Countless firsthand accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have disappeared across the last decade, and it may speak to larger issues with the historical record in the digital age.

  • fluxion@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Meanwhile archive sites are getting sued by greedy copyright owners

      • fluxion@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I’m so sick of whiny corporate removed thinking they deserve $400 million payouts because some website implemented a free digital library of books they already owned so people could still borrow them during COVID when all the libraries were shut down.

          • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            yes but what you said in reaction to “when sites try to archive information and incredibly rich copyright holders with infinite money and lawyers sue them to the detriment of human wellbeing in order to earn a pittance more to add to their infinite dragon hoard and that’s bad” is “you’re a whiny removed.”

            perhaps it would’ve been worth considering adding your thoughts on the nuances of how laws bind vs protect people in the original comment?

              • TheLadyAugust@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                people shouldn’t be out to try to change everybody’s opinions on everything all the time?

                Why are you trying to change my opinion on changing other people’s opinion?

                I don’t owe it to everyone reading my comments to explain my complete thoughts

                Oh, i guess you won’t answer that. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

      • BakedGoods@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Sick of parasites profiting from works made by people who died half a century ago. Can’t they do anything of value with their lives instead? Maybe something that benefits society instead of being a burden on it?

      • c0c0c0@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The whiny removed to whom you refer clearly do not appreciate your analysis.

          • jwmgregory@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            people aren’t downvoting you emotionally. they just very much disagree with the notion of an individual owning intellectual property, and the idea that copyright somehow spurs innovation instead of snuffing it.

  • maegul@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    So, in short, the whole “just someone else’s computer” thing will always come back to bite you. And of course, we’re still struggling with this. Here on the Fedi, everything is tied up on servers run by admins we know little about without much recourse to download archives or migrate, unless you’re up for full self hosting.

    • Excel@lemmy.megumin.org
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      11 months ago

      Except the fediverse is highly resilient in this regard, since all of the data is replicated. If an instance goes down, all of that instance’s posts are still available on every other instance.

      • maegul@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        There is that, yes. But how much control do you the user have over those caches should the original server/instance from which they were made go down? Can you easily archive or retrieve them? Edit or delete them? Do anything to further ensure their longevity? Link them back to your new social media account so that others can easily identify them as yours? Verify, in any way, that they were (or were not!) written by you as the owner of a new account?

    • Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      theoretically one couls create a lemmyverse archive that crawls the lemmyverse and subscribes to all communities it finds and archives all federation activities that it receives

      • Otter@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Would you even need to subscribe?

        Setting up an instance should probably work, unless other instances choose to defederate from it, I guess

    • guitars are real@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Decentralized architecture is a pretty good middle-ground between centralized and distributed, though (see). Moving to a fully distributed social media – which would look something like everyone running their own servers – would carry costs and problems of its own, one of which is very few people have the time and inclination to learn how to do that and massive duplication of effort (everyone becomes responsible for creating and storing their own archives for posterity’s sake, which means lots and lots of data will just go to the bit bucket to die)

      The data being shared across federated servers allows people to set up 3rd-party archives, which is beneficial, without needlessly burdening instance operators with archival work (sort of a problem for sites like MySpace, there’s nothing in it for them except maybe good PR, except digital archiving for posterity is such a niche interest there would likely be little PR benefit to doing so)

      • maegul@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        I increasingly suspect there are false dichotomies here. A user need not take full responsibility for their personal server/instance on the federation for them to truly own their data and presence. They only need to own a discrete component in the network that is easily moved and that contains their own personal information and identity. This component could just as easily be hosted on a large cloud service as it could on a bedroom Raspberry Pi, and, if truly nomadic, moved from being on one and then the other as is necessary.

        It seems to me that most architectural thinking on this point fails to consider anything other than the “hardware” or server, in more or less traditional network terms, when, it seems to me, the issues concern the presentation and address-ability and mobility of the user as a discrete object.

