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Internet Archive opens Vancouver headquarters, meeting space for the tech world
- tkgally 4y agoThe linked article mentions “There will also be servers in the building.” Here’s a bit more information from the invitation I received last week to the Internet Archive’s event marking the launch of their new Canadian headquarters: “The Canadian Data Center is a secure and sustainable back-up for the entire Archive. Our goal is to continue providing access to knowledge for decades to come, and this ensures we can and will. This Data Center stores everything in our Archive – as a back-up. It’s a full, second live copy preserved outside the US — which ensures our data cannot be compromised by threats to a single system or location.” The Internet Archive is a nonprofit charity and welcomes donations: https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
- Aachen 4y agoCanada is an interesting choice as a backup location for when the USA becomes unsuitable. Most people will use USA infra to access it, and any sort of war scenario that threatens mainland USA... I don't see Canada being not at risk. Heck, South America would have been a better choice for spreading out this huge and imo important archive (it's only a disaster copy after all, I'm assuming there are the normal backups/redundancies against disk failure and fire). This sort of thing, "hey we're opening a tech hub" and "hey we're storing our disaster copy in a very closely related economy a few km away from the current country", make me wonder if I should instead start my own copy and try to get funding to secure e.g. one recent snapshot of every website as a first goal, rather than donate money to the IA directly (as I have multiple times in the past).
- nix23 4y agoThere is also one in Alexandria (Egypt). But yes i think there should be something like this: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
- myself248 4y agoI can't understand why there isn't inertia behind restarting ia.bak or similar efforts. That seems critical to me, way more so than an official mirror which would be vulnerable to the same takedown and other pressure.
- db48x 4y agoBecause it’s a lot of work.
- throw_nbvc1234 4y agoI'd also guess because (potential) mechanisms to do so would be attacked on forums like HN because they sound too close to crypto/web3 and most people wouldn't bother to separate ideology from technology and create a PR nightmare for internet archive. So it's probably harder to recruit people to work on it. See Filecoin Foundation and their work with IA.
- ajdude 4y agoJust do something similar to folding coin, which is used for things like protein folding. Perhaps an Internet archive coin that can be earned by hoarding backups of the archive on hard drives.
- jetbalsa 4y agoIts also a really hard issue. My fav is IPFS, Its the most common suggestion but it only works on paper. IPFS Allows people to pin things, but it still has to be stored /somewhere/ and, it gets really damn slow once you throw more then a million files at it (I know... we tried) Overall, Its just a giant archive, its hard to store that much data in a cheap manner that will last 20 years.
- textfiles 4y agoI can understand why.
- 4y ago
- murderfs 4y agoAny war scenario that threatens the mainland United States would probably involve nukes starting flying, and you'd probably be screwed regardless of where you put it. I'd be more concerned with an asteroid that hits just right.
- b112 4y ago"a few km" seems like a weird way to put it, as a "few" is typically 2 or 3. And just specifying "US" and "Canada" is weird, as an archive in the US and Canada, could be separated by 10000km without any effort. That said, these archives are close, but I beleive the real reason for this, are things such as take down, erasure, and other court requests in the US, would not apply in Canada. This is doubly true, if you don't serve data to US citizens from Canada. So it allows for easy physical maintenance trips, a second off-site backup (weather, rioting, looting, earthquake, etc) unlikely to take-out both. I also think South American countries are far more likely to descend into rioting, violent takovers, coups by armies/etc, than any place in North America.
- switchbak 4y agoI wouldn't assume anything with our current (Canadian) government, especially if the US government applied strong leverage to try to get material removed. Even looking at recent history with (purported) terrorists, our record at resisting US pressure is not good. Putting it in Vancouver is also not the greatest idea when you factor in earthquake risk, although it's far enough away from San Francisco as to provide a reasonable backup. I'm sure there are other factors that come into it though, and I'm sure it makes sense on the whole.
