Could a Blockchain based file system be the answer!
Internet Archive and the like are great resources, and I support their works, but they are still a "cathedral entity." If they disappear, we lose a LOT! If for some unfortunate reason they collapse, we're stuck with a lot of rebuilding of the archive as a community. Volunteers keeping torrents would not only distribute many recoverable duplicates of the overall content, but will also allow for a quick recovery of the whole.
I don't understand "torrents", and don't need to. They seem to amount to copying and Web distribution of archived content in an active real-time way. Seems to me, there's no shortage of people who are obsessed with copying vintage archives and making them available - their way. Whatever technology they choose to that end, is up to them. That said, others say "I won't bother to obtain this manual, someone else has preserved it". A problem of excess. And access to Web servers has never EVER been cheaper - skip some business lunches and pay for a year. (Funding was part of the original post.) Ask some users to donate some dollars - and we as users *should* make those contributions, to guard against the "fall of the Cathedral". Note: the Internet Archive "is a mile wide and an inch deep". It doesn't save enough, for the purposes of this discussion. Torrents, blockchain, distributed file systems - all "hammers" looking for a "nail", in my opinion as an engineer among other engineers. I'm scanning manuals and making them available, thank you, and I have my own tools. When my "cathedral" falls, the people who got my content, will resurrect it; and I may provide for other "cathedrals" too; and for what was in mine. Thanks for reminding me of this issue. Herb Johnson -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
On 12/21/2017 12:06 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Internet Archive and the like are great resources, and I support their works, but they are still a "cathedral entity." If they disappear, we lose a LOT! If for some unfortunate reason they collapse, we're stuck with a lot of rebuilding of the archive as a community. Volunteers keeping torrents would not only distribute many recoverable duplicates of the overall content, but will also allow for a quick recovery of the whole.
I don't understand "torrents", and don't need to. They seem to amount to copying and Web distribution of archived content in an active real-time way.
It's a tool like any other. But it has nothing to do with "web", just FYI.
Seems to me, there's no shortage of people who are obsessed with copying vintage archives and making them available - their way. Whatever technology they choose to that end, is up to them. That said, others say "I won't bother to obtain this manual, someone else has preserved it". A problem of excess.
I think a lot of people learned from what happened with the Don Maslin archive. We are very lucky that it was eventually recovered.
Torrents, blockchain, distributed file systems - all "hammers" looking for a "nail", in my opinion as an engineer among other engineers. I'm scanning manuals and making them available, thank you, and I have my own tools. When my "cathedral" falls, the people who got my content, will resurrect it; and I may provide for other "cathedrals" too; and for what was in mine. Thanks for reminding me of this issue.
Please forgive me for saying so, but this is a very curmudgeonly attitude. Just because a tool is new, doesn't necessarily mean that it's useless. Further, none of these things are even all that new. People are now starting to find new applications for blockchain technology, in particular for data preservation and insurance of immutability. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. If you don't want to participate in it, don't, and that's ok. But I for one am convinced that that's how this stuff will be preserved in the future. And with ever-shortening "SQUIRREL!" attention spans, and millennial and post-millennials thinking transient content is just fine, and "oh, it'll be there" being the prevalent attitude amongst people 20-40yrs younger than us, this is an important and valuable thing. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On Dec 21, 2017, at 12:46 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 12/21/2017 12:06 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Torrents, blockchain, distributed file systems - all "hammers" looking for a "nail", in my opinion as an engineer among other engineers. I'm scanning manuals and making them available, thank you, and I have my own tools. When my "cathedral" falls, the people who got my content, will resurrect it; and I may provide for other "cathedrals" too; and for what was in mine. Thanks for reminding me of this issue.
Please forgive me for saying so, but this is a very curmudgeonly attitude. Just because a tool is new, doesn't necessarily mean that it's useless. Further, none of these things are even all that new. People are now starting to find new applications for blockchain technology, in particular for data preservation and insurance of immutability. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. If you don't want to participate in it, don't, and that's ok. But I for one am convinced that that's how this stuff will be preserved in the future.
