Vint Cerf: Everything we do will be ERASED! You can't even find last 2 times I said this

Not really much of a problem

99.999999 (repeat 9s for as long as you care) percent of everything on the Internet is of no real relevance to anyone - not even those who post it (including this comment.)

If YouTube were to go TITSUP permanently what would we lose? Nada. Cats will still be around so we can recreate all the cat videos at will.

The crap posted to Facebook (and other related sites) won't be of any use in a couple of hundred years - it isn't even of any use NOW.

Imagine some poor bastard who digs up a bunch of Facebook backups a thousand years from now. All the hard work and dedication needed to decode it (under the assumption is must be important,) and all he gets for it is the photos some assclown posted of his lunch.

Your life isn't so damned interesting that you need to preserve it for posterity. Get over it (and yourself.)

I don't see why he's so concerned.

GCHQ/NSA will take care of it.

GCHQ and NSA alternatives

The GCHQ and NSA archives aren't open to the public.

On the other hand, archive.org (the wayback machine) is accesible to the public for free (at the moment) and access just needs a browser and not much else. How hard can that be.

Anything more obscure than that and there are a few computer museums, the classic computers mailing list, and so on.

If Cerf had said we need to preserve *knowledge*, the kind of stuff that used to be in the non-fiction section in buildings called libraries, then he'd have had an excellent point.

That's what PDF/A is designed for

If it's digital you're going to need hardware and software to decode it of course but once you get past that "bootstrap" problem PDF/A is designed to be completely self-contained.

It's hopeless

We need a technology that can be abandoned and still be readable in future times.

Any technological solution is bound to fail because maintaining it requires repeated investment in either maintaining what will become an obsolete storage format in the future, or repeatedly re-writing it as new media are invented.

It's all very well suggesting that technology from people such as "Carnegie Mellon University and IBM Research" might be worth using, but this assumes a certain amount of continuity to maintain the physical storage that requires organisations to survive. You cannot rely on government or industry to still be around in the future, and the 'Cloud' (whatever is meant by that) needs to be maintained as well.

You end up with stupid chicken-and-egg situations if the description of the programs and machines necessary to read the media is only stored on the media itself.

I respect Vint Cerf. He's very influential. But he's not, in the grand scheme of things, an engineer (his degrees are in Mathematics, and he's managed various teams and companies mainly on data communication). Nowadays, he's good at the grand scheme thinking, not the detail.

He was being interviewed on Radio 4 this morning, and I got the feeling that he was either dumbing down what he was saying for a non-technical audience, or that he did not fully understand various fundamentals on machine architecture and what would be necessary to maintain in order to run a program from a current generation of machines. I would hope that it was the former, but I was not convinced. When taking about the systems, he talked about taking a snapshot of the software "with a description of the machine it runs on", glossing over that the description would have to be incredibly detailed to capture all the nuances of machine architecture to allow a working machine to be reconstructed from that description.

I would suspect strongly that it would already be nigh on impossible already to reconstruct systems from people like DG, Prime or Tandem (amongst others) unless working physical instances exist.

Trying to capture all of the operating characteristics of a complex modern processor like Power 8 or a Haswell and the associated support chipsets to allow it to be reimplemented in the future on architectures unimaginable at the moment would be a herculean task!

Much better would be to ban the use of all proprietary closed file formats, and keep the definition of the open file formats in enough detail to reconstruct the data stored in those formats.

But this does not alter the fact that there needs to be readable media maintained in perpetuity.

Easy!

Very large slab of granite and a chisel, and just chip out the bits.

Not sure about the cat videos though...

Not such a new concept

People have been saying this for decades. I remember a New Scientist article in the late 1980's postulating that we were entering a new "Dark Ages" for the reason that hundreds of years from now historians would be unable to read most of our digital records.

Also, Iain Banks' book "The Crow Road" centres on trying to read a diskette from an obsolete computer, and it was published in 1992.