Diehard Coders Just Rescued NASA’s Earth Science Data | Hacker News Reader

Diehard Coders Just Rescued NASA’s Earth Science Data

wired.com

10 pointssprucely7 comments

Which data was rescued? Was it the original raw data, or the "corrected" data?

I hope they saved both.

It's very important to make a copy the original raw data and all the metadata to know how/when/where/under what condition/by whom/ ... take the raw data. Just in case it's necessary to analyze it again, verify the correction code, use better interpolation techniques, or whatever new analysis is deem necessary in the future.

And also it important to make a copy the processed data because it's necessary a lot of time and knowledge to process them correctly and sometimes it's enough to get the processed data make further analysis.

[For a totally no controversial topic, if someone decides to make a backup of the LHC data used to discover the Higgs boson, I hope that they also save both version of the data.]

Anyway, the title is misleading. They didn't rescue anything. The data were never lost or at an imminent risk. They are still in the original source. They only made a backup in case someone decides to erase them. (Can we classify this as a fake new?)

Yes, this is fake news. Wired is no stranger to low quality click bait.

They mention that they already have come across sources that had been emptied of all the data... So No... This is not a just in case; there seems to be a concerted effort to destroy data that proves inconvenient things...

From the article:

> They can’t be sure when this data disappeared (or if anyone backed it up first).

It probably means that is was deleted a few years ago, not during the last 25 days. Perhaps it was some internal reorganization and the data is hopefully available in other URL. Perhaps it was a disk failure and a bad backup. Perhaps the main researcher got a better job at an university and moved the whole group and the links/server just rotted. Perhaps some moron sysadmin decided to save a little of disk space. It looks ridiculous, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes

There is no evidence of a concerted effort.

To get an idea of the problem, imagine that in 10 years someone decides to make a backup of all the ancient open source projects. And they are horrified to discover that 20% of the links go to SourceForge and there is a 5% of links with apparent relevant information to ExpertsExchange! After some time you get link rote, without an evil external force.

That's why I think it's important to make an organized effort to keep information alive, like the work of https://archive.org/ . I just don't agree to use a normal sloppy human behavior to support political activism.

Any person that willingly connects to a federal system without authorization in an attempt to either move data off of that site or to modify that system for monitoring without first obtaining explicit authorization to do so, is in fact committing a computer crime. Which is punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

What a load, if you access a system without authorization it is still considered a hack, especially when you move data off that site. Punishable under federal law.

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