8 ms·

Google's Vint Cerf Warns of 'digital Dark Age'

199 points by bauc 12y ago

cmiller1 12y ago
It feels weird to me to see Vint Cerf propped up in this title by being associated with Google. It seems the guy's name holds enough merit on it's own; I didn't even realize he was working with Google these days!
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  This is the first I've heard of him. After reading about him on Wikipedia I'm very surprised I've never seen him mentioned before.
  - bsdpython 12y ago
    We've mostly forgotten the people that created modern computing unless they've made a billion dollars
    - tormeh 12y ago
      It is Hacker News, not Computer Engineer/Scientist news. It was always supposed to tilt towards Silicon Valley. I don't think that's a good thing, but it's a free service from Y Combinator, so it's very understandable.
      - wayfarer2s 12y ago
        Well, since it was pg's idea, I'd guess "hacker" would slant more towards MIT-style hacks than anything to do with the valley. I think the lack of Vint Cerf stories has more to do with the temporal nature of news than any biases that people might have. I'd chalk it up to him just not making news lately. Any text on the history of the Internet, TCP/IP, and networks in general liberally mentions him.
    - deleted 12y ago
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    - mhurron 12y ago
      We've forgotten about most people unless they've made significant amounts of money. It's what our society values.
      - bsdpython 12y ago
        It's interesting to examine which historical figures have been remembered and which have been forgotten. Money is part of it but not the full story. Political leaders during times of chaos are remembered. Artists are remembered, many of which died penniless. Mass murderers are remembered. I think in general people just need a simple story to attach to a single person to remember them. Building a computer and making a billion dollars is a simple story. Walking on the moon is a simple story. Designing packet switching protocols is not. It's not a tragic situation it's just interesting to note.
  - brandall10 12y ago
    Interesting... maybe an age thing? I'm 39 and Vint is right up there in my mind with the heavyweights of computer science. That said, I wasn't aware he was with Google either. I imagine his place in my mind was solidified back in college during the .com days when history internet was a common topic of discussion.
  - tlrobinson 12y ago
    Well it's certainly not the first time he's been mentioned on Hacker News.
- rootbear 12y ago
  He was supposed to give a talk here at Goddard Space Flight Center recently, but it was snowed out. I've heard him speak before, on his Interplanetary Internet work, and he's a good speaker.
- raldi 12y ago
  Vint's been at Google since 2005.
PaulHoule 12y ago
Librarians used to worry about this 20 years ago, but then SNES9X came along.
gambiting 12y ago
I feel like we are already experiencing that. I have a drawer full of pictures given to me by my parents, some of them 100 years old,but I can't open pictures I took with my digital camera 10 years ago,because the CDs I burnt them to are unreadable. Obviously the answer to that is that I should have printed at least some of them,but I don't know anyone who prints pictures nowadays. Nowadays I backup all of them to Picassa(google plus albums),but I have no idea what happens if I can't pay for monthly storage anymore? Or if I die and no one knows my google password? All of that data will be gone permanently.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "I don't know anyone who prints pictures nowadays" Really? Most of the big supermarkets here (UK) and quite a lot of pharmacy chains have machines where you connect your device/USB/SD, select the pictures you want, and press print. It's relatively inexpensive too and I know people who use them all the time. Personally I don't actually mind if all of my digital photos are unreadable so long as I have the important ones in a physical format so this is a nice solution and takes away the pain of owning a good printer, buying lots of ink and photo paper.
  - gambiting 12y ago
    Oh maybe I didn't phrase it correctly. I meant that I don't know anyone who prints out their own pictures - most of my friends only keep their pictures on their phones/digital cameras, physical copies are only ever printed as presents and such, never to archive anything.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  I know it doesn't answer the problem at large, but if you are worried about this (or even if you're not and you just want your google data to survive you), Google released an inactive account manager a couple of months ago: https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive In the event your google account becomes inactive for a long period of time you choose, you can trust specific contacts with access to specific data. It has other niceties. I highly recommend setting it up.
jgrahamc 12y ago
Relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project "The project was stored on adapted laserdiscs in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analogue video and still pictures, but also digital data, with 300 MB of storage space on each side of the disc. Data and images were selected and collated by the BBC Domesday project based in Bilton House in West Ealing. Pre-mastering of data was carried out on a VAX-11/750 mini-computer, assisted by a network of BBC micros. The discs were mastered, produced, and tested by the Philips Laservision factory in Blackburn, England. Viewing the discs required an Acorn BBC Master expanded with a SCSI controller and an additional coprocessor controlled a Philips VP415 "Domesday Player", a specially produced laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC Master's keyboard and a trackball (known at the time as a trackerball). The software for the project was written in BCPL (a precursor to C), to make cross platform porting easier, although BCPL never attained the popularity that its early promise suggested it might."
- new299 12y ago
  The Domesday project has faired rather better than many other projects it's content is accessible online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday And I believe the content on the original Laserdiscs has been reverse engineered more than once. Hopefully once content is on the web (unless it's behind robots.txt) it gets sucked up by the Internet Archive. That of course doesn't take care of any rendering issues.
mtrn 12y ago
Last summer I discovered, by accident, a little computer museum[1] in the Kvarner Gulf. It's run by a single guy, who collected an incredible amount of old hardware over the years and exhibited them in couple of rooms. It rained the day I visited the place, and since it was an old building, it actually rained a bit inside. The guy took it with humour, but it was actually a pity. It is a great place and on some days the visitors can even run old programs on those ancient machines or play games. [1] http://www.peekpoke.hr http://www.peekpoke.hr From their site: Opened on 22nd of September 2007, Club PEEK&POKE is one of the few permanent displays of vintage computing technology in Europe. Located in the centre of the city of Rijeka and spread across 300m2 of space, it contains more than 1000 exhibits of the world and local computer history, ranging from very early calculators and game consoles to rare and obsolete computers from the nineties.
- ht_th 12y ago
  I've been to a couple of these museums as well. What makes them fun to go to are: - you may touch everything, often including things inside the computers itself - the people working there (or, as is often the case, the one guy working there) is knowledgeable, willing to talk about it in depth, cares, and you can have a real conversation with them. - there's a lot of surprising hardware around I had no idea existed (from failed computer companies, to specialized I/O of decades past, to special-purpose hardware) You cannot get the same full experience with most regular museums, as then you have to follow their narrative instead of following your curiosity. On the other hand, these museums are often not much more than an erudite collection of historical artifacts they got their hands on. To preserve is to select with a plan, not just collect everything.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Technical/science museums in general often seem to be closer to this ideal than other museums, because while some of the artefacts may be valuable, more often they are trying to showcase how things worked rather than specific objects.
    - ht_th 12y ago
fidotron 12y ago
The only long term answer is to detach the data stores from the applications which process them. It is the migration between apps that leads to this data orphaning. This also leads to the conclusion that a standard mechanism for interfacing to the data from multiple apps on multiple data backends is needed. The Android storage framework is probably the best effort at this so far, but it's far from clear how used it is.
- kawera 12y ago
  remoteStorage - An open protocol for per-user storage https://remotestorage.io https://remotestorage.io
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- Udik 12y ago
  Google won't, that's the fact. That completely useless snapshot will live till the end of the digital age, whenever it will be. That's why I don't understand Cerf's concerns.
- stingraycharles 12y ago
  The whole point he's making that we do not know what might be valuable to future civilizations. We simply cannot foresee the way they would study our culture, in the same way the ancient civilizations would not be able to comprehend our current civilization.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    We don't preserve muddy door matts today "for posterity." That we can't know exactly what will be important in the future doesn't mean we can't reasonably predict what won't be.
Maakuth 12y ago
I feel like http://archive.org/ http://archive.org/ deserves a mention here for their efforts of preserving digital history. Personal photos or other data are not in their scope, but they do wonderful things with web pages and other stuff that's publicly available. I just read Brewster Kahle's interview from Founders at Work this week and it blew my mind how determined to build the Internet Archive he's been for practically his whole career.
Udik 12y ago
Strange, I would call these preoccupations BS if not for the source. This was a common concern some 20 to 30 years ago, when the internet was practically non existent and people still used old floppy disks and cds. Today, a good part of our personal files are stored in the cloud and storage devices have become more standard through the usage of universal interfaces. Some of our personal data will be lost (whatever is left in the hard drives of old computers and not backed up) but the trail of information the world is leaving behind is so huge that what worries me is rather that time seems to have frozen. Everything we leave behind us, documents, pictures, looks as fresh today as it was the day it was produced. And as easily retrievable.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  On another thread people were saddened by rapidshare-like website being put down because a lot of content was hosted there. Let's be sure the cloud will stay long. So far most 80s data I see on the web comes from .. magazines. Ha paper.
  - evgen 12y ago
    The trick with digital data (including that stored in cloud services) is to keep it in motion. Movement from one service to another, leaving behind a copy that may eventually get deleted but just might stick around a while, is the best way to keep data available. Whatever disappeared with rapidshare would have been just fine if people have moved it to the various "latest and greatest" systems when they popped up, the only way it gets lost is if it stops moving.
    - pmontra 12y ago
