5 ms·

To me, the historical reconstruction aspect of this is at least as interesting as the attack. One of my more obscure hobbies is studying the history of ancient

by lisper 4y ago

To me, the historical reconstruction aspect of this is at least as interesting as the attack. One of my more obscure hobbies is studying the history of ancient texts, and it is fascinating to watch the process of losing primary historical sources play out in front of my eyes: > However, in 1995, Usenet poster Jay Ashworth, citing personal communications with Ken Thompson, provided strong evidence of the existence of a real-world experiment of this attack. Unfortunately, the full Usenet message is missing on the web. There are only quoted snippets of this Usenet post circulated around various blogs, reducing its authenticity. > In 2021, I’ve rediscovered the full Usenet message after a search effort in multiple Usenet archives. My success was partial - it was still a repost by someone else, and I was unable to find the original message. However, this repost contains the full Usenet message, including complete headers and message body, with the poster name and its Message-ID, establishing the authenticity of the post beyond reasonable doubts.

routerl 4y ago
The data archaeologists of the future are, right now, acquiring and developing what will become the skills of their profession. Very cool to watch, indeed.
- jll29 4y ago
  It will be hard for future (>700 years away from now) historians to discover a lot about what we thought today: writing personal and professional letters (e.g. "letters to the editor" in learned journals, letters to an uncle living in a different city) and diaries is happening less and less compared to the last 200-300 years. Perhaps we should go ahead and have a few hundred thousand emails printed with a special lasting ink on velum to pass it on to our successors ("Codex Electronicus"). On reflection, my own inbox is perhaps rather too nerdy - it would introduce a strong selection bias to posterity's view about us.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    > is happening less and less Do you have any evidence for this? Even assuming it’s true, doesn’t the volume of podcast/YouTube/email/facebook/HN posts more than make up for it?
    - NateEag 4y ago
      The key word is letters. Physical, printed letters that a historian in the 2400s can physically hold and read. Digital communications will decay and vanish beyond repair, leaving our current era's ephemera irrevocably lost to the ages. http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html
tambourine_man 4y ago
I think about this a lot as well. The folks at https://archive.org https://archive.org are the unsung heroes of our time.
joshmarlow 4y ago
I think about this a lot in humor contexts. Many jokes rely on passing cultural contexts that isn't documented and isn't made explicit. Example: In my experience "The chad was good" and various jokes around "hanging chads" and "pregnant chads" still sometimes land with people who remember the 2000 election and Charlie's Angles, but anyone a little younger misses it. Now I'm curious how many jokes in an episode of "John Oliver" or Southpark land even a year or two after the episode airs.
- autoexec 4y ago
  A lot of the jokes in last week tonight don't exactly land when they originally air either, but that has more to do with the writers than available context. I run into this problem not just when watching old shows, but also when watching contemporary TV developed in other countries. Usually it's references to proper nouns I've never heard of, and I do often look those up, but even once you know what or who something was sometimes you'd have to be willing to go deep into various rabbit holes to really understand it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Cyphase 4y ago
  Thank you. You've just helped ensure that knowledge of the "chad" reference's links to the 2000 election and Charlie's Angels will live on, in this case via the various archives of HN content out there in the world. Hello future people!
  - joshmarlow 4y ago
    Glad I finally made my mark on civilization :D
tyingq 4y ago
Funny coincidence, Ken Thompson mentions this problem in his personal reprint of "Trusting Trust" on one of his old web pages.[1] "I copied this page from the ACM, in fear that it would someday turn stale." [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080111144410/http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080111144410/http://cm.bell-la...
- bcbrown 4y ago
  Funny too, that you're posting an archive of that site, not the site itself.
  - DebtDeflation 4y ago
    I'm finding myself using archive.org (and also archive.is, but for different reasons) almost as much as Google for finding stuff these days.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
> studying the history of ancient texts, and it is fascinating to watch the process of losing primary historical sources play out in front of my eyes I just want to further call attention to this. We have the unspoken notion, an assumption that digital materials, once 'written' will remain forever. And, for a short-term 'forever' this is true. Not so for longer 'forever', as the loss of the original Usenet post, despite replicated across many systems, demonstrates.
- trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  This replication that was possible earlier, will also not happen in the future thanks to closed proprietary systems. YouTube is wonderful library of knowledge that we are legally prevented from making a copy of. There needs to be bottom-up and top-down pressure for open data standards and also a re-thinking of digital ownership rather than digital licensing. We think people don't care, but the engineers who build these systems are a tiny minority, we only need to convince them to refuse to build walled gardens.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    Nobody needs legal permission to grab all the YouTube content they want to keep. Just dedication, youtube-dlp, and a ginormous RAID array full of empty drives. This is surprisingly affordable as a hobby.
    - registeredcorn 4y ago
      Note: I would encourage switching over from youtube-dlp to yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) As I understand it, yt-dlp is considerably faster.
      - eastof 4y ago
        Just curious, why either of these over vanilla youtube-dl? Wondering if I should update my playlist downloader script

by lisper 4y ago

routerl 4y ago

The data archaeologists of the future are, right now, acquiring and developing what will become the skills of their profession. Very cool to watch, indeed.

