almost always for free, and to find one’s community no matter where you are in the world.
A terrific piece by Jonathan Zittrain on bitrot and online digital preservation:
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
This is a terrific approach to tackling cross-site surveillance. I’d love it to be implemented in all browsers. I can imagine Safari implementing this. Chrome …we’ll see.
This is a good round-up of APIs you can use to decide if and how much JavaScript to load. I might look into using storage.estimate() in service workers to figure out how much gets pre-cached.
Collusion between three separate services owned by the same company: the Google search engine, the YouTube website, and the Chrome web browser.
Gosh, this kind of information could be really damaging if there were, say, antitrust proceedings initiated.
In the meantime, use Firefox
The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?
We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.
This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.
A non-profit that offers digital preservation services for individuals.
Permanence means no subscriptions; a one-time payment for dedicated storage that preserves your most precious memories and an institution that will be there to protect the digital legacy of all people for all time.
Tantek documents the features he wants his posting interface to have.
The carbon cost of collecting and storing data no one can use is already a moral issue.
So before you add another field, let alone make a new service, can you be sure it will make enough of a difference to legitimise its impact on the planet?
This is a fascinating project from Github, the Long Now Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Bodleian Library and others. All of the public code on Github on February 2nd, 2020 will be archived for 1000 years in a vault in Svalbard.
Mind you, given the amount of dependencies that most “modern” code projects rely on, I can’t foresee the code working after 1000 days.
This is brilliant technique by Remy!
If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!
This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.
Robert McFarlane’s new book is an exploration of deep time. In this extract, he visits the Onkalo nuclear waste storage facility in Finland.
Sometimes we bury materials in order that they may be preserved for the future. Sometimes we bury materials in order to preserve the future from them.
Running an experiment for 500 years is hard enough. Then there’s the documentation…
The hard part is ensuring someone will continue doing this on schedule well into the future. The team left a USB stick with instructions, which Möller realizes is far from adequate, given how quickly digital technology becomes obsolete. They also left a hard copy, on paper. “But think about 500-year-old paper,” he says, how it would yellow and crumble. “Should we carve it in stone? Do we have to carve it in a metal plate?” But what if someone who cannot read the writing comes along and decides to take the metal plate as a cool, shiny relic, as tomb raiders once did when looting ancient tombs?
No strategy is likely to be completely foolproof 500 years later. So the team asks that researchers at each 25-year time point copy the instructions so that they remain linguistically and technologically up to date.
A time capsule for the long now. Laser-etched ceramic tablets in an Austrian salt mine carry memories of our civilisation in three categories: news editorials, scientific works, and personal stories.
You can contribute a personal story, your favorite poem, or newspaper articles which describe our problems, visions or our daily life.
Tokens that mark the location of the site are also being distributed across the planet.
It turns out that a whole lot of The So-Called Cloud is relying on magnetic tape for its backups.