      What happens when one dies, who keeps moving that data? Companies eventually close. Millennia old documents made their way to us without anybody carying about them. Digital data seem to be intrinsically different from analog ones in that continuous care is needed. What you propose is a solution but I can't see who's going to do it for free as walls and caves did for paintings and inscriptions.
crazydoggers 12y ago
No one ever considers the volume of photos and documents we are now creating. My parents probably took dozens of photographs when I was younger, and kept maybe one or two albums. Nowadays, most people have hundreds if not thousands of photographs and videos. So it seems to me that the converse will actually be true. If you've got a 100 fold increase in the number of documents and photos being created, and only 1% of those make it, you're still preserving the same number of documents. And frankly, I think that's a conservative number. As some of the other posters here mentioned, with the advent of cloud based services and easy backup systems, retrieval is getting easier. So if storage and retrieval is solved, that leaves format evolution problems. But somehow I doubt in 20 years or even more that JPEG is somehow going to be harder to read than it is now.
- digerata 12y ago
  Thousands if not tens of thousands. I'm at over 45K in iPhoto alone. Have a kid or two and your wife can get a little shutter happy.
- vidarh 12y ago
  A couple of years ago, Kodak's online photo storage service (in the UK at least) shut down. We just barely managed to get copies of the hundreds of pictures we had stored there in time. Other recent (non-photo specific) examples of vast amount of data disappearing: Geocities. Yes, large chunks of it was archived last minute. MegaUpload. And we have Rapidshare on it's way to disappearing. Cloud services can and will shut down, and it is not at all a given that we manage to preserve the data. This creates a relentless churn where some proportion of older data disappears every day. All we really can do is to fight to keep the churn rate low enough, because we have no realistic prospect of saving everything all the time.
  - pixl97 12y ago
    But that's not really any different than any other medium. If there exists two copies of a book in different libraries and then one of the libraries burns down it's not any different. I mean we still talk about the library of Alexandria 2000 years later.
JoiDegn 12y ago
That reminds me of the Encyclopedia Galactica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Galactica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Galactica. I wonder if this is a scheme to get comp scis to a remote Location and eventually start a new galactic empire.
digerata 12y ago
I, for one, feel that humanity would benefit from this generation's digital presence being wiped from existence. Everyone on this planet is now dumber for having experienced it. I fully support and will tell my congressman to vote for a digital dark age. Now get off my lawn!
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dbpatterson 12y ago
Camlistore seems relevant - it's whole intention is to last (at least) 100 years, primarily by making the data format simple and making data migration (ie, moving between providers, between hard disks, etc) a common thing. https://camlistore.org/ https://camlistore.org/
bsbechtel 12y ago
How is this different than any other point in history? Throughout time, the vast majority of records and artifacts were lost, and only some given percentage survive. Let's say it's ~2% for argument's sake...actually, the amount of material that survives would decay over time - 40% after 10 years, 20% after 50 years, etc. I have no idea what the rate of decay for digital records, information, and archives would be, but I would think it would be higher than information stored as hard copies of paper, books, etc. Of course, we are also producing orders of magnitudes more information than we were in the past.
- benihana 12y ago
  >How is this different than any other point in history? I would argue that for the first time in history, we're not limited by storage space.
herf 12y ago
You can virtualize a PC (or replicate the filesystem like Dropbox), but it is harder to virtualize a distributed system like Facebook's or Google's. And most mobile platforms are DoA without their vendor signing and cloud services. It's always been hard to migrate out of social systems--convincing a well-connected user of a photo service to move away from the place where they've accumulated comments and tags is really hard. That metadata is not portable because identity is not yet portable, and it's what we're spending time on (lots more time than we spend making spreadsheets). I think we might manage to keep "JPG as file" alive for 30-50 years, but there is lots more to manage.
- vidarh 12y ago
  This is the crux of the problem. We are getting better at archiving files. And thanks to a combination of people dedicated to emulation and the rise of virtual machines, there are few popular pieces of hardware we can't emulate in excruciating detail. But many of the services I used a decade ago are already gone. And pretty much all the services I used two decades ago have completely disappeared, with some very few notable examples. And with them, vast amounts of data. Some of it the Internet Archive have at least captured static snapshots of (and they really should have magnitudes more funding), but ten times that - or more - was data in walled gardens, behind logins or otherwise restricted in ways that means it is lost forever unless we're lucky and it turns out some admin held onto backup tapes they weren't really meant to keep. And the problem with there is not to create a snapshot of a single server, but as you say that distributed systems are far harder. Even recent. Twice I've been contracted to help companies take over infrastructure that involved systems I'd worked on, and try to "package it up", and it was incredibly hard, because no matter how much you try to tear down and bring up individual servers or groups of servers and automate deployment, very few places running complex services ever try - or could afford to try - to tear down and bring up a full copy of their entire infrastructure. Suddenly all kinds of nasty interdependencies and bootstrap problems nobody had needed to think about shows up.
whoisthemachine 12y ago
DRM also plays a role in this. Obsolete DRM techniques whose algorithms have long been forgotten will make it difficult to archive data protected by DRM onto new storage mediums.
- kbart 12y ago
  I somehow doubt it's a big issue. Do you know many DRM's that haven't been cracked in a matter of days/weeks after the release?
  - wlesieutre 12y ago
    Yeah, especially with computer games. Whatever old game is having DRM trouble, you can usually find a crack for it on Rapidshare.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      I can't tell if you made that reference on purpose, or if you're unaware that Rapidshare is shutting down.
      - wlesieutre 12y ago
        Yep, tongue firmly in cheek on that one.
    - phowat 12y ago
      Oops, turns out rapidshare is shutting down.
  - forgottenpass 12y ago
    It sort of is a big issue if you consider that preserving the history of something relies on lawbreaking motivated by piracy to enable it. Outside of the against-the-law bit it requires sufficiently motivated attackers and insufficiently good DRM. The status quo is probably stable for games and big name software packages for the time being, but it doesn't inspire confidence for the long term.
thisjepisje 12y ago
"Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete - just like what happens in a museum - but in digital form, in servers in the cloud." Why not regular servers?
- vidarh 12y ago
  The point is that the description/emulation would need to be a virtual machine, so it can be transported and duplicated, as long as you have the basic system to run it on. Otherwise the problem is just as bad when those "regular servers" die.
- freehunter 12y ago
  Servers in the cloud are just regular servers.
- jarman 12y ago
  Because buzzwords
EdwardCoffin 12y ago
I see a lot of comments amounting to saying that contemporary digital content isn't worth much, and its loss wouldn't be a big hardship. This isn't the only kind of digital content though. What I am worried about is older, pre-digital matter which is thrown out because digital copies now exist (often crappy scans of marked-up, faded pages, but that's another rant.) When the digital copies disappear, we will no longer have the durable pre-digital copies to revert to.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Indeed. Every time we scan a document and throw the original away, we're betting for the continued existence of current technological civilization. If it collapses, the thing we digitized and thrown away is the thing future generations will have lost from the cultural heritage. The Dark Ages may end up extending far beyond the beginning of information age.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Meta: I know this is the Internet, and we're all supposed to complain all of the time. And I am aware of HN's submission guidelines. But do we really need to refer to him as Google's Vint Cerf? The guy is famous in our community. It's not like he needs another adjective, and it's not like Google owns him. How about just his name? I find this phraseology a bit disconcerting.
- sswaner 12y ago
  Contrast with the comments on the Paul Carr post - several comments asking "Who is this guy?".
jpswade 12y ago
This is a very clever way to pitch cloud technology to the older generation that simply don't understand the benefits. By essentially saying that, if you don't use cloud technology your precious photos and documents might be unaccessible in years to come.
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  Cloud services require their own sort of maintenance though. http://www.everpix.com http://www.everpix.com and the like. Hopefully less often than hard drive failures, but more frequently than a format like JPEG becoming unreadable. I really hope someone comes up with a good long-term data archive/retrieval system soon, but I'm not holding my breath.
jakosz 12y ago
This is already an issue in many areas, perhaps most troubling with regards to scientific data (e.g. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018/694.short http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018/694.short)
pjc50 12y ago
The irony is that Google have also participated in acquishutdowns and data deletion. They still have the Deja archive online, but I think it's reasonable to worry whether they might just bin it at short notice like Google Reader or Wave. "Never trust a corporation to do a library's job" https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a-librarys-job-f58db4673351 https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a... An example of acquishutdown from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472047
whyleyc 12y ago
We observed this problem first hand when the inventor of Powerpoint emailed us to ask for help in opening old presentations which he could no longer view ! When the guy who wrote the software which produced the file can't view it 20 years later you know you've got a problem. You can read more about that here: http://blog.zamzar.com/2012/04/17/open-old-powerpoint-presentations-in-office-2007-and-office2010/ http://blog.zamzar.com/2012/04/17/open-old-powerpoint-presen...
- kaoD 12y ago
  This is why I'm a firm believer in open, free standards. Of course they don't necessarily guarantee you'll be able to open those files, but it's a great step in the right direction. We shouldn't have to rely on reverse engineering to preserve what's ours. Unfortunately public administrations don't realize (or don't want to realize) this, at least where I live. I even discussed this with information professionals and they wouldn't understand! We're right in the middle of some big change and it will be too late when they finally realize.
romaniv 12y ago
