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    492 points vladyslavfox | 17 comments | | HN request time: 1.227s | source | bottom
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    trompetenaccoun ◴[] No.41895988[source]
    We need archives built on decentralized storage. Don't get me wrong, I really like and support the work Internet Archive is doing, but preserving history is too important to entrust it solely to singular entities, which means singular points of failure.
    replies(19): >>41896170 #>>41896389 #>>41896411 #>>41896420 #>>41897459 #>>41897680 #>>41897913 #>>41898320 #>>41898841 #>>41899160 #>>41899729 #>>41899779 #>>41899999 #>>41900368 #>>41901199 #>>41902340 #>>41904676 #>>41905019 #>>41907926 #
    jdiff ◴[] No.41896411[source]
    This seems to get brought at least once in the comments for every one of these articles that pops up.

    The IA has tried distributing their stores, but nowhere near enough people actually put their storage where their mouths are.

    replies(6): >>41896653 #>>41897206 #>>41897450 #>>41897685 #>>41900958 #>>41905113 #
    1. zelphirkalt ◴[] No.41897685[source]
    Perhaps one idea is to let people choose what they want to protect. This way people wanting to support it can have their mission.
    replies(2): >>41897959 #>>41898049 #
    2. card_zero ◴[] No.41897959[source]
    I want it to protect all sorts of random obscure documents, mostly kind of crappy, that I can't predict in advance, so I can pursue my hobby of answering random obscure questions. For instance:

    * What is a "bird famine", and did one happen in 1880?

    * Did any astrologer ever claim that the constellations "remember" the areas of the sky, and hence zodiac signs, that they belonged to in ancient times before precession shifted them around?

    * Who first said "psychology is pulling habits out of rats", and in what context? (That one's on Wikiquote now, but only because I put it there after research on IA.)

    Or consider the recently rediscovered Bram Stoker short story. That was found in an actual library, but only because the library kept copies of old Irish newspapers instead of lining cupboards with them.

    The necessary documents to answer highly specific questions are very boring, and nobody has any reason to like them.

    replies(2): >>41899422 #>>41900601 #
    3. dawnerd ◴[] No.41898049[source]
    You already can, they have torrents for everything.
    replies(2): >>41898563 #>>41898902 #
    4. diggan ◴[] No.41898563[source]
    > they have torrents for everything

    Including the index itself? That would be awesome.

    5. tourmalinetaco ◴[] No.41898902[source]
    Their torrents suck and IME don’t update to changes in the archive.
    replies(3): >>41899505 #>>41899843 #>>41901865 #
    6. oxygen_crisis ◴[] No.41899422[source]
    You could let users choose what to mirror, and one of those choices could be a big bucket of all the least available stuff, for pure preservationists who don't want to focus on particular segments of the data.

    Sort of like the bittorrent algorithm that favors retrieving and sharing the least-available chunks if you haven't assigned any priority to certain parts.

    7. vundercind ◴[] No.41899505{3}[source]
    This is accurate, their torrent-generating system is basically broken to the point of being useless.
    8. addandsubtract ◴[] No.41899843{3}[source]
    Aren't torrents terrible at handling updates in general? If you want to make a change to the data, or even just add our remove data, you have to create a new torrent and somehow get people to update their torrent and data as well.
    replies(1): >>41899975 #
    9. macawfish ◴[] No.41899975{4}[source]
    There's a mutable torrent extension (BEP-46) but unfortunately I don't think it's widely supported. I think IPFS/IPNS is the more likely direction.
    replies(1): >>41900988 #
    10. deafpolygon ◴[] No.41900601[source]
    My favorite question is: whether or not Bowser took the princess to another castle.
    replies(1): >>41900695 #
    11. card_zero ◴[] No.41900695{3}[source]
    Since the IA had a collection of emulators (some of them running online*), and old ROMs and floppies and such, it could probably help with that one too.

    * Strictly speaking, running in-browser, but that sounded like "Bowser" so I wrote online instead.

    12. tourmalinetaco ◴[] No.41900988{5}[source]
    Which IA has moved into and hasn’t found much luck in, unfortunately.
    replies(1): >>41901320 #
    13. jpk ◴[] No.41901320{6}[source]
    How come?
    14. rbanffy ◴[] No.41901865{3}[source]
    Torrents are immutable in principle, which is good for preserving things. A new version of a set of files should be a new torrent.
    replies(2): >>41902160 #>>41902743 #
    15. zelphirkalt ◴[] No.41902160{4}[source]
    How would preservationists go about automatically updating the torrent and data they seed? Or would they need to manually regularly check, if they are still seeding the up-to-date content?
    16. diggan ◴[] No.41902743{4}[source]
    > Torrents are immutable in principle

    In practice, that's mostly how they're being used.

    But the protocol does support mutation. The BEP describing the behavior even has archive.org as an example...

    > The intention is to allow publishers to serve content that might change over time in a more decentralized fashion. Consumers interested in the publisher's content only need to know their public key + optional salt. For instance, entities like Archive.org could publish their database dumps, and benefit from not having to maintain a central HTTP feed server to notify consumers about updates.

    http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

    replies(1): >>41904861 #
    17. account42 ◴[] No.41904861{5}[source]
    Specs are nice but does any client actually implement this?