jll29 4y ago
It will be hard for future (>700 years away from now) historians to discover a lot about what we thought today: writing personal and professional letters (e.g. "letters to the editor" in learned journals, letters to an uncle living in a different city) and diaries is happening less and less compared to the last 200-300 years. Perhaps we should go ahead and have a few hundred thousand emails printed with a special lasting ink on velum to pass it on to our successors ("Codex Electronicus"). On reflection, my own inbox is perhaps rather too nerdy - it would introduce a strong selection bias to posterity's view about us.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  > is happening less and less Do you have any evidence for this? Even assuming it’s true, doesn’t the volume of podcast/YouTube/email/facebook/HN posts more than make up for it?
  - NateEag 4y ago
    The key word is letters. Physical, printed letters that a historian in the 2400s can physically hold and read. Digital communications will decay and vanish beyond repair, leaving our current era's ephemera irrevocably lost to the ages. http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html

tambourine_man 4y ago

I think about this a lot as well. The folks at https://archive.org https://archive.org are the unsung heroes of our time.

joshmarlow 4y ago

I think about this a lot in humor contexts. Many jokes rely on passing cultural contexts that isn't documented and isn't made explicit. Example: In my experience "The chad was good" and various jokes around "hanging chads" and "pregnant chads" still sometimes land with people who remember the 2000 election and Charlie's Angles, but anyone a little younger misses it. Now I'm curious how many jokes in an episode of "John Oliver" or Southpark land even a year or two after the episode airs.

autoexec 4y ago
A lot of the jokes in last week tonight don't exactly land when they originally air either, but that has more to do with the writers than available context. I run into this problem not just when watching old shows, but also when watching contemporary TV developed in other countries. Usually it's references to proper nouns I've never heard of, and I do often look those up, but even once you know what or who something was sometimes you'd have to be willing to go deep into various rabbit holes to really understand it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Cyphase 4y ago
Thank you. You've just helped ensure that knowledge of the "chad" reference's links to the 2000 election and Charlie's Angels will live on, in this case via the various archives of HN content out there in the world. Hello future people!
- joshmarlow 4y ago
  Glad I finally made my mark on civilization :D

tyingq 4y ago

Funny coincidence, Ken Thompson mentions this problem in his personal reprint of "Trusting Trust" on one of his old web pages.[1] "I copied this page from the ACM, in fear that it would someday turn stale." [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080111144410/http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080111144410/http://cm.bell-la...

bcbrown 4y ago
Funny too, that you're posting an archive of that site, not the site itself.
- DebtDeflation 4y ago
  I'm finding myself using archive.org (and also archive.is, but for different reasons) almost as much as Google for finding stuff these days.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

> studying the history of ancient texts, and it is fascinating to watch the process of losing primary historical sources play out in front of my eyes I just want to further call attention to this. We have the unspoken notion, an assumption that digital materials, once 'written' will remain forever. And, for a short-term 'forever' this is true. Not so for longer 'forever', as the loss of the original Usenet post, despite replicated across many systems, demonstrates.

trap_goes_hot 4y ago
This replication that was possible earlier, will also not happen in the future thanks to closed proprietary systems. YouTube is wonderful library of knowledge that we are legally prevented from making a copy of. There needs to be bottom-up and top-down pressure for open data standards and also a re-thinking of digital ownership rather than digital licensing. We think people don't care, but the engineers who build these systems are a tiny minority, we only need to convince them to refuse to build walled gardens.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  Nobody needs legal permission to grab all the YouTube content they want to keep. Just dedication, youtube-dlp, and a ginormous RAID array full of empty drives. This is surprisingly affordable as a hobby.
  - registeredcorn 4y ago
    Note: I would encourage switching over from youtube-dlp to yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) As I understand it, yt-dlp is considerably faster.
    - eastof 4y ago
      Just curious, why either of these over vanilla youtube-dl? Wondering if I should update my playlist downloader script