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So why is it a bad idea? There's a difference between destroying information and destroying the original copy of it.
by 1970-01-01 3y ago
So why is it a bad idea? There's a difference between destroying information and destroying the original copy of it.
- adastra22 3y agoDestroying the original copy would be destroying information. A picture of an artifact is not the same as the artifact itself.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoTrue, however these are legal documents and not art for a museum.
- notthemessiah 3y agoEven ignoring the historical value, it's easier to hack into a server and edit a file than it is to forge a legal document and break into an archive. Suddenly, you're the legitimate heir to a castle.
- potatopatch 3y agoIf the point is continued legal meaning then it would be better to digitally publish in any way that allows distributed verification of the record as what was published and not challenged. Probably thousands of people have some means to tamper with that archive, but courts don't really care to revisit hundred year old wills in the ways soap operas imply.
- mayank 3y agoVery debatable, if both are done right.
- rsynnott 3y agoIn practice these are more of historical than legal interest.
- ahnick 3y agoThat must be why that Bitcoin thing didn't pan out.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoHuh? It's very strong at the moment
- phs318u 3y agoThis argument makes it seem like forged documents were never a thing.
- voltaireodactyl 3y agoIt’s more that the risks and expenditure of effort are so different between changing files on a server vs breaking and entering that it becomes a separate category.
- wkat4242 3y agoTrue but scanning them makes it a lot harder to determine if the original was a forgery.
- phs318u 3y agoTrue. You're at the mercy of whatever information was captured at the time using means available at the time. One reason we (hopefully) don't get rid of physical evidence from criminal cases.
- teh_klev 3y agoShould we then destroy all legal documents, for example The Magna Carta? Museums aren't just a store of "art", museums are a way to preserve our heritage, preferably in its original form.
- JohnFen 3y agoThat makes the originals even more important.
- adastra22 3y agoNot art, historical artifacts. There’s tons of info that a picture wouldn’t capture. Type of paper and ink used, isotopic analysis, etc. Who knows what questions future historians or archeologists will want to ask?
- cma 3y agoBut you could say that about all trash too.
- sp527 3y agoSpeculating here, but carbon dating is potentially one useful vector for protecting against forgery/manipulation. Conversely, once something is digitized, you cannot incontrovertibly authenticate the origin time of the relevant bit flips and you also introduce the (now seemingly just on the horizon) possibility of AI-optimized digital forgeries that are indistinguishable from originals. That's off the top of my head, but the OP may have further insight.
- woah 3y agoIf only there was a technology for storing unforgeable timestamps in a way that didn't depend on the honesty and competence of any one person or organization
- Avicebron 3y agoIt would have to have some intrinsic mechanism to encourage people to store and interact with the system though..maybe people could prove they worked on it and then trade it for other things of value?
- calebh 3y agoYou can trivially implement this using a timestamp authority (TSA). This can be done without the blockchain, and there are several free publicly available services that do this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
- woah 3y agoSeems like there's no issue with digitized wills then
- anigbrowl 3y agoFor the reasons already articulated in the article we're discussing; It's a waste of people's time to reiterate them. I would add though that one of the top stories yesterday was about how the British Library website has been down for 10 days due to a ransomware attack. Digital information retrieval is only as reliable as your backup strategy.
- tgv 3y agoLet's not forget that even that is prone to problems. I had some archives (30-35 years old) that no longer can be unpacked. The application that made them is no longer working. Source code isn't available. I also had a few "rotting" CDs (not CD-R, but factory pressed CDs). You need a very good strategy to make digital information survive the next 100 years, and keep it up to date, at least yearly. And, given the performance of government IT projects in the past in so many countries, this will probably turn out to be more expensive than they hope.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoI had some Bitcoin on a USB along with the operating system and program used to read the wallet. After 8 years or so, I couldn't open my wallet despite using the same OS and same program but different hardware. (I did eventually recover the coin but it was much harder than I anticipated. and no, the USB wasn't my only copy, I wasn't quite that foolish)
- 1970-01-01 3y agoSo the only legitimate reason is "Hardware goes out of date" That is a real but solvable problem. Everything else was pure speculation.
- simonw 3y agoAsk a historian! There are several quoted in the linked article.
- jacobwilliamroy 3y agoLots of reasons but I'll list two: 1) These documents are historical artifacts like the declaration of independence or the magna carta. They may not seem important now but in 300 years people will care about them A LOT. 2) Redundancy. If the digital records are destroyed or say encrypted in a massive ransomware attack then the UK government can simply reconstruct those digital records using the paper records without having to deal with terrorists and that's a good thing.
- josefx 3y agoJust hope they aren't using Xerox to digitize those documents. That glyph substitution bug from a few years ago made quite a few would be digital archivists rather unhappy.
- rsynnott 3y agoThe digitised version isn’t a faithful copy; see the mention of the indent of the pen in the article. Information is destroyed in doing this.
- housebear 3y agoYou know what's easy to read 150, 500, and even 1000 years later? Physical writing on paper. No matter what changes, these documents can and will continue to be legible as long as they're properly stored.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoThe same can be said for microfiche.
- brnt 3y agoThe seminal answer: an archivist explains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNbhMCB_3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNbhMCB_3g
- everforward 3y agoDestroying the original destroys some information that could have legal relevance. Things could be written on the back, or the type of paper could be an important point. It will likely inadvertently make them susceptible to remote cyber attacks. How much do you trust the government to keep these digital wills secure? I'm fairly confident they can keep physical wills secure. A country's army provides a good deterrent to vandalizing physical objects. In the digital world, those threats are muted, especially if the hacker is in a jurisdiction that doesn't care.