[HN Gopher] Internet Archive opens Vancouver headquarters, meeti...
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Internet Archive opens Vancouver headquarters, meeting space for
the tech world
Author : danbolt
Score : 197 points
Date : 2022-06-17 06:07 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vancouversun.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vancouversun.com)
| fmajid wrote:
| That building is somewhat reminiscent of their SF headquarters:
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/internet-archive-headqua...
|
| That said, the biggest threat to the Internet Archive is from
| overreaching copyright legislation, and Canada is not that much
| better than the US. Iceland or some other such locale might be
| better indicated, and Iceland has natural advantages in cooling
| and cheap hydropower, a big part of a datacenter's operational
| costs.
| Thorentis wrote:
| A deep archive in Iceland would be really awesome, I hope this
| happens.
| fmajid wrote:
| Something like the Doomsday Vault in Svalbard:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Funny you mention it, because Github put a code archive in
| Svalbard as well: https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-
| vault/
| [deleted]
| ttul wrote:
| More than 25% of British Columbian workers work in the technology
| sector [1]. While the sector has been growing for 30 years,
| things really picked up in the last few years as Silicon Valley
| firms branched out in search of employees, often as a way of
| getting around the problematic processing of work visas in the
| US.
|
| BC has several great engineering and computer science
| universities and a long history of public support for the
| development of the tech sector. It's nice to see the Archive
| choosing to locate here, since it sort of validates that BC is
| perhaps no longer a third rate tech backwater.
|
| 1. https://biv.com/article/2022/05/bcs-biggest-technology-
| compa...
| ripley12 wrote:
| Your link does not seem to support that assertion. I am very
| doubtful that a quarter of BC's workers are in the technology
| sector, however you define it.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| BC also has rules that exempt tech employees from overtime
| protection.
|
| Hence why the games industry tends to do a lot of work here.
| deanCommie wrote:
| What a weird comment on this site especially.
|
| 99% of tech work is salary and now also stock-based.
|
| Overtime protection is simply not relevant, because our work
| is not hourly.
|
| We can talk about whether this is a good or bad thing and the
| general culture of crunch in the tech industry, but it's not
| BC-specific, and also arguably got WAY better since the
| pandemic
| upupandup wrote:
| even that is gone. when montreal and ontario offers
| significant tax rebates, it just doesn't make sense to do it
| in vancouver
| upupandup wrote:
| Personally I find the talent in Vancouver in general to be
| subpar, I think its one of those things in life that you get
| what you pay for. Immediately for the same role in the US, the
| Vancouver engineer takes a 30% pay cut, not including the
| exchange rate.
|
| Staff in Vancouver are constantly burnt out and its not hard to
| see why: restricted supply of housing makes rents very
| expensive, city centres are hollowed out as ppl have less
| disposable income, very low social trust and dynamics just
| offer work as a form of escapism.
|
| Vancouver just isn't fostering environment, it's ripe for
| exploitation and the top talents do not work for local
| employers. The ones that know their worth know Vancouver, out
| of all places in Canada, is the last place that pays people
| what they are worth.
|
| It's not even the fault of ppl living and working in vancouver
| but just the culture here that deprives and oppresses
| flourishing growth.
|
| It's like everything here seems borrowed from other regions and
| a subpar imitation of them all.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Your pill is a bitter one to swallow, but it is mostly true
| in my experience.
|
| I'm currently in the late stages of interviewing for remote
| positions of bay area companies. Even though I would be
| making ~30% less than my US counterparts (as a Canadian), a
| remote position for a bay area company still pays nearly
| triple what local companies pay.
|
| I'm also looking at moving out of Vancouver and to a more
| family friendly locale. It makes almost no sense to raise
| kids in Vancouver given the cost of living.
| xvilka wrote:
| Another good location would be in India. I hope, Internet Archive
| considers this option to geographically hedge potential risks of
| destruction.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| They do battle with Australia to see who can censor worse...
| tkgally wrote:
| The linked article mentions "There will also be servers in the
| building." Here's a bit more information from the invitation I
| received last week to the Internet Archive's event marking the
| launch of their new Canadian headquarters:
|
| "The Canadian Data Center is a secure and sustainable back-up for
| the entire Archive. Our goal is to continue providing access to
| knowledge for decades to come, and this ensures we can and will.
| This Data Center stores everything in our Archive - as a back-up.
