Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)

neilsloane.com

72 pointsjstrieb41 comments

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...

Coincidentally I just watched a video featuring him on Numberphile (Amazing Graphs, Part 1 or something like that).

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.

Eventually this would be acquired by Google, and shut down 2 years later.

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?

Nobody knows, because the memorial page and Google Tombstone sunset announcement were both hosted on the service, and the only mirror was on Wave.

They announced this in a Google Buzz post.

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.

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!).

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 :)

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.

Presumably if there are multiple overlords they need some accounting mechanism to allocate resources among themselves.

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.

How about Bittorrent?

And AI, it's gotta have some AI /s

Which assumes there is some "big data" as well.

But only with ML please!

Why would this service need a significantly different business model from the way cemeteries currently operate?

Because cemetery concessions usually last much shorter than 500y?

If you could somehow get the Clock of the Long Now to also be a web server...

For the domain part you can eternally use a Tor .onion domain i.e. http://eternx2sade7n5nh.onion/

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.

Isn't that the whole point, that the service would make sure to upgrade the formats as needed, so it's always viewable?

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.

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!

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.

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.

Or even better, print it out in a book, wrap it in acid-free tissue paper, and put it on a shelf, somewhere dry.

Relevant:

http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/03/printed-website.html

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.

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.

As long as this company would be around, they could keep the website up and running. That's the point of the service.

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...

I'm not saying they will keep the promise, but it seems to me that it's the entire point of the offering.

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 ...

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/

This could be done by the Internet Archive.

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.

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...

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.

False:

That's changed, as of 2017:

A few months ago we stopped referring to robots.txt files on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages (though we respond to removal requests sent to info@archive.org). As we have moved towards broader access it has not caused problems, which we take as a good sign. We are now looking to do this more broadly.

We see the future of web archiving relying less on robots.txt file declarations geared toward search engines, and more on representing the web as it really was, and is, from a user’s perspective.

https://teleread.org/2017/04/24/the-internet-archive-will-so...

https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com