"A company would have to provide the service, and I suggested to Mr Cerf that few companies have lasted for hundreds of years. So how could we guarantee that both our personal memories and all human history would be safeguarded in the long run?" This puts another perspective on the story about Japan's oldest companies, does it not? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041040)
drivingmenuts 12y ago
Who pays the cost of storage? It's not a simple question at all, especially when you consider that most of the information being stored is only marginally useful now and the future value is a complete unknown.
Steuard 12y ago
"A company would have to provide the service, and I suggested to Mr Cerf that few companies have lasted for hundreds of years." Maybe it's just that I'm an academic, but this sounds less like a job for a company and more like a job for a library. (Or more robustly, a job for the world's interconnected network of libraries.) The whole point that I take from this article is "we must preserve our heritage for the common good", and that sounds awfully close to a library's core mission.
- mcantelon 12y ago
  Librarians and archivists are working on this challenge, yes. I work for a company (Artefactual Systems) that, informed by the work being done in academia, develops open source tools related to this (extracting metadata about digital content, etc.).
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Ever since Vint Cerf started working for Google, I've been less than impressed with his speeches. His speeches have taken a pretty obvious turn towards promoting stuff that's good for Google, rather than people per se. He's now basically saying "You're all going to lose your data...better give it to Google to save it for you!".
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  It's the kind of thing that the Internet Archive (which is a library) would do.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Unfortunately, libraries (and museums and other cultural institutions) nowdays are forced to compete on the market - which erodes their ability to preserve and give access to our cultural heritage. If this trend continues, soon there won't be any functional difference between a library and a company.
- deleted 12y ago
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mark_l_watson 12y ago
While I think that Vint Cerf is correct in talking about the dangers of losing the ability to read files in various formats, my hope for long term access lies in open and standardized file formats and services like the fantastic archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/*/markwatson.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/markwatson.com is their history of my little web site, starting in 1996). I think that HTML files in a standard character set like UTF-8 could be readable a thousand years from now if human civilization has not destroyed itself. I hold out less hope for formats like various ogg formats, TIFF, JPEG, MPEG, etc. Software like computer games is even more problematic. I am hopeful that the technology will improve for archiving digital assets. New storage technologies will become more reliable, much more information dense, and less expensive both to build and provide power for.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  MPEG and TIFF I hold little hope for, but JPEG? It's an industry standard and still a massive force on the web. Not going to die any time soon.
  - officialjunk 12y ago
    Anything with lossy compression, like JPEG, is probably going to die.
    - T-hawk 12y ago
      I don't think so. There will always be usage cases involving a couple orders of magnitude less capacity or bandwidth than the leading edge. Lossy compression will always be appropriate for these. Anything involving wireless is a good start. There's a hard physical limit to the amount of data you can cram over 4G or 802.11 spectrum. It's physically impossible to losslessly stream video at 4k 60fps over these, so that's why we use lossy compression (currently MPEG) and always will.
    - gillianseed 12y ago
      Eh? Unless storage becomes enormously cheaper I don't see that having a chance of happening. The key to lossy compression is that you can have huge file size savings while not causing visible degradation (visible here being the human eye).
pervycreeper 12y ago
This is valuable (as I understand it, they are using a metaphor for virtual machines), however the need for this in most cases could be obviated by using open data formats. The problems of physically degrading storage media, "bit rot", and the ability to interface with obsolete technology are also a big deal
mcantelon 12y ago
The effort to combat this is known as digital preservation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation
butterfi 12y ago
I work for a Science museum that is struggling to keep its twenty-year digital collection (web, media, art, etc) archived. Resources seems the be the common factor. It takes time and energy to keep old projects from falling into disrepair or losing them altogether, and many institutions don't have the bandwidth or resources to dedicate to the long term. It's a problem, and I'm grateful to Vint Cerf for putting a spotlight on the issue.
- deleted 12y ago
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greatabel 12y ago
I think some organizations should do things like "TimeMachine of the Internet", like osx's TimeMachine, just in larger scope .
- jarman 12y ago
  https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/
bkeroack 12y ago
I've been thinking about this too, but I believe that Vint Cerf's solution is not feasible. Or, rather, it's a typical technologist "solution" that only prolongs the problem. Imagine you're an archaeologist in the year 4500 or so, by our calendar. What we know of as modern Western civilization collapsed thousands of years prior, all you have are physical artifacts dug out of the ground in your attempt to reconstruct the history of this lost civilization. What would you see? Circa the late 20th century you'll notice a precipitous decline in the volume of any surviving cultural material--meaning printed books, magazines, business papers of various sorts. You'll find fewer sound recordings, ticket stubs, even purchase receipts. The various detritus of daily life will appear to rapidly dry up and virtually disappear, around the world more or less simultaneously. What conclusion would you make? The population at the time seemed to be stable or growing as measured by ruins of settlements, yet they seemed to be doing less or producing less? Perhaps there was a crisis in education and illiteracy became rampant? Maybe there was an ecological disaster and paper itself became scarce? You see that a huge proportion of our culture that we take for granted--not just pop culture, cat gifs, etc--but substantial business and scientific research information as well would be completely lost to these future historians. On a more trivial level, when was the last time you saw a comprehensive, printed guide to iOS 8 (for example)? You could consider that a significant cultural/artistic artifact from our time, yet how will it be preserved in any meaningful way for future scholars? Anybody interested in these questions might peruse http://www.longnow.org http://www.longnow.org
- SoftwareMaven 12y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with your hypothetical archeologist's assessment. We haven't seen any kind of real drop in the amount of garbage being produced[1] (it's barely leveled off in the last decade, and that doesn't include commercial waste). Sure, the kind of garbage is changing, but that happened in the past as well (from bronze garbage to iron garbage), and it indicated a change in technology, not a failure of the civilization. And an indicated change in technology is the pointer our future archeologist will need to start looking for something else. 1. http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/ http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/
- pixl97 12y ago
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newscracker 12y ago
There are at least a few different things to be considered here, and I'm instantly reminded of a big stinker of a post by Mark Pilgrim about proprietary apps and data formats as well as another old article about how stuff that was archived by some government agency was not even readable or accessible later on due to technology changes (it's not one of those referenced in the Wikipedia article for "digital dark age"). Firstly, the medium of storage, the encoding and the interface form one angle to look at. Just like how floppies and CDs are now (almost) obsolete, there would be a future when there won't be any machines that recognize a USB storage device. The same would hold good for other technologies that we have quickly run through, to mention a few - PATA, SATA, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe and so on. Can you read an MFM hard drive today with any computer that you have? With adequate care, data can be moved from one medium to another, like how people learned to move music from tapes to CDs and then to flash drives and hard drives, then to the truly nebulous thing called "cloud", etc. Next, consider the data formats themselves and the applications that support them. This is where proprietary formats, especially those that are not widely popular, would hurt the users. So if you're using, for example, Apple's document formats on Pages/Numbers/KeyNote, it's likely that those files will soon become obsolete (as they already have, where Apple does not support older formats in the newer iWork). Commonly used and supported formats that don't change rapidly, like JPG and PDF, for example, are safe for a much longer time because there are many applications to process these documents with, both proprietary as well as FOSS. Even the web pages stored by archive.org or any doc or xls files lying around from about 20 years ago - how many more years do you think browsers, word processors and spreadsheet programs will keep bloating up (like they have been so far) just to support older versions of doc, xls, ppt, html, etc.? At some point, the bloat will have to be cut and a decision made that older formats will not be rendered like they used to be. That would leave some clobbered text or gibberish or both showing up for any interested future humans to figure out whether it's worth preserving or not and to convert it to a newer format if they care. Now, assume the data format is a long surviving one, like say, mp3 or jpg. How do you protect it from bit rot wherever it's stored? Just because you put it on Amazon or iCloud or Dropbox does not mean you can't lose part of the data to corruption of different kinds or lose all of your data due to system failures. Among the people who do regularly backup, perhaps only a fraction of a percentage actually verifies backups (if at all). With consumer level cloud options, there's not a lot of hope for data longevity for non-tech savvy people. If you're dreaming up a beautiful future in the cloud for all data storage, how can you be sure that your data just doesn't vanish or that it doesn't diminish in quality? People have had that happen to their precious photos by sites that had sneaky terms and conditions about deleting old photos (or if photo prints are not ordered regularly), didn't allow full downloads at any point in time, and sites that went out of business. We can see people treating social networks as reliable cloud storage for their photos as well, disregarding the risks of making such an assumption. Ignore data integrity and data format issues for a moment, and imagine a distant future where 64K displays are common. All your current and older photos and videos would either look terrible on those or may even be completely indistinguishable. Of what use would these artifacts be then for anyone? Considering that a lot of data on the cloud is actually insignificant at the level of the human species (like rants and comments on social networks, LOLcats, etc.) and also the huge amount of data being created every second, how would someone in the future even sift through all this? It's somewhat similar to the NSA/GHCQ looking for a needle in a haystack the size of a huge mountain, except that this haystack is to preserve history, culture, etc. The current haystack being built would need a lot of archivists from different backgrounds working continuously to separate the wheat from the chaff and to also look at consolidating (or "packing") the information concisely (like gathering summaries, sentiments, trends, statistics) if we're ever to have an archive that future generations would even want to look at (say centuries ahead in the future). Leaving it to governments alone or corporations alone is not the solution since each would shape the archive in its own image. This is a very complex topic for most individuals to deal with, and the above points didn't even touch upon cultural and linguistic shifts that happen over time for any data to be usable. I'm sure I've missed many other aspects about prolonging the life of (usable and useful) data. P.S.: The best everlasting format, as many tech savvy people know, is plain, unencrypted text for textual content (this still assumes that the media can be read, because encoding may play spoilsport). P.P.S.: All LOLcats may actually be cultural items to preserve for eternity! :P