- wk_end 4y agoI wouldn't just say "current" - Canadian governments have been pretty subservient (for obvious reasons) to the US since WWII, at least.
- b112 4y agoWhat a weird subthread, with made up, unsubstantiated claims. It also shows a shocking lack of understanding. The "Canadian Government", being the executive branch in this case, has no bearing on this. US requests to seize assets, force shutdowns would be handled by Canadian courts, the judicial branch. Which do not kowtow to anyone politically, US or otherwise, and never, ever have.
- 4y ago
- rowanajmarshall 4y agoI think any war scenario that threatens the mainland US probably threatens the rest of the Western World, and probably the entire developed world too. And in any case, there are plenty of scenarios where Japan, or Germany, or India are threatened, but vanishingly few where North America is.
- fmajid 4y agoI'm pretty sure if the US mainland is threatened by any foreign actor, the entire planet is toast. They could maybe have a cold archive in Svalbard for future alien xenoarcheologists trying to figure out why human civilization self-destructed. Now, a civil war, that's a different story.
- generationP 4y ago> Canada is an interesting choice as a backup location for when the USA becomes unsuitable. Good for a World War III scenario. Less good for a "delete this [wide class of information] or else" scenario, as there are now two governments to appease and the Canadian one is far less free-speech-friendly than the US one.
- welterde 4y agoNot sure free-speech-friendliness is really relevant here, since the most likely avenues of attack would be copyright or it being classified information. For both those things the US isn't exactly the best candidate either.
- generationP 4y agoI consider at least the latter to be part of free speech as well. Then there is privacy (the Wayback Machine is likely a C&D magnet here), pornography/obscenity (many places are stricter than the US) and "hate speech" (here the US is unbeaten). Besides that, having the data spread over two countries means being susceptible to both governments.
- pessimizer 4y agoThis is probably to protect the archive from the US.
- FredPret 4y agoIn a war that threatens mainland USA, nowhere on Earth would be safe. Perhaps in a nuclear bunker in New Zealand, or on board the ISS.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Canada is an interesting choice as a backup location for when the USA becomes unsuitable. Most people will use USA infra to access it, and any sort of war scenario that threatens mainland USA... Honestly, the Internet Archive is probably toast wherever it is if there's "any sort of war scenario that threatens mainland USA." I don't think we should kid ourselves that something like the Internet Archive will be able to be preserved over the long term. It's a kind of thing that's bug, fragile, and expensive to maintain. Most of that stuff is destined to be lost eventually, probably sooner than we'd expect.
- _jal 4y agoI think the risk scenarios in question are more legal/political than war-related. As others have noted, the set of safe locations to store an enormous, expensive, extremely fragile collection of uncensored material during a world war is approximately the null set.
- Fargoan 4y agoNot only is it close, but it's in an area that could have earthquake. I think we need to bury the servers in Manitoba for extra security.
- Thorentis 4y agoSeems odd to go to all this effort of making an entire second copy, only to put it just over the border into a country with not too dissimilar laws. As another commenter said, would've been better to go with Iceland or something.
- jazzyjackson 4y agoA backup of the archive has been hosted at Bibliotheca Alexandria in Egypt since 2002 [0] and is accessible at [1]. I'm not sure what the state of that project is but I guess it's not a "live" copy, the first link here describes an incremental upgrade over the years. Agreed that Iceland would be a nice international headquarters. [0] http://www.bibalex.org/en/project/details?documentid=283 http://www.bibalex.org/en/project/details?documentid=283 [1] http://web.archive.bibalex.org/web/ http://web.archive.bibalex.org/web/
- jetbalsa 4y agoI will note that Alexandria backup has gotten a tad out of sync. No fault of theirs, the data set just got too large to manage.