| It's a full, second live copy preserved outside the US -- which
| ensures our data cannot be compromised by threats to a single
| system or location."
|
| The Internet Archive is a nonprofit charity and welcomes
| donations:
|
| https://archive.org/donate/
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I think they are preparing for the wave of christofacism being
| lead by the current GOP leadership that seems to be growing
| inside of the USA.
| [deleted]
| thinkingkong wrote:
| I was at the building recently for an event, and I peeked into
| the 'office' and there were servers. Like 8 of them. There's
| absolutely no way they're going to be mirroring data in this
| location. They might establish another location within Canada
| for doing backup but if you're serious about DR having
| something in Vancouver isn't exactly the best idea. Most
| companies would choose to locate in the interior of BC around
| Kelowna / Kamloops region.
| Aachen wrote:
| Canada is an interesting choice as a backup location for when
| the USA becomes unsuitable. Most people will use USA infra to
| access it, and any sort of war scenario that threatens mainland
| USA... I don't see Canada being not at risk. Heck, South
| America would have been a better choice for spreading out this
| huge and imo important archive (it's only a disaster copy after
| all, I'm assuming there are the normal backups/redundancies
| against disk failure and fire).
|
| This sort of thing, "hey we're opening a tech hub" and "hey
| we're storing our disaster copy in a _very_ closely related
| economy a few km away from the current country ", make me
| wonder if I should instead start my own copy and try to get
| funding to secure e.g. one recent snapshot of every website as
| a first goal, rather than donate money to the IA directly (as I
| have multiple times in the past).
| generationP wrote:
| > Canada is an interesting choice as a backup location for
| when the USA becomes unsuitable.
|
| Good for a World War III scenario. Less good for a "delete
| this [wide class of information] or else" scenario, as there
| are now two governments to appease and the Canadian one is
| far less free-speech-friendly than the US one.
| welterde wrote:
| Not sure free-speech-friendliness is really relevant here,
| since the most likely avenues of attack would be copyright
| or it being classified information. For both those things
| the US isn't exactly the best candidate either.
| generationP wrote:
| I consider at least the latter to be part of free speech
| as well. Then there is privacy (the Wayback Machine is
| likely a C&D magnet here), pornography/obscenity (many
| places are stricter than the US) and "hate speech" (here
| the US is unbeaten). Besides that, having the data spread
| over two countries means being susceptible to _both_
| governments.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is probably to protect the archive _from_ the US.
| murderfs wrote:
| Any war scenario that threatens the mainland United States
| would probably involve nukes starting flying, and you'd
| probably be screwed regardless of where you put it. I'd be
| more concerned with an asteroid that hits just right.
| bbarnett wrote:
| "a few km" seems like a weird way to put it, as a "few" is
| typically 2 or 3. And just specifying "US" and "Canada" is
| weird, as an archive in the US and Canada, could be separated
| by 10000km without any effort.
|
| That said, these archives are close, but I beleive the real
| reason for this, are things such as take down, erasure, and
| other court requests in the US, would not apply in Canada.
|
| This is doubly true, if you don't serve data to US citizens
| from Canada.
|
| So it allows for easy physical maintenance trips, a second
| off-site backup (weather, rioting, looting, earthquake, etc)
| unlikely to take-out both.
|
| I also think South American countries are far more likely to
| descend into rioting, violent takovers, coups by armies/etc,
| than any place in North America.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > So it allows for easy physical maintenance trips, a
| second off-site backup (weather, rioting, looting,
| earthquake, etc) unlikely to take-out both.
|
| > I also think South American countries are far more likely
| to descend into rioting, violent takovers, coups by
| armies/etc, than any place in North America.
|
| North America is constantly hit by various disasters, from
| earthquakes along the ring of fire to hurricans on the
| south and east coasts, to ridiculous cold weather in the
| continents. For more manmade disasters, George Floyd
| aftermath and Jan 6th 2021 would tend to disagree.
|
| Switzerland would be a good place for an archive.
| Connected, stable, neutral
| robonerd wrote:
| > _For more manmade disasters, George Floyd aftermath and
| Jan 6th 2021 would tend to disagree. Switzerland would be
| a good place for an archive. Connected, stable, neutral_
|
| The threat of a Nazi invasion of Switzerland was a more
| severe threat to civil order in Switzerland than _any_
| protest or riot in America or Canada in the past century.