karmacondon 12y ago
Several people have mentioned the Internet Archive. They're doing god's work and you should give them money [0]. But I think that dapper Vint "One is glad to be of service" Cerf is referring to how difficult it will be for far future historians to piece together records of daily life in the 21st century, especially from the view of individuals. Think of Da Vinci's notebooks, the personal journals of artic explorers, correspondence letters from great artists and statesman. Now imagine that those things are stored on floppy disks in Office95 .doc format. We'd have a hard time viewing that media today. In 1,000 years it might be impossible. A lot more will be lost to history than what the Internet Archive is currently storing. I can't think of a great solution. When I watch some historical documentaries, it seems like every other scene is based on a quotation from a letter or an old photograph. We don't print those things out any more. They'll be lost, completely lost, when email services and social networks finally shut down. And even if people download personal backups, most file and physical storage formats have a shelf life measured in decades at the most. Letters can sit around in attics for lifetimes, undisturbed. A file formatted for a Commodore 64's word processor program might as well be written in a lost language and then one way encrypted. I'm not sure what to do about it, but it seems like a damn shame. [0] https://archive.org/donate/index.php https://archive.org/donate/index.php
- theoh 12y ago
  Art institutions take these problems seriously. XFR STN at the New Museum is just one example of dozens of projects which attempt to rescue obsolete digital content. I think the problem is less serious than you think where file formats are concerned. It is very severe with a platform like Twitter, though. An informed public would reject the useless level of threading offered by Twitter...
  - lifeformed 12y ago
    Do we need to preserve every tweet, though? The important ones get mentioned in articles and other places. 99% is just noise, although I guess it would be interesting for future people to listen in. It doesn't seem that important of a thing to preserve though. Sure, if we could hear daily conversations of people from the year 1000 we'd learn a lot. But that's only because we don't have access to much other cultural information from back then, unlike what we'll have now with webpages and news articles.
JustSomeNobody 12y ago
This is why proprietary binary formats are evil. We here so much of IoT now, but what we're really going to get is MS's IoT, Samsung's IoT, Apple's IoT. We are not ever really going to have a true IoT (assuming we even need an IoT).
known 12y ago
http://archive.today/ http://archive.today/ is nifty
maerF0x0 12y ago
When I think of future civilizations pouring over our archives I imagine they'll have invented new technologies that give them capabilities to discover facts in ways we cant imagine. So long as the bits are still correct I could envision an AI that can basically "crack" the codes and bring about a human readable version. Its sort of like cryptanalysis in that you have a bunch of "cipher" texts (eg, .DOC files) and maybe you even have some known plain texts (.txt files with similar file names) . Yes i realize .txt is ascii and that is a cipher in itself, but I am presuming that a 1-1 keyless mapping will be easy for them to figure out. Encrypted stuff maybe totally unreachable though besides brute force.
danans 12y ago
There seem to be at least two future scenarios people are discussing here: 1) A future where society loses the ability to build and maintain tools to process digital data at scale, and as such, are only reliant on analog tools to reconstruct the past. 2) A future where due to the extreme advancement of technology, old file formats are "forgotten", and therefore they are difficult to decode. I think Vint statements are to be taken in the context of scenario 2, although I kind of think that even if we forgot the format, we'd be able to rediscover it with enough analysis and computing power, which would be a non-issue in future scenario 2. For scenario 1, I don't think we have answers short of burying long lasting dormant computing devices in bunkers all over the world, along with maps of how to find them cast in a very stable medium. Or see http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept as a proposed analog preservation solution for a large(ish) data set.
wglb 12y ago
Reminds me of the extremes the hackers had to go to to recover images from the nasa tapes http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181241-lunar-recovery-project-restores-stunning-moon-footage-from-inside-an-a-mcdonalds http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181241-lunar-recovery-pro...
fit2rule 12y ago
I think this is one reason to keep the 8-bit computing world alive. The act in and of itself is worthy from the perspective that a lot of the older software is still perfectly useful, fun, and applicable to the modern world, and as well will inspire the perpetuation of platforms as we fall ever further over the abyss of hardware relevance. On one end is 'how relevant is the new hardware' and the other is 'how relevant is the old hardware' .. as soon as these become equivalent, we have a stable progression of human digital culture. But, we don't have that: everyone upgrades their new iDevices as soon as they can, and even in just the last few short years we start to see apps that just don't run any more. This is a given. Which is why I think that the resuscitation of 8-bit Computing, specifically, is such a valuable thing to do: it provides context. When you've spent the evening actually having fun with 30-year old software, the urge to splurge on soon-to-be-redundant newgear is de-composed. Eventually, a person can understand that all computing architectures over the Age, So Far, are of use. That's how they got to be a working program in the first place: someone found it useful. I recently downloaded a PDF of 80 or so BASIC programs, written to be as compatible with the plethora of machines that were available in the 80's, as possible. What a joy it was to see linked lists, self-modifying code, and competent optimization of program space while also using simplified interfaces, to be cross platform as possible. A modern comp-sci student can even still today, learn a lot of very important lessons about computers by reading such archives and going through 30 or so years of history. It factually is not a long amount of time. All those lost floppy disk collections, out there in the dumping grounds, or even the ones still working, hidden in the closet, have the potential to be just as relevant in 100 years as they were on the very first day of publication. I urge anyone with an 8-bit stash to dig it out, soon enough, and find your active community. There are few 8-bit machines out there which don't have a thriving scene.
Animats 12y ago
If there's trouble with image, video or audio files, it's probably going to be because of DRM. The number of formats for those is small relative to the number of items stored. Text documents in obscure formats can be more troublesome. There were many early word processors, and many file format versions. Those can be hard to convert, and there will be obscure text documents some historian will want to see a century from now. Converting stored text documents into some self-explanatory form like XML for archiving purposes is helpful. Even if the software doesn't survive, the text will still be there and someone can probably figure out the encoding. Structured graphics files from old programs are a real problem. This is a big problem in the CAD world. CAD files aren't just pictures any more. They're detailed descriptions of physical objects and how they're made. Moving them from one present-day CAD program to another is tough. Going back 20 or 50 years will be tougher. People will have a real need to do that; buildings, aircraft, and industrial machinery last that long. The present compromise is to export such things in well-know formats that are viewable, but not necessarily editable. Cerf is talking about preserving execution environments, so you can run old software years later. With so much "cloud based" stuff, and network oriented DRM, that's not going to work once the servers have gone away.
WalterBright 12y ago
I find this strange. I know a lot about my parents, a few bits and pieces about my grandparents, and essentially nothing about my great-grandparents. Very, very little of those days was kept, so how can we be entering a "dark age"? Heck, archaeologists are digging through trash heaps in Jamestown trying to figure out how they lived.
dwarman 12y ago
The Long Now folks have been warning of this for at least twenty years. Their definition of a "Dark Age" is one for which we have no extant original records. Which describes the state of digital data precisely. Their concern with this is how to encode the data alongside the clock for distant descendants to read without access to the originating technology. From their exposition I learned to backup complete computers, not just workfiles., not even just the hard drives. Still not enough, even for decades let alone millennia.
pmontra 12y ago
I quote a page of Stross' Glasshouse which I'm reading right now. "We know why the dark age happened [...] Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For reasons of commercial advantage, some of their largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quantities of useful materials in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible."
krick 12y ago
I was expecting more obvious suggestions to move all our stuff to google cloud "for the greater good". Apparently it was just a preparation… But seriously, these complaints are dubious at best. Changing hardware? Well, maybe. Still, we won't migrate to newer hardware unless we can bring our stuff with us. Maybe only if 2D pictures will eventually be considered obsolete and never used since, but I doubt it as well. Changing software? I'm struggling to imagine how text documents could become unreadable. Even on completely new architecture it won't be hard to write a translator. The same way I cannot imagine bitmap images becoming obsolete, and every single format we use is just moderately complicated compression algorithm wrapped around bitmap, and every curious historian will be able to recreate it by himself. The same stays true for wav/flac,ogg,mp3, etc. I can imagine how Adobe swf will become obsolete and it might be hard to find software to open it in 100 years. Or Microsoft Office slideshows. But it feel almost right.

