Future-safe archives
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I just woke up in Paris, it's 5:34AM here, but back in California, it still never ceases to amaze me, the day hasn't yet flipped. You guys haven't even gone to bed yet! Now that's amazing to me. What perseverence! Keep up the good work everybody.  I just started posting a couple of twits that really should be a blog post, so let's get started. First at some point, after a suitable period of mourning, I'd like to rasie the issue of what's to happen with Marc Orchant's web presence. Which of course is a way of focusing attention on all of our web presences.  None of us like to think of it, but truth is none of us are going to live forever. Yet if you read this, it's likely that you're creating a digital body that can and imho should continue to exist even after your physical body stops existing. People are humble, no one wants to come out and say their work has any value that's worth preserving past their death, but come on, we know that's not true. If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing on the web. As would Hemingway or Faulkner, Vonnegut or Mailer, John Lennon or Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandberg or Robert Frost. Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. You think there isn't any great literature out there on the web? I wouldn't be so sure about that. What if there is? And what if a baby born today becomes a great creative force? Or what if there's a social disaster like the Holocaust? Did you know that there are preserved diaries from pre-revolutionary America? Writings of ordinary people can be of enormous help to historians. And if we believe in citizen journalism (I do) why not citizen historians? Shouldn't we be thinking out into the future? We should! With all possible humility, I'd like to tell you that a few days after I die my entire web presence will likely disappear. My servers require some attention from me from time to time. The first time that happens, poof, there goes 10-plus years of Scripting News, and all the docs for the OPML Editor and the OPML spec, the XML-RPC site, to name just a few. Anyway, within a couple of months it will all certainly disappear, unless someone pays my hosting and DSL bills. Maybe someone will, but isn't it ridiculous that that's what it depends on? And when my sites disappear so will my uncle's. He died in 2003. His site is still accessible because I keep it that way. When I die, who will will take over for me? I'm sure the world will survive without his writing, but why? If I love the memory of my uncle, and I do, what can I do to reserve a place for him in the archive of the future. It seems such a small thing, but it's most of what remains of his life.  And what of academics, Nobel Laureates and others? I know for a fact that a great university (Harvard) has no plan to protect their web-based work after they pass. It's so ironic that the web offers an archival solution for non-digital work, yet the web information is more fragile than the physical stuff. Preserving our digital heritage is going to require some foresight, some planning, but it seems possible and we surely can do much better. Marc's fate awaits us all. While we're still alive, there's still time to solve this problem. When we're gone, it will be too late. Part of his legacy can be that he helped focus us on this issue, and his life work could be a great test case. Do we want to see his work preserved? And if so, how will it be done? PS: The RSS 2.0 site will likely persist, because I gave it to Berkman, and then used it as a test case to learn about future-safing. It seems likely to continue to exist, knock wood, praise Murphy, as long as Harvard exists.
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News and survey results from Computerworld's twice-annual storage conference.
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One of the major issues plaguing search engines right now is the growing list of web documents available online. While no exact numbers are available, there are billions of search results to sort through. But, they can&#8217;t all be relevant both on material content and time &#8212; can they?  Of course they&#8217;re not, and Google [...]
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If you hang around on web-related mailing lists long enough, you start getting the idea that the future is full of metadata. Now, this metadata may or may not be XML, or it may or may not be RDF or OWL or a dozen other technologies with impressive-sounding words like &ldquo;ontology&rdquo; in their names. It may or may not be the long-dreamt-of (and often derided) &ldquo;Semantic Web.&rdquo; In fact, it may or may not be a dozen different buzzwords, and it may or may not be a good thing. But whatever the future is, it will definitely be full of metadata; on this the experts agree.    To my mind there&rsquo;s a problem with this: the argument always seems to depend on technologies which don&rsquo;t exist or aren&rsquo;t quite ready yet, so it always falls back to talking about how things will be &ldquo;in the future,&rdquo; which may never get here. Luckily, there's an easy way to add oodles of metadata to your documents right this minute, without having to learn anything more complicated than trusty old HTML 4.01. If it catches on, &ldquo;the future&rdquo; might get here a lot sooner than expected.
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Well, maybe not yet. But what does the future hold for those who consider their source code an important proprietary asset? Halloween this year featured more scary stuff than just ghosts and ghouls.
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VeriSign and America Online on Tuesday announced plans to showcase software for &quot;safe chat rooms&quot; this December. The safe chat room will use authentication technology to verify a child&#39;s age.
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Joel Barker wrote an interesting book entitled, "Paradigms:The Business of Discovering the Future". Originally written several years ago, I find it relevant today. In his book Barker has more of an interest in how we think about the future than making predictions. read more
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BOFFINS AND boffinettes at Imperial College London are developing a new optical disk that can store a terabyte of data. The Multiplexed Optical Data Storage (Mods)technology is expected to be released towards
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To see the e-mail I get every day from readers about security issues is to develop a deep discomfort with the state of computing today. Keeping a Windows PC safe can demand a high degree of vigilance. -Rob Pegoraro
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DHS wants to build a portable lab to set up at events and transit hubs to test ways to detect terrorists using remote sensors and pyschological techniques.  Will your thoughts be clean enough to board the train? In 27B Stroke 6.
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Today, many people rely on computers to do homework, work, create, etc., so it's important to take special care with your data storage. This week you'll learn about how to protect your data and prevent intrusions.  By Vincent Deguzman. 0919
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Decide to do something about portable data storage now rather than later. Let your auditors and risk management staff know that 4GB dip sticks are here, and 1.6TB gel disks are around the corner.
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See how smarter documents are working for others at
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International Hologram Manufacturers Association responds to our story on the efficacy of holograms as security measures and readers respond to our little Digg social experiment. Plus: Links to our most popular blog posts.
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By The Idaho Statesman, Boise  Sep. 14--The Secure Your Future workshop, organized by the University of Idaho Cooperative Extension Service and the Canyon Owyhee Financial Literacy Coalition, has changed locations.
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I'm starting to realize that my blog is a bit of a time machine.  For example I can create a blog entry to warn myself about something that WILL happen in the future.    My current NTP  blog entry is a good example.  I wrote this for myself as much as for the people who read my blog (or find me via Google).  I know for sure that NTP on Debian is going to bite me sometime in the future and I'm going to forget WHY.  Then I'm going to (of course) go to Google or my aggregator and search for NTP and then find my blog post.    I've done this about a dozen times now and its saved me a TON of time!
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New publications, experiments and breakthroughs in information technology--and what they mean.