Techdirt. Stories filed under "archive"

DailyDirt: The Future Of Storage

Michael Ho — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:00:00 PDT

Storing digital data can be unreliable if you want it to last a really long time. But there are many ways to store vast amounts of data, and if you're not in a hurry to retrieve the data, it can be somewhat cheap to maintain an enormous amount of information nowadays. Here are just a few examples of storing LOTS of data in somewhat unconventional ways.

Printing at about 100,000 dots per inch in full color has been achieved by researchers at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. As a proof of principle, a test image of Lenna was formed on a silicon wafer covered with a nanoscale metal coating. [url]
Amazon is starting to offer archival storage for just $0.01 per gigabyte per month. This Glacier storage service is aimed at replacing old tape archives and geographically distinct facilities, but retrieving the data isn't so convenient: data retrieval requests can take hours (hence the name Glacier) and there's also a retrieval fee after you've accessed more than 5% of your data vault in a month. [url]
Geneticists in Boston have stored a 5.27-megabit book (containing 53,246 words, 11 JPG image files and a JavaScript program) on DNA. This is the highest density of non-biological data ever encoded by DNA, and a gram of material could store 455 exabytes of data. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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DailyDirt: In The Year 2525...

Michael Ho — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 17:00:00 PDT

Computers have made it easier and easier for people to create incredible amounts of data -- passing the zettabyte barrier in 2010. The growth of data is actually surpassing our ability to store it, and it's a bit concerning that our ability to store digital information for long periods of time isn't too reliable (just try to access stuff on a 5.25" floppy). Here are just a few interesting links on preserving information for thousands of years.

Digitally-stored information about nuclear waste needs to be accessible many thousands of years from now. Engraving the info on sapphire discs with platinum is just one proposed solution that could work for future archaeologists -- but in what language should it be written? [url]
If you thought your burned CDs/DVDs lasted forever, think again. But if you still want to store your data on plastic discs, there's a company (Millenniata) that sells an optical disc engraving technology for writing CDs/DVDs that work with standard CD/DVD readers -- and that claims to last for about 1,000 years (or at least hundreds of years). [url]
Neanderthals were making cave paintings over 40,800 years ago in Spain. How much of our art will survive the next 40,000 years? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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Internet Archive Enables Over 1,000,000 Torrents Of Books, Music And Movies

Mike Masnick — Tue, 7 Aug 2012 20:06:00 PDT

We sometimes hear people say that BitTorrent as a technology is only good for infringement. We know that's not true, but then people will point to examples of how frequently it's used for infringement. Of course, that's meaningless when you look at both the larger picture and the nature of trends. When new distribution technologies are introduced, it's not surprising that they're used that way because there's so little legitimate activity on the system. But that changes over time. Remember, when the VCR first came about, nearly all activity on it was described as "infringing" by some, because there was no legitimate content being offered. However, obviously, over time that changed and more and more legitimate content was offered.

Over the years, we've certainly seen an increase in content being offered via BitTorrent, but today there's a big addition: the Internet Archive has enabled over one million torrents of books, music and movies from its collection.

The Internet Archive is now offering over 1,000,000 torrents including our live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, lots and lots of books, and all new uploads from our patrons into Community collections (with more to follow).

And while some ignorant organizations may declare that the Internet Archive is a "rogue site," I think most people recognize that it's a wonderful repository of all sorts of legal content, much of which is now available using the rather efficient distribution technology BitTorrent.

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Archive Of Geocities Released As A 1TB Torrent

Mike Masnick — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 07:46:40 PDT

In early 2009, Yahoo announced that it was going to put Geocities out of its misery and finally shut down the site entirely, even as it was still getting 11 million unique visitors per month. Soon after the announcement, we had heard about some projects to try to archive the entire site (with some claims that it couldn't be done in time). The actual shut down occurred almost exactly a year ago, and yet a group calling itself The Archive Team is apparently releasing its entire Geocities archive, blinking flashing "under construction signs" and all, as a nearly 1 TB torrent. They don't think they got everything, but do believe they archived "a significant percentage" of the site.

It's worth reading the blog post by the folks who did this explaining why they did it, noting how little people realized that this was basically erasing digital history and culture:

What we were facing, you see, was the wholesale destruction of the still-rare combination of words digital heritage, the erasing and silencing of hundreds of thousands of voices, voices that representing the dawn of what one might call "regular people" joining the World Wide Web. A unique moment in human history, preserved for many years and spontaneously combusting due to a few marks in a ledger, the decision of who-knows for who-knows-what.

This is interesting on a number of levels. It is fascinating how little most people seemed to care about the loss of Geocities. Yes, it was quite an abandoned digital hangout for much of the past decade, but the group is right that it represented an important watershed in recognizing that anyone could be a content creator. I first learned to make websites via a Geocities account (before it was even called Geocities, mind you). And yet, Yahoo just dumped it.

Of course, someone could make the argument that this archive is copyright infringement. I doubt anyone will, but it is an interesting question. The archiving is an important point in preserving digital history, and yet it's also a moment of massive copyright infringement -- technically speaking. This is the sort of bizarrely bad result you get in a world where copyright is automatically given to any content at the moment of creation. Most of the people creating Geocities pages would have no reason (or desire) to copyright what they created, and yet they all got it by default.

Hopefully, no one decides to pursue the copyright issue in any serious manner. In the meantime, we'll leave you with the parting words of The Archive Team:

While it's quite clear this sort of cavalier attitude to digital history will continue, the hope is that this torrent will bring some attention to both the worth of these archives and the ease at which it can be lost -- and found again.

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Library of Congress Responds To Privacy Gripes By Making Twitter Archive Less Useful

Karl Bode — Fri, 7 May 2010 02:17:25 PDT

We recently noted how the Library Of Congress and Twitter made a big deal of the fact that the LOC would now be archiving Twitter conversations. The idea is that researchers may find a mountain of largely-incoherent blathering about the Twilight films useful in providing context as they try to piece together events of the twenty-first century. Late last week a little more detail of the archiving process leaked out, the LOC saying that in response to privacy complaints they wouldn't store deleted tweets, and they'd also be placing all tweets under embargo for a period of six months (for whatever that's supposed to accomplish). For good measure, they're also apparently locking down the Twitter archive to "qualified researchers" and considering further restrictions:

"The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that is not enough to put privacy issues to rest, she said, “We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.” The library plans to dole out its access to its Twitter archive only to those whom Ms. Anderson called "qualified researchers."

The historical dangers of "filtering certain things" aside, what's the point of these restrictions? The entire archive is already being indexed by Google in real time, with no delays or restrictions -- and other copies are being doled out to companies like Microsoft and Yahoo. In an age where phone companies are feeding every single byte of data in real time to the NSA with questionable oversight -- worrying too much about the storage of your clever Twitter barbs seems to be missing the forest for the trees. The Library of Congress appears to have responded to these largely-senseless privacy concerns (you are communicating using a public service) by making the government's Twitter archive more annoying to use. Though hey, if the apocalypse manages to decimate every other copy of the Twitter archive -- you can sleep well knowing that you'll still be able to dig through OchoCinco's insights at The Library Of Congress with a laminated community college ID.

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