[liberationtech] economic cost of lost emails.

[Andy Isaacson]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 04:40:26PM -0300, J.M. Porup wrote:
> 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.

A diversity of tactics is best.  Given a useful archive of knowledge
(the complete wikipedia edit history in all languages, including deleted
and censored data, would be a good start), we need to store it in
hundreds of places --

 - on microsd cards in waterproof cases buried underground
 - on archival DVD-R
 - microprinted on metal foil or volume-optimized "paper" substrates,
   buried in obscure locations
 - on cubesats (but LEO is not a friendly place for multidecade
   storage, you need MEO at least to avoid deorbiting)
 - on long-term electronic storage media including naked-eye readable
   instructions on how to access it ("what do you MEAN you can't read a
   Acorn LaserDisc!?")

Folks doing this should be cautious of being completely visible, since
in the hypothesized interregnum the lists of "where the knowledge from
the past is" will be target lists, both for the opressors to destroy and
for desperate exploiters to plunder.  A mix of projects --

 - some with explicit locations like "these coordinates"
 - some with vague lists like "200-300 locations in the continental US"
 - some with no presence at all

is best.

Other information to consider including --

 - software implementations (the Debian archive and source code)
 - human language references
 - scientific datasets and paper archives
 - scientific source code and reproducibility instructions
 - farming data and scientific methods
 - practical how-to information such as Farmer's Almanac

-andy