[liberationtech] economic cost of lost emails.

[Natanael]

A blockchain of torrent magnet links, of archives of all kinds of data like
everything public that Archive.org holds?
Then you both have it all accessible and you can that verify everybody sees
the same version.

I've been thinking of a sci-fi story concept of "archivers" collecting and
indexing absolutely everything that matters in a structured append-only
database of sorts (side story, but necessary in my sci-fi world).
Everything would be tagged and sorted and categorized and annotated. It
would be like a P2P Git with more metadata and the ability to search with
all sorts of filters, essentially an open Google/Wolfram Alpha given a
smart enough endpoint, with a bit of IBM Watson. There would be plenty of
separate projects all maintaining their own archives, of which some would
be thoroughly vetted for authencity, and all updates ever would be signed
by the contributors/archivers.

Kind of Wikipedia actually, but with all sorts of filetypes and a full
semantic web, with the hash chain structure of which Git and Bitcoin share
to prove the history of the data, and digital signatures.

It would already be possible to build today (it doesn't need any new exotic
algorithms or other inventions), but designing it can be incredibly hard
considering you'd have to figure out a standard way to handle
cross-referencing and annotation across all kinds of filetypes, and that
you need to define a data structure that won't need to be replaced every
few months because of frequently discovered limitations.

- Sent from my phone
Den 24 aug 2014 21:40 skrev "J.M. Porup" <jm at porup.com>:

> On Sun, Aug 24, 2014, at 15:19, taltman wrote:
> > I don't know exactly what is meant by "eventuality of digital book
> > burning", but here's my opinion on the nuts and bolts of protecting your
> > data:
>
> I believe we are approaching a Library of Alexandria moment. We have
> created an Information Age in which nothing is secure, and deleting
> unwanted information ("thought crime") is trivial. Furthermore, infotech
> has redistributed power from the people to the government. It would be
> naive to expect this power to go unabused. Totalitarianism is in
> the wind.
>
> If we really want a permanent archive of humanity's work, we
> need to build some kind of distributed Noah's Ark. Archive.org is
> no good (book depositories are the first to go when the book-burning
> starts), and asking the book-burners at the NSA and GCHQ to guard
> our civilization's store of knowledge is laughable on its face.
>
> Something P2P, maybe blockchain-based, might work. Convincing people
> of the reality and urgency of the threat is another matter.
>
> Jens
>
> --
> J.M. Porup
> www.JMPorup.com
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