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492 points vladyslavfox | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.612s | source
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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.
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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.

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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.
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dawnerd ◴[] No.41898049[source]
You already can, they have torrents for everything.
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tourmalinetaco ◴[] No.41898902[source]
Their torrents suck and IME don’t update to changes in the archive.
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1. rbanffy ◴[] No.41901865[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.
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2. zelphirkalt ◴[] No.41902160[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?
3. diggan ◴[] No.41902743[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

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4. account42 ◴[] No.41904861[source]
Specs are nice but does any client actually implement this?