Google vice president Vint Cerf warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk
24 replies, posted
[url]http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf[/url]
[quote=The Guardian]Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned.
Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.
Cerf called for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no matter how old they are.[/quote]
So time to find a way to safely store information securely in a modern day tomb with included super intuitive user guide using pictograms to explain how to read it all and translate it?
Fuck yeah modern day Pharaohs, with less organ removal and undead mummies.
Seriously though people have been struggling with this sort of thing for a long time, in regards to this and ways to make sure future generations don't stumble into nuclear waste stores and shit.
I can't quite remember the name/location of it, but iirc there's some vault somewhere in Europe (a mountain maybe?) that stores at least one copy of pretty much every type of old tech for communication or data reading/storage. So they've got the hardware covered.
I think Pentium/MIPS is already taking care of this.
It's sadly mostly a afterthought, but there are people out there trying to save old internet crap.
They did a defcon talk a time ago.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZTmuX3cog[/media]
Historians will finally be able to review our criptic ytmnd gifs
Hang on, I'll ask my grandma to forward me those old emails again.
so what exactly is in danger?
Even if we 'lose' our modern technology, the raw data can still be kept. When you consider that forensic scientists are currently reading 2000-year-old messages from scrolls that were obliterated in Pompeii, I think program obsolescence won't be as much of an issue as we're thinking it will be.
[QUOTE=Killuah;47141723]so what exactly is in danger?[/QUOTE]
Wait I'm an idiot I didn't use a CD for years and I don't have a floppy drive.
anything that saves my geocities page is a postitive movement for me
[QUOTE=MR-X;47141650]Historians will finally be able to review our criptic ytmnd gifs[/QUOTE]
Lovely, we'll put them next to all the [url=http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction]under construction gifs.[/url]
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;47141731]Even if we 'lose' our modern technology, the raw data can still be kept. When you consider that forensic scientists are currently reading 2000-year-old messages from scrolls that were obliterated in Pompeii, I think program obsolescence won't be as much of an issue as we're thinking it will be.[/QUOTE]
Lol, those scrolls are something you can actually see as is. Even in a million years, assuming people still have eyes, a printed picture or text will still be what it always was. Digital data is just 0s and 1s, without the hardware and software that can interpret it, it means nothing.
A simple example... let's say 20 years ago you had a text document on a 8" floppy disc and you saved both it and the printed copy in a safe. Now that printed copy can be read as is, but to open that floppy you will have to go to a museum or something to find a PC and a floppy drive that is compatible.
In the year 3300 where everyone is flying spaceships from Sol to i Boötis and beyond and porn is all virtual reality, my hentai collection will be viewed as a valueless antique
a hundred years from now people will look back on the achaic and greedy nature of our copyright and lament on all the lost culture, even today due to a need to squeeze every last drop of blood from a rock, we've lost almost all the film from the early days of film, days and days of historical radio broadcasts from across the world, and the countless other examples of our out of control system destroying the culture it supposedly protects
too bad we're never going to get any meaningful copyright reform, but at the very least, the library of congress should be allowed to archive any media regardless of copyright limitations
[editline]14th February 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=AntonioR;47142115]Lol, those scrolls are something you can actually see as is. Even in a million years, assuming people still have eyes, a printed picture or text will still be what it always was. Digital data is just 0s and 1s, without the hardware and software that can interpret it, it means nothing.
A simple example... let's say 20 years ago you had a text document on a 8" floppy disc and you saved both it and the printed copy in a safe. Now that printed copy can be read as is, but to open that floppy you will have to go to a museum or something to find a PC and a floppy drive that is compatible.[/QUOTE]
in fact this is already a problem, andy worhol used one of the first digital cameras for some of his work, except it uses a proprietary storage system that nobody today can read, at least nobody has found another reader
[QUOTE=FetusFondler;47142173]my hentai collection will be viewed as a valueless antique[/QUOTE]
Pornhub has a vintage category so you never know
this is some steins gate IBM 5100 shit right here
Modern non-proprietary formats should not be facing this problem since they are open and well documented.
Plaintext will always be readable since we're not going to all of a sudden forget how UTF-8 works.
[QUOTE=AntonioR;47142115]Lol, those scrolls are something you can actually see as is. Even in a million years, assuming people still have eyes, a printed picture or text will still be what it always was. Digital data is just 0s and 1s, without the hardware and software that can interpret it, it means nothing.
A simple example... let's say 20 years ago you had a text document on a 8" floppy disc and you saved both it and the printed copy in a safe. Now that printed copy can be read as is, but to open that floppy you will have to go to a museum or something to find a PC and a floppy drive that is compatible.[/QUOTE]
Except a lot of stuff from long ago wasn't exactly written in a language that we can comprehend today. The specifications for a floppy disk drive are pretty well-known, and even if none exist in a few hundred years, we will certainly be able to rebuild one, even though the data on the disk has long since deteriorated into a demagnetized mess. I've got a bunch of floppies around, and most over 10 years old have been corrupted to some extent. Although, the oldest one I have (a PS/2 reference disk from '89) still sort of works, and that was when 3.5 inchers were only just gaining traction (hur).
A dead language, however, is a bit more difficult... it may last longer but decoding it isn't exactly possible much of the time.
[QUOTE=ScottyWired;47142877]Pornhub has a vintage category so you never know[/QUOTE]
Blast to the past with VHS quality porn.
-snip-
[QUOTE=Killuah;47141440]I think Pentium/MIPS is already taking care of this.[/QUOTE]
Compared to the other people I know, I'm a small fry. Fucking Paul Allen can do circles around anything I've archived so far...and yes he has. His museum helped me archive a small pile of DECtapes and LINCtapes I had found because I can't afford the collector-tier hardware to read them.
Right now it's mainly the task of the Internet Archive, Bitsavers, and the various warez sites I can't discuss who are keeping it all centralized. Things however like robots.txt however does not make this archiving process any easier. Neither are companies who move on and deny the existance of old products in written or software form, but will DMCA your ass if you try to archive their now unobtainable software/utilities/drivers. We're already running into products from the 80's which cannot be used now simply because nobody could get access to the files.
My buddy has 150 gigs worth of pornography on his hard drive.
Needless to say, he is ready for an internet blackout
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;47141731]Even if we 'lose' our modern technology, the raw data can still be kept. When you consider that forensic scientists are currently reading 2000-year-old messages from scrolls that were obliterated in Pompeii, I think program obsolescence won't be as much of an issue as we're thinking it will be.[/QUOTE]
It's actually more complex since you arent dealing with a real language. Imagine a completely clean ascii text file, that's little endian. This is as simple as you can go and you already have a full blown substitution cypher, a language you may or may not recognise.
It's significantly more complex the more esoteric the document becomes. A word doc is massively more complicated and you need to seperate the text from the data dealing with how the text looks.
There's actually a fairly nice push to human readable files from this decade, but anything from the 80s or 90s? You get a huge amount of binary file formats which are a pain to wade trough.
Now imagine you have a big indian binary file in something like Urdu. You have no clue what the language is, the endiannes and you have a storage media in front of you.
You have no clue what the filesystem is or how it works, and even if we assume you can read dada from the medium, you have no clue what you're dealing with.
Of course, the stronger your own computers are, the more automated things can get. The truth is, without a good computer, delving trough those binary fileformats would probably be impossible in the future.
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