199 points by bauc 12y ago

It feels weird to me to see Vint Cerf propped up in this title by being associated with Google. It seems the guy's name holds enough merit on it's own; I didn't even realize he was working with Google these days!

k-mcgrady 12y ago
This is the first I've heard of him. After reading about him on Wikipedia I'm very surprised I've never seen him mentioned before.
- bsdpython 12y ago
  We've mostly forgotten the people that created modern computing unless they've made a billion dollars
  - tormeh 12y ago
    It is Hacker News, not Computer Engineer/Scientist news. It was always supposed to tilt towards Silicon Valley. I don't think that's a good thing, but it's a free service from Y Combinator, so it's very understandable.
    - wayfarer2s 12y ago
      Well, since it was pg's idea, I'd guess "hacker" would slant more towards MIT-style hacks than anything to do with the valley. I think the lack of Vint Cerf stories has more to do with the temporal nature of news than any biases that people might have. I'd chalk it up to him just not making news lately. Any text on the history of the Internet, TCP/IP, and networks in general liberally mentions him.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - mhurron 12y ago
    We've forgotten about most people unless they've made significant amounts of money. It's what our society values.
    - bsdpython 12y ago
      It's interesting to examine which historical figures have been remembered and which have been forgotten. Money is part of it but not the full story. Political leaders during times of chaos are remembered. Artists are remembered, many of which died penniless. Mass murderers are remembered. I think in general people just need a simple story to attach to a single person to remember them. Building a computer and making a billion dollars is a simple story. Walking on the moon is a simple story. Designing packet switching protocols is not. It's not a tragic situation it's just interesting to note.
- brandall10 12y ago
  Interesting... maybe an age thing? I'm 39 and Vint is right up there in my mind with the heavyweights of computer science. That said, I wasn't aware he was with Google either. I imagine his place in my mind was solidified back in college during the .com days when history internet was a common topic of discussion.
- tlrobinson 12y ago
  Well it's certainly not the first time he's been mentioned on Hacker News.
rootbear 12y ago
He was supposed to give a talk here at Goddard Space Flight Center recently, but it was snowed out. I've heard him speak before, on his Interplanetary Internet work, and he's a good speaker.
raldi 12y ago
Vint's been at Google since 2005.

PaulHoule 12y ago

Librarians used to worry about this 20 years ago, but then SNES9X came along.

gambiting 12y ago

I feel like we are already experiencing that. I have a drawer full of pictures given to me by my parents, some of them 100 years old,but I can't open pictures I took with my digital camera 10 years ago,because the CDs I burnt them to are unreadable. Obviously the answer to that is that I should have printed at least some of them,but I don't know anyone who prints pictures nowadays. Nowadays I backup all of them to Picassa(google plus albums),but I have no idea what happens if I can't pay for monthly storage anymore? Or if I die and no one knows my google password? All of that data will be gone permanently.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "I don't know anyone who prints pictures nowadays" Really? Most of the big supermarkets here (UK) and quite a lot of pharmacy chains have machines where you connect your device/USB/SD, select the pictures you want, and press print. It's relatively inexpensive too and I know people who use them all the time. Personally I don't actually mind if all of my digital photos are unreadable so long as I have the important ones in a physical format so this is a nice solution and takes away the pain of owning a good printer, buying lots of ink and photo paper.
- gambiting 12y ago
  Oh maybe I didn't phrase it correctly. I meant that I don't know anyone who prints out their own pictures - most of my friends only keep their pictures on their phones/digital cameras, physical copies are only ever printed as presents and such, never to archive anything.
scrollaway 12y ago
I know it doesn't answer the problem at large, but if you are worried about this (or even if you're not and you just want your google data to survive you), Google released an inactive account manager a couple of months ago: https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive In the event your google account becomes inactive for a long period of time you choose, you can trust specific contacts with access to specific data. It has other niceties. I highly recommend setting it up.

jgrahamc 12y ago

Relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project "The project was stored on adapted laserdiscs in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analogue video and still pictures, but also digital data, with 300 MB of storage space on each side of the disc. Data and images were selected and collated by the BBC Domesday project based in Bilton House in West Ealing. Pre-mastering of data was carried out on a VAX-11/750 mini-computer, assisted by a network of BBC micros. The discs were mastered, produced, and tested by the Philips Laservision factory in Blackburn, England. Viewing the discs required an Acorn BBC Master expanded with a SCSI controller and an additional coprocessor controlled a Philips VP415 "Domesday Player", a specially produced laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC Master's keyboard and a trackball (known at the time as a trackerball). The software for the project was written in BCPL (a precursor to C), to make cross platform porting easier, although BCPL never attained the popularity that its early promise suggested it might."

new299 12y ago
The Domesday project has faired rather better than many other projects it's content is accessible online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday And I believe the content on the original Laserdiscs has been reverse engineered more than once. Hopefully once content is on the web (unless it's behind robots.txt) it gets sucked up by the Internet Archive. That of course doesn't take care of any rendering issues.

mtrn 12y ago

Last summer I discovered, by accident, a little computer museum[1] in the Kvarner Gulf. It's run by a single guy, who collected an incredible amount of old hardware over the years and exhibited them in couple of rooms. It rained the day I visited the place, and since it was an old building, it actually rained a bit inside. The guy took it with humour, but it was actually a pity. It is a great place and on some days the visitors can even run old programs on those ancient machines or play games. [1] http://www.peekpoke.hr http://www.peekpoke.hr From their site: Opened on 22nd of September 2007, Club PEEK&POKE is one of the few permanent displays of vintage computing technology in Europe. Located in the centre of the city of Rijeka and spread across 300m2 of space, it contains more than 1000 exhibits of the world and local computer history, ranging from very early calculators and game consoles to rare and obsolete computers from the nineties.

ht_th 12y ago
I've been to a couple of these museums as well. What makes them fun to go to are: - you may touch everything, often including things inside the computers itself - the people working there (or, as is often the case, the one guy working there) is knowledgeable, willing to talk about it in depth, cares, and you can have a real conversation with them. - there's a lot of surprising hardware around I had no idea existed (from failed computer companies, to specialized I/O of decades past, to special-purpose hardware) You cannot get the same full experience with most regular museums, as then you have to follow their narrative instead of following your curiosity. On the other hand, these museums are often not much more than an erudite collection of historical artifacts they got their hands on. To preserve is to select with a plan, not just collect everything.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Technical/science museums in general often seem to be closer to this ideal than other museums, because while some of the artefacts may be valuable, more often they are trying to showcase how things worked rather than specific objects.
  - ht_th 12y ago

fidotron 12y ago

The only long term answer is to detach the data stores from the applications which process them. It is the migration between apps that leads to this data orphaning. This also leads to the conclusion that a standard mechanism for interfacing to the data from multiple apps on multiple data backends is needed. The Android storage framework is probably the best effort at this so far, but it's far from clear how used it is.

kawera 12y ago
remoteStorage - An open protocol for per-user storage https://remotestorage.io https://remotestorage.io

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Udik 12y ago
Google won't, that's the fact. That completely useless snapshot will live till the end of the digital age, whenever it will be. That's why I don't understand Cerf's concerns.
stingraycharles 12y ago
The whole point he's making that we do not know what might be valuable to future civilizations. We simply cannot foresee the way they would study our culture, in the same way the ancient civilizations would not be able to comprehend our current civilization.
- brudgers 12y ago
  We don't preserve muddy door matts today "for posterity." That we can't know exactly what will be important in the future doesn't mean we can't reasonably predict what won't be.

Maakuth 12y ago

I feel like http://archive.org/ http://archive.org/ deserves a mention here for their efforts of preserving digital history. Personal photos or other data are not in their scope, but they do wonderful things with web pages and other stuff that's publicly available. I just read Brewster Kahle's interview from Founders at Work this week and it blew my mind how determined to build the Internet Archive he's been for practically his whole career.

