[liberationtech] economic cost of lost emails.

[J.M. Porup]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014, at 03:03, Andy Isaacson wrote:
> 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

Anyone know any dissident billionaires willing to fund such a
project? Maybe Pierre Omidyar would be interested...

Jens

--
J.M. Porup
www.JMPorup.com