- thinkingkong 4y agoI was at the building recently for an event, and I peeked into the 'office' and there were servers. Like 8 of them. There's absolutely no way they're going to be mirroring data in this location. They might establish another location within Canada for doing backup but if you're serious about DR having something in Vancouver isn't exactly the best idea. Most companies would choose to locate in the interior of BC around Kelowna / Kamloops region.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoI think they are preparing for the wave of christofacism being lead by the current GOP leadership that seems to be growing inside of the USA.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- elevaet 4y agoLocated in the "The Permanent Building", it couldn't be more appropriately situated. Steps away from the library too. A great presence in the city!
- ttul 4y agoMore than 25% of British Columbian workers work in the technology sector [1]. While the sector has been growing for 30 years, things really picked up in the last few years as Silicon Valley firms branched out in search of employees, often as a way of getting around the problematic processing of work visas in the US. BC has several great engineering and computer science universities and a long history of public support for the development of the tech sector. It’s nice to see the Archive choosing to locate here, since it sort of validates that BC is perhaps no longer a third rate tech backwater. 1. https://biv.com/article/2022/05/bcs-biggest-technology-companies-getting-bigger https://biv.com/article/2022/05/bcs-biggest-technology-compa...
- ripley12 4y agoYour link does not seem to support that assertion. I am very doubtful that a quarter of BC’s workers are in the technology sector, however you define it.
- dghlsakjg 4y agoBC also has rules that exempt tech employees from overtime protection. Hence why the games industry tends to do a lot of work here.
- deanCommie 4y agoWhat a weird comment on this site especially. 99% of tech work is salary and now also stock-based. Overtime protection is simply not relevant, because our work is not hourly. We can talk about whether this is a good or bad thing and the general culture of crunch in the tech industry, but it's not BC-specific, and also arguably got WAY better since the pandemic
- fmajid 4y agoThat building is somewhat reminiscent of their SF headquarters: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/internet-archive-headquarters https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/internet-archive-headqua... That said, the biggest threat to the Internet Archive is from overreaching copyright legislation, and Canada is not that much better than the US. Iceland or some other such locale might be better indicated, and Iceland has natural advantages in cooling and cheap hydropower, a big part of a datacenter's operational costs.
- Thorentis 4y agoA deep archive in Iceland would be really awesome, I hope this happens.
- fmajid 4y agoSomething like the Doomsday Vault in Svalbard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoFunny you mention it, because Github put a code archive in Svalbard as well: https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
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- xvilka 4y agoAnother good location would be in India. I hope, Internet Archive considers this option to geographically hedge potential risks of destruction.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoThey do battle with Australia to see who can censor worse...
- alwayslikethis 4y agoFor the purpose of avoiding court orders, it would be better to have two or three complementary organizations that are nominally unrelated: Archive 1: Located in the US, hosts most of the content Archive 2: Located in Russia, hosts content that the US has problems with, such as copyrighted material or government secrets. Backups: Located in some relatively neutral countries, probably somewhere in the Middle East, like UAE.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoNone of the countries you mention are countries I'd consider safe or neutral though; I'd instead consider a Scandinavian country, Iceland, Switzerland, or Australia / New Zealand. Germany, France, Spain and other western-European countries seem pretty solid as well, but only as secondary/tertiary locations within existing hosting parties.
- rootusrootus 4y agoNone of those would be great choices if your aim is to host copies of classified US government documents, every one would comply with US requests to shut it down (and possibly extradite the folks who own those servers). You're kinda stuck having to chose a country that is comfortable opposing the US. Of course, that comes with its own many downsides.
- acoard 4y ago> if your aim is to host copies of classified US government documents I do not believe that is the aim of Archive.org. That sounds more like Wikileaks territory.
- rootusrootus 4y agoThe GP post specifically suggested that. I agree that nobody at archive.org seems to have such a strategy in mind.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
- Fargoan 4y agoI give them $5/month. You're welcome
- StayTrue 4y agoPutting servers in Canada is a good idea but Vancouver is in the same seismic zone as San Francisco.