Udik 12y ago

Strange, I would call these preoccupations BS if not for the source. This was a common concern some 20 to 30 years ago, when the internet was practically non existent and people still used old floppy disks and cds. Today, a good part of our personal files are stored in the cloud and storage devices have become more standard through the usage of universal interfaces. Some of our personal data will be lost (whatever is left in the hard drives of old computers and not backed up) but the trail of information the world is leaving behind is so huge that what worries me is rather that time seems to have frozen. Everything we leave behind us, documents, pictures, looks as fresh today as it was the day it was produced. And as easily retrievable.

agumonkey 12y ago
On another thread people were saddened by rapidshare-like website being put down because a lot of content was hosted there. Let's be sure the cloud will stay long. So far most 80s data I see on the web comes from .. magazines. Ha paper.
- evgen 12y ago
  The trick with digital data (including that stored in cloud services) is to keep it in motion. Movement from one service to another, leaving behind a copy that may eventually get deleted but just might stick around a while, is the best way to keep data available. Whatever disappeared with rapidshare would have been just fine if people have moved it to the various "latest and greatest" systems when they popped up, the only way it gets lost is if it stops moving.
  - pmontra 12y ago
    What happens when one dies, who keeps moving that data? Companies eventually close. Millennia old documents made their way to us without anybody carying about them. Digital data seem to be intrinsically different from analog ones in that continuous care is needed. What you propose is a solution but I can't see who's going to do it for free as walls and caves did for paintings and inscriptions.

crazydoggers 12y ago

No one ever considers the volume of photos and documents we are now creating. My parents probably took dozens of photographs when I was younger, and kept maybe one or two albums. Nowadays, most people have hundreds if not thousands of photographs and videos. So it seems to me that the converse will actually be true. If you've got a 100 fold increase in the number of documents and photos being created, and only 1% of those make it, you're still preserving the same number of documents. And frankly, I think that's a conservative number. As some of the other posters here mentioned, with the advent of cloud based services and easy backup systems, retrieval is getting easier. So if storage and retrieval is solved, that leaves format evolution problems. But somehow I doubt in 20 years or even more that JPEG is somehow going to be harder to read than it is now.

digerata 12y ago
Thousands if not tens of thousands. I'm at over 45K in iPhoto alone. Have a kid or two and your wife can get a little shutter happy.
vidarh 12y ago
A couple of years ago, Kodak's online photo storage service (in the UK at least) shut down. We just barely managed to get copies of the hundreds of pictures we had stored there in time. Other recent (non-photo specific) examples of vast amount of data disappearing: Geocities. Yes, large chunks of it was archived last minute. MegaUpload. And we have Rapidshare on it's way to disappearing. Cloud services can and will shut down, and it is not at all a given that we manage to preserve the data. This creates a relentless churn where some proportion of older data disappears every day. All we really can do is to fight to keep the churn rate low enough, because we have no realistic prospect of saving everything all the time.
- pixl97 12y ago
  But that's not really any different than any other medium. If there exists two copies of a book in different libraries and then one of the libraries burns down it's not any different. I mean we still talk about the library of Alexandria 2000 years later.

JoiDegn 12y ago

That reminds me of the Encyclopedia Galactica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Galactica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Galactica. I wonder if this is a scheme to get comp scis to a remote Location and eventually start a new galactic empire.

digerata 12y ago

I, for one, feel that humanity would benefit from this generation's digital presence being wiped from existence. Everyone on this planet is now dumber for having experienced it. I fully support and will tell my congressman to vote for a digital dark age. Now get off my lawn!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dbpatterson 12y ago

Camlistore seems relevant - it's whole intention is to last (at least) 100 years, primarily by making the data format simple and making data migration (ie, moving between providers, between hard disks, etc) a common thing. https://camlistore.org/ https://camlistore.org/

bsbechtel 12y ago

How is this different than any other point in history? Throughout time, the vast majority of records and artifacts were lost, and only some given percentage survive. Let's say it's ~2% for argument's sake...actually, the amount of material that survives would decay over time - 40% after 10 years, 20% after 50 years, etc. I have no idea what the rate of decay for digital records, information, and archives would be, but I would think it would be higher than information stored as hard copies of paper, books, etc. Of course, we are also producing orders of magnitudes more information than we were in the past.

benihana 12y ago
>How is this different than any other point in history? I would argue that for the first time in history, we're not limited by storage space.

herf 12y ago

You can virtualize a PC (or replicate the filesystem like Dropbox), but it is harder to virtualize a distributed system like Facebook's or Google's. And most mobile platforms are DoA without their vendor signing and cloud services. It's always been hard to migrate out of social systems--convincing a well-connected user of a photo service to move away from the place where they've accumulated comments and tags is really hard. That metadata is not portable because identity is not yet portable, and it's what we're spending time on (lots more time than we spend making spreadsheets). I think we might manage to keep "JPG as file" alive for 30-50 years, but there is lots more to manage.

vidarh 12y ago
This is the crux of the problem. We are getting better at archiving files. And thanks to a combination of people dedicated to emulation and the rise of virtual machines, there are few popular pieces of hardware we can't emulate in excruciating detail. But many of the services I used a decade ago are already gone. And pretty much all the services I used two decades ago have completely disappeared, with some very few notable examples. And with them, vast amounts of data. Some of it the Internet Archive have at least captured static snapshots of (and they really should have magnitudes more funding), but ten times that - or more - was data in walled gardens, behind logins or otherwise restricted in ways that means it is lost forever unless we're lucky and it turns out some admin held onto backup tapes they weren't really meant to keep. And the problem with there is not to create a snapshot of a single server, but as you say that distributed systems are far harder. Even recent. Twice I've been contracted to help companies take over infrastructure that involved systems I'd worked on, and try to "package it up", and it was incredibly hard, because no matter how much you try to tear down and bring up individual servers or groups of servers and automate deployment, very few places running complex services ever try - or could afford to try - to tear down and bring up a full copy of their entire infrastructure. Suddenly all kinds of nasty interdependencies and bootstrap problems nobody had needed to think about shows up.

whoisthemachine 12y ago

DRM also plays a role in this. Obsolete DRM techniques whose algorithms have long been forgotten will make it difficult to archive data protected by DRM onto new storage mediums.

kbart 12y ago
I somehow doubt it's a big issue. Do you know many DRM's that haven't been cracked in a matter of days/weeks after the release?
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  Yeah, especially with computer games. Whatever old game is having DRM trouble, you can usually find a crack for it on Rapidshare.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    I can't tell if you made that reference on purpose, or if you're unaware that Rapidshare is shutting down.
    - wlesieutre 12y ago
      Yep, tongue firmly in cheek on that one.
  - phowat 12y ago
    Oops, turns out rapidshare is shutting down.
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  It sort of is a big issue if you consider that preserving the history of something relies on lawbreaking motivated by piracy to enable it. Outside of the against-the-law bit it requires sufficiently motivated attackers and insufficiently good DRM. The status quo is probably stable for games and big name software packages for the time being, but it doesn't inspire confidence for the long term.

thisjepisje 12y ago

"Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete - just like what happens in a museum - but in digital form, in servers in the cloud." Why not regular servers?

vidarh 12y ago
The point is that the description/emulation would need to be a virtual machine, so it can be transported and duplicated, as long as you have the basic system to run it on. Otherwise the problem is just as bad when those "regular servers" die.
freehunter 12y ago
Servers in the cloud are just regular servers.
jarman 12y ago
Because buzzwords

EdwardCoffin 12y ago

I see a lot of comments amounting to saying that contemporary digital content isn't worth much, and its loss wouldn't be a big hardship. This isn't the only kind of digital content though. What I am worried about is older, pre-digital matter which is thrown out because digital copies now exist (often crappy scans of marked-up, faded pages, but that's another rant.) When the digital copies disappear, we will no longer have the durable pre-digital copies to revert to.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Indeed. Every time we scan a document and throw the original away, we're betting for the continued existence of current technological civilization. If it collapses, the thing we digitized and thrown away is the thing future generations will have lost from the cultural heritage. The Dark Ages may end up extending far beyond the beginning of information age.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

Meta: I know this is the Internet, and we're all supposed to complain all of the time. And I am aware of HN's submission guidelines. But do we really need to refer to him as Google's Vint Cerf? The guy is famous in our community. It's not like he needs another adjective, and it's not like Google owns him. How about just his name? I find this phraseology a bit disconcerting.

sswaner 12y ago
Contrast with the comments on the Paul Carr post - several comments asking "Who is this guy?".

jpswade 12y ago

This is a very clever way to pitch cloud technology to the older generation that simply don't understand the benefits. By essentially saying that, if you don't use cloud technology your precious photos and documents might be unaccessible in years to come.

wlesieutre 12y ago
Cloud services require their own sort of maintenance though. http://www.everpix.com http://www.everpix.com and the like. Hopefully less often than hard drive failures, but more frequently than a format like JPEG becoming unreadable. I really hope someone comes up with a good long-term data archive/retrieval system soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

jakosz 12y ago

This is already an issue in many areas, perhaps most troubling with regards to scientific data (e.g. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018/694.short http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018/694.short)

pjc50 12y ago

The irony is that Google have also participated in acquishutdowns and data deletion. They still have the Deja archive online, but I think it's reasonable to worry whether they might just bin it at short notice like Google Reader or Wave. "Never trust a corporation to do a library's job" https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a-librarys-job-f58db4673351 https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a... An example of acquishutdown from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472047

whyleyc 12y ago

We observed this problem first hand when the inventor of Powerpoint emailed us to ask for help in opening old presentations which he could no longer view ! When the guy who wrote the software which produced the file can't view it 20 years later you know you've got a problem. You can read more about that here: http://blog.zamzar.com/2012/04/17/open-old-powerpoint-presentations-in-office-2007-and-office2010/ http://blog.zamzar.com/2012/04/17/open-old-powerpoint-presen...

kaoD 12y ago
This is why I'm a firm believer in open, free standards. Of course they don't necessarily guarantee you'll be able to open those files, but it's a great step in the right direction. We shouldn't have to rely on reverse engineering to preserve what's ours. Unfortunately public administrations don't realize (or don't want to realize) this, at least where I live. I even discussed this with information professionals and they wouldn't understand! We're right in the middle of some big change and it will be too late when they finally realize.

romaniv 12y ago

"A company would have to provide the service, and I suggested to Mr Cerf that few companies have lasted for hundreds of years. So how could we guarantee that both our personal memories and all human history would be safeguarded in the long run?" This puts another perspective on the story about Japan's oldest companies, does it not? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041040)

drivingmenuts 12y ago

Who pays the cost of storage? It's not a simple question at all, especially when you consider that most of the information being stored is only marginally useful now and the future value is a complete unknown.

