Ask HN: How to Deal with the Volatility of the Internet? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to Deal with the Volatility of the Internet?

13 pointswhatever15 comments

Context: I was born in the 90's and as a result I consumed mostly e-content both for personal development and recreation. Not many physical books, CD's etc.

I was searching the other day some playlists in my youtube account for old songs, interesting videos etc that I loved, only to find out that almost half of these were gone (without even leaving the title as evidence of what it could be there). Then I suddenly realized in shock that in 10 years from now, nothing that I use today to learn, to laugh at, to question myself, to have fun with etc, are guaranteed to be there for me or for my kids.

All of my books are e-books, my pc games are digital, I rely on a music subscription, netflix & youtube for video, google for accessing interesting websites, my photos in a cloud service and the list goes on.

A book will be there for me regardless of what happens to the publisher. But there is no guarantee about my favorite website/streaming/cloud service.

How do we modify the internet and DRM to deal with the future volatility of the businesses behind the content we consume today? What can we do as individuals?

I'm designing a set of information / knowledge tools for myself that attempt to cache, in an Archive.org-centric approach, any data that i link to. If i form an opinion on something based on remote knowledge, i want a hardcopy of it locally.

The whole thing will be backed by an immutable content addressed database. With support for structured (SQL) and unstructured (Binary/etc) content. All very much WIP, and going on several full iterations over the years due to experiments in immutable architectures.

Focused on Git user facing patterns. Which is to say, it should (at a minimum) be syncable over SSH, local FS, etc. No required servers to run, query, sync and etc.

This whole idea was heavily inspired by Camlistore / Perkeep. I'm not concerned about my "data life" (tweets/etc), but rather being able to keep references to what i put into my head. To refer back later, etc.

I'm not saying this as a precursor to sharing my projects, but rather to distribute the ideas i work towards in hope that more people do.

I admire sites like http://www.homeoftheunderdogs.net/ and GOG for keeping some of these things alive, despite the hosting costs and conflicts with copyrights. Unfortunately analog things are going to be a lot harder to archive.

Bit and link rot is real, and with modern services any content can disappear from one day to the next.

I do the following:

1. Download any video content I want to keep with YouTube-dl

2. Download any code repo that is important to me

3. Submit every article I find interesting on the web to archive.org

4. Keep many papers and ebooks as PDF (pdfgrep ftw)

5. Keep copious notes on anything that affects my work routines and methodologies

It might not be sufficient, but it is something.

I don't advocate for this, I am in favour of pirating evrything and think copyrights and patents should be abolished... But

One could push even further, license everything with a full description. To extort money from the new creators one needs a reference. This reference should be an open storage for everyone to see if they are infringing

As an individual, you can keep local backups of everything that matters (well, harder for subscription services, but viable for your own data, websites, youtube videos, ...). Takes effort though.

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