    • reflex@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      How would we piece our history back together?

      Maybe some kind of foundation to stem the period of bahbawism?

    • gonzo0815@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      “The aurora over the Rocky Mountains in the United States was so bright that the glow woke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.”

      Lol, this must’ve been hella confusing.

    • sapient [they/them]@infosec.pub
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      11 months ago

      Luckily, it is possible to shield the power supply from a carrington event at least, and we do have satellites keeping watch. The main issue is making sure all the power infrastructure is actually shielded, which costs money >.<

      • SuperDuper@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Bro Texas won’t even pay to weatherize their power grid and they know cold weather happens every winter.

          • Unaware7013@kbin.social
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            10 months ago

            No that was the bullshit ercot put out to cover for the fact that fossil fuel production dropped by half or more. Source:

            But the majority of the power losses were from gas plants, including 25 gigawatts of capacity that went offline. Coal and nuclear outages cut another 4.5 gigawatts and 1.3 gigawatts respectively, according to the University of Texas at Austin report. Considering that peak demand was about 70 gigawatts, losing about 30 gigawatts from gas, coal and nuclear was a disaster.

            Wind energy also performed poorly, starting with ice accumulation that led to some wind farms needing to shut down early in the crisis. Wind power outages peaked at about 9 gigawatts, a number that takes into account wind levels on those days, according to the UT Austin repor

            It’s not like wind is blameless, but (the power crisis) wasn’t caused by wind failure,” said Webber. To say otherwise is “at best misleading, at worst an outright lie.”

            Natural gas and coal totals 70% of their total generation, and wind was 20%, so losing half of both means fossil fuels was much more impactful.

      • Balder@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        To be honest this doesn’t make me any more optimistic. I’m sure there are countries that might spend resources on this, but mine 100% won’t. And if the majority of the world is screwed, I guess we can all agree there won’t be any stable place.

        This episode of Why Files was really worrying.

    • squib@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      Pretty obvious. We build a time machine to go back to 1776. Then, when it malfunctions and sends to 1976 instead we learn the art of The Hustle.

    • Jaded@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      We would definitely lose some data but I’m guessing there’s a few hundred backups of Wikipedia and the important stuff floating around.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        A huge solar storm could wipe out the backups too unless they’re stored in a deep vault or something.

        • Jaded@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          11 months ago

          Solar storms arent really a risk for small electronics, more so if they aren’t connected to the grid. You wouldn’t need a deep vault, more like a cupboard.

          There is a risk the hard drives wear out before society gets the grid back online and restarts producing hard drives though. We already don’t have that many facilities and they would certainly be taken offline, and the knowledge to build those facilities, that might get lost properly when the storm would hit.

    • Bobert@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      “All things are made of atoms; little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”

  • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.astaluk.icu
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    11 months ago

    I’ll be honest, I had forgotten MySpace was a thing back then. Every single page I went to was gaudy as hell and took forever to load on my dial up connection at the time. I’m a little surprised they’re still around. And damn, it looks a lot different!

    • June@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Yea it’s a music centric site now, right?

      Edit: I was curious so I looked it up. They either have 6-10 employees and 1-5M in revenue, or 523 employees and 84.2M in revenue, depending on whether you misspell ‘employees’ in the search or not (on bing).

      • mainframegremlin@programming.dev
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        11 months ago

        I don’t remember the specific article I read that dove into this but it was essentially sold due to it being one of the first large data collections (user data). I’m not sure the extent its traweled now but before the social media machine took off, it was the largest if not one of the largest concentrations of actual data points to run algorithms against.

  • Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz
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    11 months ago

    I see this as a plus. People have a right to be forgotten. The problem nowadays is that companies track you and keep all your data forever and then use it to advertise to you.

    At the very least, data collection and preservation should be explicitly opt-in.

    If you really want to save something, download it yourself.

  • silvercove@lemdro.id
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    11 months ago

    Do not worry. History will not forget the murders American thugs comitted there.