Steuard 12y ago

"A company would have to provide the service, and I suggested to Mr Cerf that few companies have lasted for hundreds of years." Maybe it's just that I'm an academic, but this sounds less like a job for a company and more like a job for a library. (Or more robustly, a job for the world's interconnected network of libraries.) The whole point that I take from this article is "we must preserve our heritage for the common good", and that sounds awfully close to a library's core mission.

mcantelon 12y ago
Librarians and archivists are working on this challenge, yes. I work for a company (Artefactual Systems) that, informed by the work being done in academia, develops open source tools related to this (extracting metadata about digital content, etc.).
higherpurpose 12y ago
Ever since Vint Cerf started working for Google, I've been less than impressed with his speeches. His speeches have taken a pretty obvious turn towards promoting stuff that's good for Google, rather than people per se. He's now basically saying "You're all going to lose your data...better give it to Google to save it for you!".
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
It's the kind of thing that the Internet Archive (which is a library) would do.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Unfortunately, libraries (and museums and other cultural institutions) nowdays are forced to compete on the market - which erodes their ability to preserve and give access to our cultural heritage. If this trend continues, soon there won't be any functional difference between a library and a company.
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mark_l_watson 12y ago

While I think that Vint Cerf is correct in talking about the dangers of losing the ability to read files in various formats, my hope for long term access lies in open and standardized file formats and services like the fantastic archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/*/markwatson.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/markwatson.com is their history of my little web site, starting in 1996). I think that HTML files in a standard character set like UTF-8 could be readable a thousand years from now if human civilization has not destroyed itself. I hold out less hope for formats like various ogg formats, TIFF, JPEG, MPEG, etc. Software like computer games is even more problematic. I am hopeful that the technology will improve for archiving digital assets. New storage technologies will become more reliable, much more information dense, and less expensive both to build and provide power for.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
MPEG and TIFF I hold little hope for, but JPEG? It's an industry standard and still a massive force on the web. Not going to die any time soon.
- officialjunk 12y ago
  Anything with lossy compression, like JPEG, is probably going to die.
  - T-hawk 12y ago
    I don't think so. There will always be usage cases involving a couple orders of magnitude less capacity or bandwidth than the leading edge. Lossy compression will always be appropriate for these. Anything involving wireless is a good start. There's a hard physical limit to the amount of data you can cram over 4G or 802.11 spectrum. It's physically impossible to losslessly stream video at 4k 60fps over these, so that's why we use lossy compression (currently MPEG) and always will.
  - gillianseed 12y ago
    Eh? Unless storage becomes enormously cheaper I don't see that having a chance of happening. The key to lossy compression is that you can have huge file size savings while not causing visible degradation (visible here being the human eye).

pervycreeper 12y ago

This is valuable (as I understand it, they are using a metaphor for virtual machines), however the need for this in most cases could be obviated by using open data formats. The problems of physically degrading storage media, "bit rot", and the ability to interface with obsolete technology are also a big deal

mcantelon 12y ago

The effort to combat this is known as digital preservation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation

butterfi 12y ago

I work for a Science museum that is struggling to keep its twenty-year digital collection (web, media, art, etc) archived. Resources seems the be the common factor. It takes time and energy to keep old projects from falling into disrepair or losing them altogether, and many institutions don't have the bandwidth or resources to dedicate to the long term. It's a problem, and I'm grateful to Vint Cerf for putting a spotlight on the issue.

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greatabel 12y ago

I think some organizations should do things like "TimeMachine of the Internet", like osx's TimeMachine, just in larger scope .

jarman 12y ago
https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/

bkeroack 12y ago

I've been thinking about this too, but I believe that Vint Cerf's solution is not feasible. Or, rather, it's a typical technologist "solution" that only prolongs the problem. Imagine you're an archaeologist in the year 4500 or so, by our calendar. What we know of as modern Western civilization collapsed thousands of years prior, all you have are physical artifacts dug out of the ground in your attempt to reconstruct the history of this lost civilization. What would you see? Circa the late 20th century you'll notice a precipitous decline in the volume of any surviving cultural material--meaning printed books, magazines, business papers of various sorts. You'll find fewer sound recordings, ticket stubs, even purchase receipts. The various detritus of daily life will appear to rapidly dry up and virtually disappear, around the world more or less simultaneously. What conclusion would you make? The population at the time seemed to be stable or growing as measured by ruins of settlements, yet they seemed to be doing less or producing less? Perhaps there was a crisis in education and illiteracy became rampant? Maybe there was an ecological disaster and paper itself became scarce? You see that a huge proportion of our culture that we take for granted--not just pop culture, cat gifs, etc--but substantial business and scientific research information as well would be completely lost to these future historians. On a more trivial level, when was the last time you saw a comprehensive, printed guide to iOS 8 (for example)? You could consider that a significant cultural/artistic artifact from our time, yet how will it be preserved in any meaningful way for future scholars? Anybody interested in these questions might peruse http://www.longnow.org http://www.longnow.org

SoftwareMaven 12y ago
I'm not sure I agree with your hypothetical archeologist's assessment. We haven't seen any kind of real drop in the amount of garbage being produced[1] (it's barely leveled off in the last decade, and that doesn't include commercial waste). Sure, the kind of garbage is changing, but that happened in the past as well (from bronze garbage to iron garbage), and it indicated a change in technology, not a failure of the civilization. And an indicated change in technology is the pointer our future archeologist will need to start looking for something else. 1. http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/ http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/
pixl97 12y ago

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newscracker 12y ago

There are at least a few different things to be considered here, and I'm instantly reminded of a big stinker of a post by Mark Pilgrim about proprietary apps and data formats as well as another old article about how stuff that was archived by some government agency was not even readable or accessible later on due to technology changes (it's not one of those referenced in the Wikipedia article for "digital dark age"). Firstly, the medium of storage, the encoding and the interface form one angle to look at. Just like how floppies and CDs are now (almost) obsolete, there would be a future when there won't be any machines that recognize a USB storage device. The same would hold good for other technologies that we have quickly run through, to mention a few - PATA, SATA, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe and so on. Can you read an MFM hard drive today with any computer that you have? With adequate care, data can be moved from one medium to another, like how people learned to move music from tapes to CDs and then to flash drives and hard drives, then to the truly nebulous thing called "cloud", etc. Next, consider the data formats themselves and the applications that support them. This is where proprietary formats, especially those that are not widely popular, would hurt the users. So if you're using, for example, Apple's document formats on Pages/Numbers/KeyNote, it's likely that those files will soon become obsolete (as they already have, where Apple does not support older formats in the newer iWork). Commonly used and supported formats that don't change rapidly, like JPG and PDF, for example, are safe for a much longer time because there are many applications to process these documents with, both proprietary as well as FOSS. Even the web pages stored by archive.org or any doc or xls files lying around from about 20 years ago - how many more years do you think browsers, word processors and spreadsheet programs will keep bloating up (like they have been so far) just to support older versions of doc, xls, ppt, html, etc.? At some point, the bloat will have to be cut and a decision made that older formats will not be rendered like they used to be. That would leave some clobbered text or gibberish or both showing up for any interested future humans to figure out whether it's worth preserving or not and to convert it to a newer format if they care. Now, assume the data format is a long surviving one, like say, mp3 or jpg. How do you protect it from bit rot wherever it's stored? Just because you put it on Amazon or iCloud or Dropbox does not mean you can't lose part of the data to corruption of different kinds or lose all of your data due to system failures. Among the people who do regularly backup, perhaps only a fraction of a percentage actually verifies backups (if at all). With consumer level cloud options, there's not a lot of hope for data longevity for non-tech savvy people. If you're dreaming up a beautiful future in the cloud for all data storage, how can you be sure that your data just doesn't vanish or that it doesn't diminish in quality? People have had that happen to their precious photos by sites that had sneaky terms and conditions about deleting old photos (or if photo prints are not ordered regularly), didn't allow full downloads at any point in time, and sites that went out of business. We can see people treating social networks as reliable cloud storage for their photos as well, disregarding the risks of making such an assumption. Ignore data integrity and data format issues for a moment, and imagine a distant future where 64K displays are common. All your current and older photos and videos would either look terrible on those or may even be completely indistinguishable. Of what use would these artifacts be then for anyone? Considering that a lot of data on the cloud is actually insignificant at the level of the human species (like rants and comments on social networks, LOLcats, etc.) and also the huge amount of data being created every second, how would someone in the future even sift through all this? It's somewhat similar to the NSA/GHCQ looking for a needle in a haystack the size of a huge mountain, except that this haystack is to preserve history, culture, etc. The current haystack being built would need a lot of archivists from different backgrounds working continuously to separate the wheat from the chaff and to also look at consolidating (or "packing") the information concisely (like gathering summaries, sentiments, trends, statistics) if we're ever to have an archive that future generations would even want to look at (say centuries ahead in the future). Leaving it to governments alone or corporations alone is not the solution since each would shape the archive in its own image. This is a very complex topic for most individuals to deal with, and the above points didn't even touch upon cultural and linguistic shifts that happen over time for any data to be usable. I'm sure I've missed many other aspects about prolonging the life of (usable and useful) data. P.S.: The best everlasting format, as many tech savvy people know, is plain, unencrypted text for textual content (this still assumes that the media can be read, because encoding may play spoilsport). P.P.S.: All LOLcats may actually be cultural items to preserve for eternity! :P

