The Race to Save our Online Lives from a Digital Dark Age
August 20, 2024 at 12:25AMHard drives, cloud storage, automated backups. Sometimes it feels like our digital lives are duplicated in so many places they’ll never disappear. Not so. From MySpace to MTV News to Usenet, huge swaths of information have been wiped from the internet—and the file formats and operating systems racing themselves into obsolescence make it even more difficult to assume permanence. For MIT Tech Review, Niall Firth surveys the people and technologies hoping to preserve the ever-proliferating petabytes of the present day.
Meanwhile, deep in the vaults of an abandoned mine in Svalbard, Norway, GitHub is storing some of history’s most important software (including the source code for Linux, Android, and Python) on special film its creators claim can last for more than 500 years. The film, made by the firm Piql, is coated in microscopic silver halide crystals that permanently darken when exposed to light. A high-powered light source is used to create dark pixels just six micrometers across, which encode binary data. A scanner then reads the data back. Instructions for how to access the information are written in English on each roll, in case there is no longer anyone around to explain how it works.
In addition to GitHub’s collection, the storage facility, known as the Arctic World Archive, also includes data supplied by the Vatican and the European Space Agency, as well as various artworks and images from governments and institutions around the world. Yale University, for example, has stored a collection of software, including Microsoft Office and Adobe, as Piql data. Just a few hundred meters down the road you find the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility preserving a selection of the world’s biodiversity for future generations. Data about what each seed container holds is also stored on Piql film.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/19/the-race-to-save-our-online-lives-from-a-digital-dark-age/
via IFTTT
Watch