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From a security perspective you must assume "Anything you post on the internet will be there forever". That's also why we tell kids that it'll be online forever

From a security perspective you must assume "Anything you post on the internet will be there forever". That's also why we tell kids that it'll be online forever - because there is no guarantee we remove all copies of it. However from a data integrity perspective you must hold the opposite perspective "Assume your copy is the only copy that exists", as you cannot guarantee other's have a copy of the data or will keep their copies. I'm personally very worried about what the internet will look like in 15 years. How many awesome communities, blogs, projects, etc. will disappear?

segfaultbuserr 7y ago
I'd just hope Hacker News never "upgrades" itself in the next 15 years so I can still find archives of previous discussions, including this thread. Hacker News is the center of technology, just like the Usenet Groups were the center from the late 70s to the mid-90s, that must be preserved as computer history. Our generation can see how the Internet started and how 4.3BSD worked by reading the Usenet archives, the future generations deserve to be able doing the same, learn how the Silicon Valley in the 2010s worked by reading Hacker News archives.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  > Hacker News is the center of technology Let's not pat ourselves on the back too hard.
  - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
    Okay, not the center, but possibly the largest general-interest forum near the center. Can you name another Internet forum where discussions are similar to general-interest Usenet tech groups, where even internal details or confidential information about tech companies such as Microsoft [0] or Oracle [1] leaks out from time to time? Mailing lists? Well, yes, but there are all single-topic forum. Twitter? Probably, but it's not a forum, and it's even responsible for killing the forums. Reddit? Those programming groups are large, but they are closer to newsfeed where you can submit links than a forum (Hacker News is also a newsfeed, but it's discussion-orientated, some people don't even read the news). Although some communities such as r/bitcoin has plenty of important history preserved here, but not a general-interest tech forum. 4chan? It has some historical significant for Internet subcultures, but probably not in general interest. Chatrooms? Yes. Freenode is still big, Discord has a lot of communities, but they are not forums. My conclusion about Hacker News being the center was after a long depression that the social media has killed large forums where long opinions are elaborated. But Hacker News is still kicking around, like it was 1995. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689391 (original comment deleted, reposted here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w...) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
    - nfoz 7y ago
      HN is just another slashdot. And slashdot looks like it's still going fine: https://slashdot.org/ https://slashdot.org/
      - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
        Yes, but I think it doesn't replace HN. The first difference is that Slashdot provides a summary of the news, so most Slashdot users do actually read the news, and makes a few points down in comment; unlike Hacker News, where many don't and just wait for a chance to jump in and post comments. Therefore, the contents are often of a different nature, HN is closer to a forum. Also, the current Slashdot is truly different from early Slashdot. It seems to be more corporative and commercial. On early Slashdot, you can occasionally see interviews and book reviews dedicated to the community, you rarely see those post nowadays, if any. Also, in recent years, Slashdot implemented (or refused to implement) changes and created a strong opposition within a subgroup of users, and gave to birth of forks of smaller site. While HN is still here and living well (I do know Lobster is a HN fork). So both HN and Slashdot needs archives, and they should know better not to push for destructive upgrades that makes reading historical posts difficult. Both work well today, but I don't know what would happen in the future.
        skinnymuch 7y ago
        HN is pretty corporate for YC companies and stuff.
      - kadoban 7y ago
        It still exists, I guess. It's a pale shadow of what it once was, and not even close to as useful or fun as HN.
      - REDDitMen 7y ago
        And Slashdot looks like it's still going. To me it's more of an very early reddit.
      - serf 7y ago
  - chapium 7y ago
    And Silicon Valley municipal politics and health fads totally unsupported by anything other than good feels.
cookiecaper 7y ago
Yeah, I think that people really tend to overlook how much of our common history and heritage exists exclusively as bits on some old hunk of rust, and how frequently those bits are permanently and irrevocably vaporized. Shutdowns like this are well-planned and orderly compared to the much-more-common-than-anyone-wants-to-admit "woops, I ran rm -rf in the wrong directory", "woops, I ran fsck on a mounted disk" (which I literally did last night, fortunately without the deserved vaporization), or "woops, someone sold the wrong server and the hard drive is out in the wild now", followed up by the inevitable "woops, turns out the backups have been broken for the last 32 months, probably should've been checking that". Historians are going to have a hard time moving forward. Until the last 15 years or so, when someone died, you could go collect "their papers" -- journals, letters, records, photos, and so on. The digital equivalent is scattered across dozens of personal devices and thousands of servers. Even if we're generous and assume that something like 20% of it will still exist when a person becomes deceased, the data is comingled in someone's crappy MySQL somewhere, or it's stored behind passwords, crypto keys, and other contraptions that are virtually unbreakable as compared against something like "call the locksmith". As people age, I think these concerns will begin to be taken much more seriously, but it shows the crucial importance of fully utilizing things like the GDPR-mandated "fork over your data" export and becoming proficient in backup, archiving, and system forensics. This is an area of some interest to me, so when my grandmother died a couple of years ago, I worked quickly to get a bit-for-bit copy of every user-accessible digital device in her house. I got almost everything, but a distant family member absconded with the iPad, which had been her primary computing device for the last couple of years of her life, before I could even get on a plane. [Tangential pro-tip here: large files can and do lose bits. Create multiple copies, create parity files, and don't rely blindly on either RAID or filesystem-level checksums.] Fortunately, she was in her mid-90s and while she enjoyed technology, she also maintained handwritten journals for over 50 years, so we still have the main records of her legacy. But things will be different for people not-all-that-much younger.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago

I'd just hope Hacker News never "upgrades" itself in the next 15 years so I can still find archives of previous discussions, including this thread. Hacker News is the center of technology, just like the Usenet Groups were the center from the late 70s to the mid-90s, that must be preserved as computer history. Our generation can see how the Internet started and how 4.3BSD worked by reading the Usenet archives, the future generations deserve to be able doing the same, learn how the Silicon Valley in the 2010s worked by reading Hacker News archives.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
> Hacker News is the center of technology Let's not pat ourselves on the back too hard.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  Okay, not the center, but possibly the largest general-interest forum near the center. Can you name another Internet forum where discussions are similar to general-interest Usenet tech groups, where even internal details or confidential information about tech companies such as Microsoft [0] or Oracle [1] leaks out from time to time? Mailing lists? Well, yes, but there are all single-topic forum. Twitter? Probably, but it's not a forum, and it's even responsible for killing the forums. Reddit? Those programming groups are large, but they are closer to newsfeed where you can submit links than a forum (Hacker News is also a newsfeed, but it's discussion-orientated, some people don't even read the news). Although some communities such as r/bitcoin has plenty of important history preserved here, but not a general-interest tech forum. 4chan? It has some historical significant for Internet subcultures, but probably not in general interest. Chatrooms? Yes. Freenode is still big, Discord has a lot of communities, but they are not forums. My conclusion about Hacker News being the center was after a long depression that the social media has killed large forums where long opinions are elaborated. But Hacker News is still kicking around, like it was 1995. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689391 (original comment deleted, reposted here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w...) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
  - nfoz 7y ago
    HN is just another slashdot. And slashdot looks like it's still going fine: https://slashdot.org/ https://slashdot.org/
    - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
      Yes, but I think it doesn't replace HN. The first difference is that Slashdot provides a summary of the news, so most Slashdot users do actually read the news, and makes a few points down in comment; unlike Hacker News, where many don't and just wait for a chance to jump in and post comments. Therefore, the contents are often of a different nature, HN is closer to a forum. Also, the current Slashdot is truly different from early Slashdot. It seems to be more corporative and commercial. On early Slashdot, you can occasionally see interviews and book reviews dedicated to the community, you rarely see those post nowadays, if any. Also, in recent years, Slashdot implemented (or refused to implement) changes and created a strong opposition within a subgroup of users, and gave to birth of forks of smaller site. While HN is still here and living well (I do know Lobster is a HN fork). So both HN and Slashdot needs archives, and they should know better not to push for destructive upgrades that makes reading historical posts difficult. Both work well today, but I don't know what would happen in the future.
      - skinnymuch 7y ago
        HN is pretty corporate for YC companies and stuff.
    - kadoban 7y ago
      It still exists, I guess. It's a pale shadow of what it once was, and not even close to as useful or fun as HN.
    - REDDitMen 7y ago
      And Slashdot looks like it's still going. To me it's more of an very early reddit.
    - serf 7y ago
- chapium 7y ago
  And Silicon Valley municipal politics and health fads totally unsupported by anything other than good feels.

cookiecaper 7y ago

Yeah, I think that people really tend to overlook how much of our common history and heritage exists exclusively as bits on some old hunk of rust, and how frequently those bits are permanently and irrevocably vaporized. Shutdowns like this are well-planned and orderly compared to the much-more-common-than-anyone-wants-to-admit "woops, I ran rm -rf in the wrong directory", "woops, I ran fsck on a mounted disk" (which I literally did last night, fortunately without the deserved vaporization), or "woops, someone sold the wrong server and the hard drive is out in the wild now", followed up by the inevitable "woops, turns out the backups have been broken for the last 32 months, probably should've been checking that". Historians are going to have a hard time moving forward. Until the last 15 years or so, when someone died, you could go collect "their papers" -- journals, letters, records, photos, and so on. The digital equivalent is scattered across dozens of personal devices and thousands of servers. Even if we're generous and assume that something like 20% of it will still exist when a person becomes deceased, the data is comingled in someone's crappy MySQL somewhere, or it's stored behind passwords, crypto keys, and other contraptions that are virtually unbreakable as compared against something like "call the locksmith". As people age, I think these concerns will begin to be taken much more seriously, but it shows the crucial importance of fully utilizing things like the GDPR-mandated "fork over your data" export and becoming proficient in backup, archiving, and system forensics. This is an area of some interest to me, so when my grandmother died a couple of years ago, I worked quickly to get a bit-for-bit copy of every user-accessible digital device in her house. I got almost everything, but a distant family member absconded with the iPad, which had been her primary computing device for the last couple of years of her life, before I could even get on a plane. [Tangential pro-tip here: large files can and do lose bits. Create multiple copies, create parity files, and don't rely blindly on either RAID or filesystem-level checksums.] Fortunately, she was in her mid-90s and while she enjoyed technology, she also maintained handwritten journals for over 50 years, so we still have the main records of her legacy. But things will be different for people not-all-that-much younger.