karmacondon 12y ago

Several people have mentioned the Internet Archive. They're doing god's work and you should give them money [0]. But I think that dapper Vint "One is glad to be of service" Cerf is referring to how difficult it will be for far future historians to piece together records of daily life in the 21st century, especially from the view of individuals. Think of Da Vinci's notebooks, the personal journals of artic explorers, correspondence letters from great artists and statesman. Now imagine that those things are stored on floppy disks in Office95 .doc format. We'd have a hard time viewing that media today. In 1,000 years it might be impossible. A lot more will be lost to history than what the Internet Archive is currently storing. I can't think of a great solution. When I watch some historical documentaries, it seems like every other scene is based on a quotation from a letter or an old photograph. We don't print those things out any more. They'll be lost, completely lost, when email services and social networks finally shut down. And even if people download personal backups, most file and physical storage formats have a shelf life measured in decades at the most. Letters can sit around in attics for lifetimes, undisturbed. A file formatted for a Commodore 64's word processor program might as well be written in a lost language and then one way encrypted. I'm not sure what to do about it, but it seems like a damn shame. [0] https://archive.org/donate/index.php https://archive.org/donate/index.php

theoh 12y ago
Art institutions take these problems seriously. XFR STN at the New Museum is just one example of dozens of projects which attempt to rescue obsolete digital content. I think the problem is less serious than you think where file formats are concerned. It is very severe with a platform like Twitter, though. An informed public would reject the useless level of threading offered by Twitter...
- lifeformed 12y ago
  Do we need to preserve every tweet, though? The important ones get mentioned in articles and other places. 99% is just noise, although I guess it would be interesting for future people to listen in. It doesn't seem that important of a thing to preserve though. Sure, if we could hear daily conversations of people from the year 1000 we'd learn a lot. But that's only because we don't have access to much other cultural information from back then, unlike what we'll have now with webpages and news articles.

JustSomeNobody 12y ago

This is why proprietary binary formats are evil. We here so much of IoT now, but what we're really going to get is MS's IoT, Samsung's IoT, Apple's IoT. We are not ever really going to have a true IoT (assuming we even need an IoT).

known 12y ago

http://archive.today/ http://archive.today/ is nifty

maerF0x0 12y ago

When I think of future civilizations pouring over our archives I imagine they'll have invented new technologies that give them capabilities to discover facts in ways we cant imagine. So long as the bits are still correct I could envision an AI that can basically "crack" the codes and bring about a human readable version. Its sort of like cryptanalysis in that you have a bunch of "cipher" texts (eg, .DOC files) and maybe you even have some known plain texts (.txt files with similar file names) . Yes i realize .txt is ascii and that is a cipher in itself, but I am presuming that a 1-1 keyless mapping will be easy for them to figure out. Encrypted stuff maybe totally unreachable though besides brute force.

danans 12y ago

There seem to be at least two future scenarios people are discussing here: 1) A future where society loses the ability to build and maintain tools to process digital data at scale, and as such, are only reliant on analog tools to reconstruct the past. 2) A future where due to the extreme advancement of technology, old file formats are "forgotten", and therefore they are difficult to decode. I think Vint statements are to be taken in the context of scenario 2, although I kind of think that even if we forgot the format, we'd be able to rediscover it with enough analysis and computing power, which would be a non-issue in future scenario 2. For scenario 1, I don't think we have answers short of burying long lasting dormant computing devices in bunkers all over the world, along with maps of how to find them cast in a very stable medium. Or see http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept as a proposed analog preservation solution for a large(ish) data set.

wglb 12y ago

Reminds me of the extremes the hackers had to go to to recover images from the nasa tapes http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181241-lunar-recovery-project-restores-stunning-moon-footage-from-inside-an-a-mcdonalds http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181241-lunar-recovery-pro...

fit2rule 12y ago

I think this is one reason to keep the 8-bit computing world alive. The act in and of itself is worthy from the perspective that a lot of the older software is still perfectly useful, fun, and applicable to the modern world, and as well will inspire the perpetuation of platforms as we fall ever further over the abyss of hardware relevance. On one end is 'how relevant is the new hardware' and the other is 'how relevant is the old hardware' .. as soon as these become equivalent, we have a stable progression of human digital culture. But, we don't have that: everyone upgrades their new iDevices as soon as they can, and even in just the last few short years we start to see apps that just don't run any more. This is a given. Which is why I think that the resuscitation of 8-bit Computing, specifically, is such a valuable thing to do: it provides context. When you've spent the evening actually having fun with 30-year old software, the urge to splurge on soon-to-be-redundant newgear is de-composed. Eventually, a person can understand that all computing architectures over the Age, So Far, are of use. That's how they got to be a working program in the first place: someone found it useful. I recently downloaded a PDF of 80 or so BASIC programs, written to be as compatible with the plethora of machines that were available in the 80's, as possible. What a joy it was to see linked lists, self-modifying code, and competent optimization of program space while also using simplified interfaces, to be cross platform as possible. A modern comp-sci student can even still today, learn a lot of very important lessons about computers by reading such archives and going through 30 or so years of history. It factually is not a long amount of time. All those lost floppy disk collections, out there in the dumping grounds, or even the ones still working, hidden in the closet, have the potential to be just as relevant in 100 years as they were on the very first day of publication. I urge anyone with an 8-bit stash to dig it out, soon enough, and find your active community. There are few 8-bit machines out there which don't have a thriving scene.

Animats 12y ago

If there's trouble with image, video or audio files, it's probably going to be because of DRM. The number of formats for those is small relative to the number of items stored. Text documents in obscure formats can be more troublesome. There were many early word processors, and many file format versions. Those can be hard to convert, and there will be obscure text documents some historian will want to see a century from now. Converting stored text documents into some self-explanatory form like XML for archiving purposes is helpful. Even if the software doesn't survive, the text will still be there and someone can probably figure out the encoding. Structured graphics files from old programs are a real problem. This is a big problem in the CAD world. CAD files aren't just pictures any more. They're detailed descriptions of physical objects and how they're made. Moving them from one present-day CAD program to another is tough. Going back 20 or 50 years will be tougher. People will have a real need to do that; buildings, aircraft, and industrial machinery last that long. The present compromise is to export such things in well-know formats that are viewable, but not necessarily editable. Cerf is talking about preserving execution environments, so you can run old software years later. With so much "cloud based" stuff, and network oriented DRM, that's not going to work once the servers have gone away.

WalterBright 12y ago

I find this strange. I know a lot about my parents, a few bits and pieces about my grandparents, and essentially nothing about my great-grandparents. Very, very little of those days was kept, so how can we be entering a "dark age"? Heck, archaeologists are digging through trash heaps in Jamestown trying to figure out how they lived.

dwarman 12y ago

The Long Now folks have been warning of this for at least twenty years. Their definition of a "Dark Age" is one for which we have no extant original records. Which describes the state of digital data precisely. Their concern with this is how to encode the data alongside the clock for distant descendants to read without access to the originating technology. From their exposition I learned to backup complete computers, not just workfiles., not even just the hard drives. Still not enough, even for decades let alone millennia.

pmontra 12y ago

I quote a page of Stross' Glasshouse which I'm reading right now. "We know why the dark age happened [...] Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For reasons of commercial advantage, some of their largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quantities of useful materials in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible."

krick 12y ago

I was expecting more obvious suggestions to move all our stuff to google cloud "for the greater good". Apparently it was just a preparation… But seriously, these complaints are dubious at best. Changing hardware? Well, maybe. Still, we won't migrate to newer hardware unless we can bring our stuff with us. Maybe only if 2D pictures will eventually be considered obsolete and never used since, but I doubt it as well. Changing software? I'm struggling to imagine how text documents could become unreadable. Even on completely new architecture it won't be hard to write a translator. The same way I cannot imagine bitmap images becoming obsolete, and every single format we use is just moderately complicated compression algorithm wrapped around bitmap, and every curious historian will be able to recreate it by himself. The same stays true for wav/flac,ogg,mp3, etc. I can imagine how Adobe swf will become obsolete and it might be hard to find software to open it in 100 years. Or Microsoft Office slideshows. But it feel almost right.