|
| > _Nazi Germany repeatedly violated Swiss airspace.
| During the Battle of France in 1940, German aircraft
| violated Swiss airspace at least 197 times.[17] In
| several air incidents, the Swiss shot down 11 Luftwaffe
| aircraft between 10 May and 17 June 1940, while suffering
| the loss of three of their own aircraft.[17] Germany
| protested diplomatically on 5 June and with a second note
| on 19 June which contained explicit threats. Hitler was
| especially furious when he saw that German equipment was
| used to shoot down German pilots. He said they would
| respond "in another manner".[17] On 20 June, the Swiss
| air force was ordered to stop intercepting planes
| violating Swiss airspace. Swiss fighters began instead to
| force intruding aircraft to land at Swiss airfields.
| Anti-aircraft units still operated. Later, Hitler and
| Hermann Goring sent saboteurs to destroy Swiss airfields
| but they were captured by Swiss troops before they could
| cause any damage.[18] Skirmishes between German and Swiss
| troops took place on the northern border of Switzerland
| throughout the war.[citation needed]_
| switchbak wrote:
| I wouldn't assume anything with our current (Canadian)
| government, especially if the US government applied strong
| leverage to try to get material removed. Even looking at
| recent history with (purported) terrorists, our record at
| resisting US pressure is not good.
|
| Putting it in Vancouver is also not the greatest idea when
| you factor in earthquake risk, although it's far enough
| away from San Francisco as to provide a reasonable backup.
| I'm sure there are other factors that come into it though,
| and I'm sure it makes sense on the whole.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| oddly though - in some science and software themes,
| Canada is more closely aligned to the EU and Commonwealth
| than the USA. (American here..)
| wk_end wrote:
| I wouldn't just say "current" - Canadian governments have
| been pretty subservient (for obvious reasons) to the US
| since WWII, at least.
| nix23 wrote:
| There is also one in Alexandria (Egypt).
|
| But yes i think there should be something like this:
|
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
| myself248 wrote:
| I can't understand why there isn't inertia behind
| restarting ia.bak or similar efforts. That seems critical
| to me, way more so than an official mirror which would be
| vulnerable to the same takedown and other pressure.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Around 1 PB of the Archive is available via torrent for
| backup. The full Archive was around 10 PB back in 2012 so
| I imagine it's quite a bit bigger, now.
|
| https://help.archive.org/help/archive-bittorrents/
| jetbalsa wrote:
| North of 40PB nowadays. You can find these stats buried
| in their public links. They do not hold up well to
| traffic so I will not link them.
| jonah-archive wrote:
| Our numbers as of the end of 2021:
| https://archive.org/web/petabox.php 4
| data centers, 745 nodes, 28,000 spinning disks
| Wayback Machine: 57 PetaBytes Books/Music/Video
| Collections: 42 PetaBytes Unique data: 99
| PetaBytes Total used storage: 212 PetaBytes
| db48x wrote:
| Because it's a lot of work.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| I'd also guess because (potential) mechanisms to do so
| would be attacked on forums like HN because they sound
| too close to crypto/web3 and most people wouldn't bother
| to separate ideology from technology and create a PR
| nightmare for internet archive. So it's probably harder
| to recruit people to work on it.
|
| See Filecoin Foundation and their work with IA.
| ajdude wrote:
| Just do something similar to folding coin, which is used
| for things like protein folding. Perhaps an Internet
| archive coin that can be earned by hoarding backups of
| the archive on hard drives.
| jetbalsa wrote:
| Its also a really hard issue. My fav is IPFS, Its the
| most common suggestion but it only works on paper. IPFS
| Allows people to pin things, but it still has to be
| stored /somewhere/ and, it gets really damn slow once you
| throw more then a million files at it (I know... we
| tried)
|
| Overall, Its just a giant archive, its hard to store that
| much data in a cheap manner that will last 20 years.
| textfiles wrote:
| I can understand why.
| _jal wrote:
| I think the risk scenarios in question are more
| legal/political than war-related.
|
| As others have noted, the set of safe locations to store an
| enormous, expensive, extremely fragile collection of
| uncensored material during a world war is approximately the
| null set.
| FredPret wrote:
| In a war that threatens mainland USA, nowhere on Earth would
| be safe. Perhaps in a nuclear bunker in New Zealand, or on
| board the ISS.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Canada is an interesting choice as a backup location for
| when the USA becomes unsuitable. Most people will use USA
| infra to access it, and any sort of war scenario that
| threatens mainland USA...
