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posted by mrpg on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the 404 dept.

Vint Cerf, the godfather of the Internet, spoke in Sydney, Australia on Wednesday and issued a blunt call to action for a digital preservation regime for content and code to be quickly put in place to counter the existing throwaway culture that denies future generations an essential window into life in the past. He emphasized that this was especially needed for the WWW. Due to the volatile nature of electronic storage media as well as the format in which information is encoded, it is not possible to preserve digital material without prior planning and action.

[...] While the digital disappearance phenomenon is one which has so far mainly vexed official archivists and librarians for some years now, Cerf's take is that as everything goes from creation, the risk of accidental or careless memory loss increases correspondingly.

Archivists have for decades fought publicly for open document formats to hedge against proprietary and vendor risks – especially when classified material usually can only be made public after 30 to 50 years, sometimes longer.

From iTnews : Internet is losing its memory: Cerf


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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday June 30 2018, @09:04AM (3 children)

    by anubi (2828) on Saturday June 30 2018, @09:04AM (#700595) Journal

    The unfettered internet will have a tendency to retain anything worth retaining, and stuff no-one deemed significant will be consigned to oblivion.

    I am grateful I was able to recover a recording done a long time ago... Begin the Beguine ( Artie Shaw ) and Tonight We Love ( Freddy Martin ).

    I am old. And this was my Dad's music!

    I remember playing the 78's of them when I was a little kid. I heard 'em again on an show the local PBS was airing... "Things that aren't here anymore". It was so wonderful to be able to find them, and hear them again. I mean, the original ones, just as I heard them as a kid.

    I fear the next generation of kids may be denied this.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @09:28AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @09:28AM (#700596)

    The unfettered internet will have a tendency to retain anything worth retaining, and stuff no-one deemed significant will be consigned to oblivion.

    So that's why the utterly worst rips have the most seeders, while perfect quality rips are seeded by just about no one!

    • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday June 30 2018, @10:20AM

      by anubi (2828) on Saturday June 30 2018, @10:20AM (#700607) Journal

      I am quite grateful anybody took the trouble to seed it in the first place.

      Especially now that our Congress is passing so much law about people trying to share. They seem determined to make us all part of the beast, whose only function is to generate economic activity that is trackable, profitable to certain entities, and detrimental to those not empowered to craft the law.

      --
      "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:17PM (#700728)

    REM did it better