thejml

They take your data down pretty quick when you die and stop paying for it. And as much as we all want to think AWS and GCP and Azure are sticking around forever there’s no reason at this time to believe they will be around in 100+ years.

There have been plenty of cloud services that have shut down and taken their data offline. And plenty of current ones deleted data after users have gone inactive. Or require constant payments to keep accounts active. Cloud, as it exits now, is not the answer to the archival question.

But it can be rusted.

Don’t forget, you also need drives that work that long and connect to computers or some other device to utilize the bits, and the bus they use must be available and working, and the disk format they’re written in must be readable, and the images themselves encoded with an algorithm that we still have access to, etc. it’s not just the media.

I think it’s possible, thanks to the retro enthusiasts, we still have access to some things from the 70s and 80s, but they’re getting fewer and fewer, especially in a working state. That’s only 50yrs ago. What happens when you want to go 100? Or 500? A few thousand? We are familiar with journals from the Civil War, and have found items and notes from Egypt, Roman, and Ancient Greek civilizations, how can we preserve what happened in the currently information rich time we live in, for future generations? Especially as much of it migrates online to blog posts and social networks and news sites that eventually shut down due to corporate issues or shifting internet traffic?

This makes perfect sense. The only way around it would be to randomize the location of the digits/letters, and I’m sure people would throw a fit if that was the case. Still it should be an option.

Going to 4 is just playing it safe, you gotta go to 5!

https://theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036/

Hopefully this is true because I’ve heard from people trying to do just that with other “Smart TVs” that won’t work at all without an internet connection and account at least for initial setup.

July 2024, just barely outside of 10yrs ago.

The kind of issues you run into “running the Internet” are not the same as the average desktop user. Most of those systems don’t even have a monitor attached, let alone a whole desktop environment or GUI.

And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we’ve created over the years remains accessible and citable.

This is such a big thing. Losing access to content is something we’re seeing en masse and future historians and hobbyists greatly appreciate having historical articles accessible and not lost to the sands of time. I think it would be even better if we could all torrent and archive as well, but accessibility and continued access is appreciated.

I was thinking RollerCoaster Tycoon 3.