|
| Honestly, the Internet Archive is probably toast _wherever it
| is_ if there 's "any sort of war scenario that threatens
| mainland USA."
|
| I don't think we should kid ourselves that something like the
| Internet Archive will be able to be preserved over the long
| term. It's a kind of thing that's bug, fragile, and expensive
| to maintain. Most of that stuff is destined to be lost
| eventually, probably sooner than we'd expect.
| rowanajmarshall wrote:
| I think any war scenario that threatens the mainland US
| probably threatens the rest of the Western World, and
| probably the entire developed world too.
|
| And in any case, there are plenty of scenarios where Japan,
| or Germany, or India are threatened, but vanishingly few
| where North America is.
| fmajid wrote:
| I'm pretty sure if the US mainland is threatened by any
| foreign actor, the entire planet is toast. They could maybe
| have a cold archive in Svalbard for future alien
| xenoarcheologists trying to figure out why human
| civilization self-destructed.
|
| Now, a civil war, that's a different story.
| Fargoan wrote:
| Not only is it close, but it's in an area that could have
| earthquake. I think we need to bury the servers in Manitoba
| for extra security.
| Thorentis wrote:
| Seems odd to go to all this effort of making an entire second
| copy, only to put it just over the border into a country with
| not too dissimilar laws. As another commenter said, would've
| been better to go with Iceland or something.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| A backup of the archive has been hosted at Bibliotheca
| Alexandria in Egypt since 2002 [0] and is accessible at [1].
| I'm not sure what the state of that project is but I guess
| it's not a "live" copy, the first link here describes an
| incremental upgrade over the years.
|
| Agreed that Iceland would be a nice international
| headquarters.
|
| [0] http://www.bibalex.org/en/project/details?documentid=283
|
| [1] http://web.archive.bibalex.org/web/
| jetbalsa wrote:
| I will note that Alexandria backup has gotten a tad out of
| sync. No fault of theirs, the data set just got too large
| to manage.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| For the purpose of avoiding court orders, it would be better to
| have two or three complementary organizations that are nominally
| unrelated:
|
| Archive 1: Located in the US, hosts most of the content
|
| Archive 2: Located in Russia, hosts content that the US has
| problems with, such as copyrighted material or government
| secrets.
|
| Backups: Located in some relatively neutral countries, probably
| somewhere in the Middle East, like UAE.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Switzerland is the natural location for a backup country. Maybe
| hosting just costs too much there?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| None of the countries you mention are countries I'd consider
| safe or neutral though; I'd instead consider a Scandinavian
| country, Iceland, Switzerland, or Australia / New Zealand.
| Germany, France, Spain and other western-European countries
| seem pretty solid as well, but only as secondary/tertiary
| locations within existing hosting parties.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| None of those would be great choices if your aim is to host
| copies of classified US government documents, every one would
| comply with US requests to shut it down (and possibly
| extradite the folks who own those servers). You're kinda
| stuck having to chose a country that is comfortable opposing
| the US. Of course, that comes with its own many downsides.
| acoard wrote:
| > if your aim is to host copies of classified US government
| documents
|
| I do not believe that is the aim of Archive.org. That
| sounds more like Wikileaks territory.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| The GP post specifically suggested that. I agree that
| nobody at archive.org seems to have such a strategy in
| mind.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| EU nations have strong libel and "Right to be forgotten"
| laws. Makes them unsuitable as archives of record.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| I feel like places like Russia would be too risky. Russia is
| just as interested in hosting "truthy" information that the US
| has problems with as anything else.
|
| So you're hosting some leaks the US doesn't like, Russia
| decides there's a narrative around that ... but not all the
| leaks match that narrative and now you're in just as bad a
| place as any other.
|
| Less free countries are just worse options all around ... and
| moving data isn't going to impress some of those countries /
| your locals will get harassed or worse if the same organization
| is hosting content they don't like elsewhere ...
| elevaet wrote:
| Located in the "The Permanent Building", it couldn't be more
| appropriately situated. Steps away from the library too.
|
| A great presence in the city!
| Fargoan wrote:
| I give them $5/month. You're welcome
| StayTrue wrote:
| Putting servers in Canada is a good idea but Vancouver is in the
| same seismic zone as San Francisco.
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