Disc rot is a challenge for both archivists and collectors (2017)

Other older platforms like Napster or DC++ (which actually still exists) let people share their own collection at the click of a button. This gave access to a really really long tail of rarities that perhaps only a handful of people were interested in, while torrent sites are mostly mainstream content.

Now that there are crowdfunding campaigns and tons of tools for microtransaction, that is even less excusable than when you had the effort to imagine the apparition of these obvious solutions.

The only thing that gives me pause is that we transitioned to a system where individual music tracks are nearly free-on-demand* a decade ago and the sky never fell.

There were transition costs, and artists get way more from live performances now, but there's still an industry.

More than anything I'd just like to experiment with shorter copyright terms. I don't think the founders were crazy when they set them at around a generation. I agree that it might be risky to blow everything up, but I think there's a lot of bargaining we could do over term lengths that would be pretty harmless.

* To a first order approximation. Sure, many artists technically can get something when I pull up a track on YouTube. But if I'm not playing a whole playlist, I might not even see any ads.

What should we value more: hacker principles or phony outdated business models that aren't compatible with the realities of the digital age?

Copyright was created back when industrial capacity was required in order to make copies at scale. People had to own stuff like printing presses in order to infringe copyright at a scale that caused any damage. This is no longer the case. Copyright infringement is trivial now. It's as easy as copy paste. To solve this, the copyright industry intends to lock us out of computing. They think unlimited computers are too powerful for mere citizens like us and we should have access to nothing but limited versions that can execute nothing but predefined functions approved by them.

The mere existence of copyright is an existential threat to hackers and their values. If the preservation of free computing and internet requires sacrificing the entertainment industry, then so be it. The alternative is to sacrifice free computing.

Due to the existence of subversive technologies such as encryption, governments have been increasingly adopting the same perspective as the copyright industry.

I can only estimate because exact numbers are hard to find, but I'd say peak what era music tracker community total users was in the 350k region and we're probably somewhere around 100k now.

It does because private trackers use buffer as currency. The music trackers have had to adapt to use points systems now to encourage downloading activity. But even still, activity is way down from the what.cd days. It's just easier to stream the easily accessible stuff.

People didn't go to what.cd and jump through all those hoops to find rare music, they went to find good music, and now Spotify and YouTube do a good enough job of that with a lot less effort.

As a funny example of that I discovered Billie Eilish when Ocean Eyes first came out from a private tracker and now she's about as big as anyone. So it isn't just about discovering rare czech folk singers, but any music that you might like.

I think the hardcore demographic you mentioned is spot on and does exist, but they were always a minority and the evaporation of the less hardcore users explains why the scene is so much smaller now.

Azure apparently has an "archive" tier for 0.1c, which you can lower even further with long-term high-volume reservation: if you reserve 1PB for 3 years it's 0.081c/GB/mo (using only local redundancy) in the cheapest DCs where it's available (some DCs either don't have that feature at all, or it's way more expensive e.g. 0.1636 in asian DCs where it's available).

[0] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#storage-pricing

It apparently uses a similar basic process as those mall kiosks that take a volumetric picture of your face and then etch it into a cube of glass?

But in this case, they just write the data to the side of a small piece of glass over the course of days and it's basically permanent for all eternity unless something breaks it.

Your situation is likely happened because of bad RAM.

I've been wanting to try to understand them to see if I could implement something myself for a while now

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitro...

(edited to make more readable)

Also ZFS. Part of its purpose and design goals was countering bit rot (as well as device hostility to keeping data safe), as Sun had customers affected (even with ECC). Hence the end-to-end checksumming amongst other features.

scrub exists pretty much just for bit rot: you run scrub regularly, it goes over the disk, checks that every block checksums properly, and if they don't[0] it repairs the data using the non-corrupted copy (assuming you have one).

[0] and your dataset is replicated, note that even if you don't use a raid configuration you can mark important dataset as to-duplicate for this purpose (this is not equivalent to device redundancy, it's a feature which exists solely for bitrot / corruption protection)

Tidal goes higher, to 96khz on master quality where available (the vast number of tracks are not master quality, sadly).