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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
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:48PM
This !!
The fact that the internet gives EVERYONE a voice, leaving us all with a warm feeling of egalitarianism, does nothing for civilization, science, or betterment of mankind or life on earth.
Not only must we discard the bulk of human blathering due to insufficient storage, but we must do so for self preservation reasons, and simple sanity.
Human civilization was never advanced by documenting the coffee table mutterings that should have disappeared when the cup was empty.
(And yes, that includes stories and comments we post on SN, none of it original. Its merely a pass-time for those of us here and now.)
Editors and peer reviews and the cost of printing presses use to filter wheat from chaff. Wrong and useless stuff still got printed. But far less than today.
We've found peer reviews to restrictive, Editors easily corruptible, and cheap internet provides virtually no filter at all.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.