[HN Gopher] Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home P...
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Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
Author : jstrieb
Score : 66 points
Date : 2021-03-02 09:49 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (neilsloane.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (neilsloane.com)
| retiredalien2 wrote:
| A counter suggestion:
|
| Proposal for the Future Service: the Eternal Infinite Day (now)
|
| A first principles approach to this would be a time machine + a
| cosmic simulation console. I'm not saying that the technology
| will be available this month but definitely sometime this year
| (or technically last year too) is probable.
|
| At least it's a non zero chance. Combine that with a long enough
| timeline, and the future might just become the past.
| nathias wrote:
| a homepage that can lie dormant for millennia in the sands of our
| ruined planet and can activate, when a strange kind of sentience
| discovers it and exposes its sensors again to the warmth of
| reddish sunlight of our dying star. Its crystal memory unit
| starts to reflow, emitting weak signals in an undecipherable
| language long forgotten ...
| imhoguy wrote:
| Make it a space probe and send it into the space!
|
| Reminds me Star Trek TNG "The Inner Light" episode:
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0708803/
| aklemm wrote:
| I've thought about this a bit myself. It could be a publicly-
| funded service or simply a non-profit trust, but simply having a
| text based namespace, and links to where all other data are
| stored would be a massive benefit.
|
| https://internetid.gov/personname
|
| id -> https://mycurrentISP.com/iddata/personname
|
| healthdata -> https://mycurrentinsurer/personname
|
| photos -> https://apple.com/icloud/photos/personname
|
| Whatever, but the idea is the Eternal Home Page can be
| mostly(only?) pointers to records and then the authentication and
| authorization can change and exist in the private market. The
| Eternal Home Page can implement some auth as well.
|
| Setup a trust, charge/tax/fee enough to always provide the
| hosting and security, that's it.
|
| For now, everyone should at least manage a personal web page of
| their own to keep the dream alive.
|
| Anyway, legal and financial aspects are what will make it
| permanent, not technology (though it can help!).
| ktpsns wrote:
| If you want to preserve digital content for long time, you also
| probably better stick to boring standards such as plain text
| files or some static HTML instead of something fancy.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Or even better, print it out in a book, wrap it in acid-free
| tissue paper, and put it on a shelf, somewhere dry.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| Relevant:
|
| http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html
|
| https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/03/printed-website.html
| birracerveza wrote:
| Good idea but impossible with a centralized service, because as
| soon as the hosting company goes down the page goes down with it.
| Only now that decentralization is starting to be a thing this
| will finally be possible.
| Grustaf wrote:
| As long as this company would be around, they could keep the
| website up and running. That's the point of the service.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| Orange's futureself project was only supposed to last 20
| years and is already gone.
|
| It was a site where you could write an email to your future
| self, that they would deliver in 20 years.
|
| https://futureself.orange.com/
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150726002333/https://futuresel.
| ..
| Grustaf wrote:
| I'm not saying they will keep the promise, but it seems to
| me that it's the entire point of the offering.
| [deleted]
| mlok wrote:
| This could be done by the Internet Archive.
| lorax wrote:
| You can already do this with the Internet Archive, just create
| a web page, submit it to the wayback machine, then publish the
| resulting archive link. Like this:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210302145655/https://news.ycom...
| noyesno wrote:
| Except if you lose the domain and someone else picks it up,
| they can setup a restrictive robots.txt and your page will no
| longer be visible in the archive.
| dsr_ wrote:
| This is actually a plausible service for them.
|
| Assuming a long-term return of 3%, in exchange for a $200 one-
| time donation, they could afford to spend $3 a year on
| maintaining a page and get another $3 a year to fund their
| operations. Right now, that's enough for 2GB of disk and more
| cpu and bandwidth than will be used long-term.
|
| The biggest costs are likely to be customer service and abuse
| prevention. That could sink this.
| retiredalien wrote:
| A counter suggestion:
|
| Proposal for the Future Service: the Eternal Infinite Day (now)
|
| A first principles approach to this would be a time machine + a
| cosmic simulation console. I'm not saying that the technology
| will be available this month but definitely sometime this year
| (or technically last year too) is probable.
|
| At least it's a non zero chance. Combine that with a long enough
| timeline, and the future might just become the past.
| hobbescotch wrote:
| There are companies out there today (like
| https://www.mykeeper.com) doing something similar in this space
| with Digital/online memorials where you can create pages for
| documenting & sharing people's lives. Would be interesting though
| to have some sort of way of guaranteeing digital perpetuity for
| these memorials so that they could exist independently of the
| specific service they were created on.
| jstrieb wrote:
| For additional context: the author of this page, Neil Sloane, is
| the creator and maintainer of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer
| Sequences (OEIS).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Sloane
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Intege...
| qubex wrote:
| Coincidentally I just watched a video featuring him on
| Numberphile ( _Amazing Graphs, Part 1_ or something like that).
