Internet Archive opens Vancouver headquarters, meeting space for the tech world
vancouversun.com
vancouversun.com
“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:
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).
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.
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.
It also shows a shocking lack of understanding. The "Canadian Government", being the executive branch in this case, has no bearing on this. US requests to seize assets, force shutdowns would be handled by Canadian courts, the judicial branch.
Which do not kowtow to anyone politically, US or otherwise, and never, ever have.
> 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
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 Göring 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]
But yes i think there should be something like this:
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 PetaBytesSee Filecoin Foundation and their work with IA.
Overall, Its just a giant archive, its hard to store that much data in a cheap manner that will last 20 years.
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.
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.
And in any case, there are plenty of scenarios where Japan, or Germany, or India are threatened, but vanishingly few where North America is.
Now, a civil war, that's a different story.
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.
Agreed that Iceland would be a nice international headquarters.
[0] http://www.bibalex.org/en/project/details?documentid=283
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.
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 ...
I do not believe that is the aim of Archive.org. That sounds more like Wikileaks territory.
A great presence in the city!
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.
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...
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.
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.
No, it doesn't.
Hence why the games industry tends to do a lot of work here.
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
EA is so bursting at the seams due to growth that they're expanding to a new City of Vancouver studio.