My primary issue with blockchain is that it's a good solution for one particular thing (which you mentioned above), but now that cryptocurrency has exploded everyone wants to use it for everything without knowing what it is or why (per the Perl saying, "when all you have is scissors, everything starts to look like a nail"). It's great for making verified, immutable, distributed histories, and if your problem space fits into that, then great! I think there are some aspects of filesystems (particularly distributed ones) that can benefit from that. But then I also see nonsense like this, and I despair: http://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/long-island-iced-tea-comp... I'm certainly not saying that there's no role for blockchain ideas in digital preservation, but I'm definitely worried about how the whole blockchain concept has turned into some sort of digital snake oil that purports to fix everything. It's the same boat I'm in for IoT; my masters' thesis was on wireless sensor networks just a year or two before the Internet of Things "revolution" exploded, and the dilution of the term and the rush to commercialize it without any thought as to why or what the consequences would be have done a great deal of harm to the field. - Dave
On 12/21/2017 01:07 PM, David Riley wrote:
On Dec 21, 2017, at 12:46 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 12/21/2017 12:06 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Torrents, blockchain, distributed file systems - all "hammers" looking for a "nail", in my opinion as an engineer among other engineers. I'm scanning manuals and making them available, thank you, and I have my own tools. When my "cathedral" falls, the people who got my content, will resurrect it; and I may provide for other "cathedrals" too; and for what was in mine. Thanks for reminding me of this issue.
Please forgive me for saying so, but this is a very curmudgeonly attitude. Just because a tool is new, doesn't necessarily mean that it's useless. Further, none of these things are even all that new. People are now starting to find new applications for blockchain technology, in particular for data preservation and insurance of immutability. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. If you don't want to participate in it, don't, and that's ok. But I for one am convinced that that's how this stuff will be preserved in the future.
My primary issue with blockchain is that it's a good solution for one particular thing (which you mentioned above), but now that cryptocurrency has exploded everyone wants to use it for everything without knowing what it is or why (per the Perl saying, "when all you have is scissors, everything starts to look like a nail").
It's great for making verified, immutable, distributed histories, and if your problem space fits into that, then great! I think there are some aspects of filesystems (particularly distributed ones) that can benefit from that. But then I also see nonsense like this, and I despair: http://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/long-island-iced-tea-comp...
I'm certainly not saying that there's no role for blockchain ideas in digital preservation, but I'm definitely worried about how the whole blockchain concept has turned into some sort of digital snake oil that purports to fix everything.
It's the same boat I'm in for IoT; my masters' thesis was on wireless sensor networks just a year or two before the Internet of Things "revolution" exploded, and the dilution of the term and the rush to commercialize it without any thought as to why or what the consequences would be have done a great deal of harm to the field.
Well yes, this happens for lots of new things. It's up to people like us to know the difference between BS and real applications. But now that we have enough CPU power to wrangle it, blockchain technologies can do quite a bit. I feel your pain on the "IoT" thing. The exact same stuff I've been doing for years is now called "IoT". -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 12:06 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I don't understand "torrents", and don't need to. They seem to amount to copying and Web distribution of archived content in an active real-time way.
Close enough, but it's more peer storage instead of web server storage. Seems to me, there's no shortage of people who are obsessed with copying
vintage archives and making them available - their way. Whatever technology they choose to that end, is up to them. That said, others say "I won't bother to obtain this manual, someone else has preserved it". A problem of excess.
The biggest problem with this is that while it is decentralized, there's no central authority. The Internet Archive is certainly a central authority, but it's still an "eggs in one basket" risk. We can still only trust the backups will be good if needed due to catastrophic failure.
And access to Web servers has never EVER been cheaper - skip some business lunches and pay for a year. (Funding was part of the original post.) Ask some users to donate some dollars - and we as users *should* make those contributions, to guard against the "fall of the Cathedral".
Still needs a RELIABLE central point of entry which defines where to go for this collection and that, with the potential for dead links over time, and no direct access to any singly provided resource should a linked server disappear. We can't count on redundancy either without volunteers actively maintaining their respective servers. Add to that the basic fact that such an idea REQUIRES funding, if at least to host a central jump page.
Torrents, blockchain, distributed file systems - all "hammers" looking for a "nail", in my opinion as an engineer among other engineers. I'm scanning manuals and making them available, thank you, and I have my own tools. When my "cathedral" falls, the people who got my content, will resurrect it; and I may provide for other "cathedrals" too; and for what was in mine. Thanks for reminding me of this issue.
That's because "nails" in this sense are outmoded. Screws are much stronger at holding things together, therefore a different tool is needed. That's why the suggestions of distributed storage are viable. Torrent file groups (or whatever the future may bring) are distributed amongst any number of volunteers, all decentralized and redundant, location independent (domain name not needed), and not a single web server fee (no matter how minuscule) is required. All that's needed for someone to get started downloading one or more files from a torrent is torrent software and a single .torrent file. That file provides a key to the automation of torrent activity. All that's needed for someone to volunteer to host files is to dedicate storage space on their own computer and leave their torrent software running. It remains pretty much hands-free for the volunteer at this point. Again, it's like a RAID thing. If one volunteer goes offline, then the larger collection of other volunteers can still provide the full content.
participants (4)
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Dave McGuire -
David Riley -
Herb Johnson -
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