| molf wrote:
| It's one thing to have the data around for centuries, it's
| another to be able to view it. Some content (Flash) is already
| very difficult to view just a few decades after it was created,
| let alone centuries.
|
| Who is going to be able to view a JPEG file 500 years from now?
| It requires not only the data, but also all the software
| infrastructure to be able to interpret this data. To me it seems
| a stretch that all software required to view it is still usable
| in a century, let alone 5 centuries.
|
| So even if you keep these home pages around "forever", it seems
| unlikely to me that anyone wants to invest time in transcoding
| everything when the world moves on to different storage formats.
| So what you end up might be little more than a bag of bytes?
| Though I guess the textual content within the HTML still has some
| chance of still being readable.
|
| It will be fun times for Internet Historians in 2496 when they
| try to compile the historical copies of gcc, cmake, nasm and
| libjpeg.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Isn't that the whole point, that the service would make sure to
| upgrade the formats as needed, so it's always viewable?
| molf wrote:
| Maybe... It could be a sort of digital restoration?
|
| It's not mentioned at all in the article though, which I
| found surprising. My first reaction was that I don't think
| storage is the only problem, maybe not even the most
| difficult problem.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Yeah I didn't read it carefully, i just presumed that was
| the idea. Anyone can put up a website or tombstone, the job
| to be done here is to make sure it stays up and stays
| readable, otherwise it's pointless... So maybe there is a
| business waiting to be launched here!
| dskloet wrote:
| Eventually this would be acquired by Google, and shut down 2
| years later.
| OJFord wrote:
| Are you joking that that's what would become of the
| hypothetical service, or saying that it did materialise but
| then Google really did buy it and shut it down?
| sneak wrote:
| Nobody knows, because the memorial page and Google Tombstone
| sunset announcement were both hosted on the service, and the
| only mirror was on Wave.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| They announced this in a Google Buzz post.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I remember being super excited when I first read about it
| in Google Reader, in my feed of Google services that were
| going to improve the lives of humanity from hereon in.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| I've been interested in doing this for some time. I haven't
| looked into _How_ to do it heavily yet; however my hunch is, it
| can be done with one or a combination of these:
|
| - IPFS
|
| - Dat (https://dat.foundation/)
|
| - Ethereum
|
| - Prepaying for Hosting and Domains + Archive.org
|
| Would be curious to hear how others have gone about this.
|
| It would be interesting if there were a service where you could
| pay in $5,000 worth of Ethereum for such and have it be
| "Unstaked" in 500 years and pay the bearers at that time, likely
| some would be our Transhuman AI overlords :)
| tito wrote:
| For the domain part you can eternally use a Tor .onion domain
| i.e. http://eternx2sade7n5nh.onion/
| drdec wrote:
| Why would this service need a significantly different business
| model from the way cemeteries currently operate?
| charles_f wrote:
| Because cemetery concessions usually last much shorter than
| 500y?
| flippyhead wrote:
| If you could somehow get the Clock of the Long Now to also be a
| web server...
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| How about Bittorrent?
| woleium wrote:
| And AI, it's gotta have some AI /s
| charles_f wrote:
| Which assumes there is some "big data" as well.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| But only with ML please!
| UShouldBWorking wrote:
| You joke but none of these are passing fads. Bitorent
| continues to host and sever terabytes of data daily, I
| just downloaded my OS over torrent the other day. Bitcoin
| has been working great (now called Bitcoin Cash) as Peer
| to Peer Digital Cash for over a decade now. And ML makes
| EVERYTHING you do online possible. Try to image a modern
| search engine without ML.
|
| There is no reason to joke about these life changing
| technologies unless you just don't understand how
| valuable they are.
| codetrotter wrote:
| But why would transhuman AI overlords care about
| cryptocurrency. Or any other form of currency or valuable
| stuff. If they are our overlords then what ever they want they
| can take, they don't need currency to pay for it.
| staplers wrote:
| AI overlords would still require physical presence via metal
| box and electricity. Two scarce resources. I'll let you
| connect the rest of the dots.
| minitoar wrote:
| Presumably if there are multiple overlords they need some
| accounting mechanism to allocate resources among themselves.
| lorax wrote:
| There are a few services like this today, some are fairly simple
| like memorial web pages or find-a-grave where you can add photos
| about the people named on the tombstones.
|
| Expanding beyond that (and I think more useful) are eternal
| digital archives such as https://www.permanent.org/ which is a
| non-profit that charges you per gigabyte for perpetual storage.
| They store copies of your data with multiple providers (AWS and
| Backblaze right now) and promise to transcode formats as
| technologies change. you can make the archives public (letting
| you have the "eternal home page") or private so only certain
| people can view or update it. The money you pay goes into an
| endowment and the earnings from the endowment pay the storage
| costs.
| hanselot wrote:
| New Service Available: Perpetual Fake News...
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(page generated 2021-03-02 23:03 UTC)