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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: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:32PM

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:32PM (#700749) Journal

    I think its a good thing to know how to code. That way, you know good and well what your code does. Kinda like that feeling I got when I coded my own CRC and MD5 digester from odds and ends I found... when I had finally written my own C++ library under Borland Turbo C++ 3.1 for DOS, I could use it knowing good and well how to use it and what it did. I ended up using that program for years...

    Then you quit using it, and it was never documented, and it dies with You or your hard drive, whichever comes first.

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