This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours worth of work by people who simply love music and wanted to share that love with other enthusiasts, creating some of the richest catalogues of music and music metadata the world has ever seen. And then it all was destroyed.
And this was true for many other topics of interest too.
We have burned many digital libraries in the last few decades, and we will probably continue to do so for a while longer.
This should be a golden age for information preservation. Instead it's a dark age. I personally know several eye-wateringly good bands whose catalogs are not available anywhere, at all.
Even the brief bloom of the torrent and sharing scene was incredible, though. Scarce works that circulate manually are in near-constant jeopardy, because every new copy takes new effort. But a whole lot of unique content, from jam-band tapes to obscure translated books, just showed up on torrent sites and got shared widely. Even if it's inaccessible at the moment, that stretch may have spawned enough copies to endure across the next few transitions.
Eh, I feel like we've almost fully gotten away from bit-rot. Bit-rot was a problem because individuals don't bother to go to the effort of constant IT administration, and don't have the economies of scale required to afford good data redundancy.
But individuals don't have to back things up "personally" any more. With one command, I can send three copies of any file to three object-storage providers. Each one (according to the Dynamo architecture, which they mostly all implement) is holding 17 copies of the data on 17 shards, and replaces copies from the good ones whenever they go bad. Each provider's copies only exist in one region, but the region is different for each provider selected. As individual object-storage providers die, I can find new ones and sync my data over from the surviving ones. As long as "cloud [redundant] object storage" as a concept exists, I won't have to do much at all to ensure continued integrity of my data. All the details—including porting my data to new physical substrates when old formats die—are being handled under the abstraction, and converted into (tiny!) monthly fees that are lower than what even a zero-redundancy tape library would cost me.
And, of course, the data I'm sending is encrypted, and not even with a symmetric key, but rather a PKI key where the decryption half of the key is held in cold storage (i.e. in hardcopy base64 in a safety deposit box at a bank; and a few other places.) If I'm uploading rips of something copyrighted, nobody will ever know that but me. I'll be able to get the data back out when the time comes to dust it off and share it.
The masters still exist, I'm told, but that's no good to anyone - they won't be re-released because it would require too much intellectual property wrangling and nobody cares enough to bother, and sooner or later that hard drive will die and that will be that.
Edit: Wait. Am I part of the problem?
If you want more, look either of them up.
Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still have them, if bit rot hasn't caught up, but they simply ceased to be available.
I'm not sure these ever landed on torrent sites, but the first album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor is considered lost, and Eminem's debut EP was unavailable for more than a decade. Both are (early-)digital-era works, which raises interesting questions about the fragility of even modern content. The archive-less disappearance of quite a few online short stories, flash games, and Soundcloud tracks makes me suspect that in a few decades, quite a few more "first works" of notable creators will be unavailable.
Years ago, I was on a university private tracker. It was used more to share hard-to-find resources than for any actual piracy, much less piracy of anything new or policed. (I'm sure people stole plenty of 50-year-old textbook PDFs.) But when the hoster shut it down abruptly, everything simply vanished, including all kinds of hand-scanned and annotated stuff which may be literally irreplaceable.
Meanwhile, something like Kickass Torrents can be shut down and abandoned by the owners, but the content all reappears almost immediately. The private-tracker model has lots of advantages for community building, but as far as robustness it undermines the entire concept of P2P sharing.
It's sort of funny to see that even something released post-internet can float in and out of availability like that. I generally class recent content as "lost" or "available", but obviously there's still a third category.
Yes, I just noticed I accidentally dropped the "of thousands" part while writing my comments.
It was a gaming historian's wet dream. They were even beginning to record the releases from different warez scene groups.
But everything went away because, form what I gathered, someone in EA noticed you could download FIFA 96 for the Mega Drive/Genesis.
Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the site. RIP
People still have all this on their drives. I'm sure the community can be revived someday.
I sure hope the community can be revived.
There's a lot more bandwidth and cheap storage today than 10 years ago. I'd love to be able to contribute and share to it.
I so dearly hope this is true for other sites like What.CD
The FIFA games usually have licenses to use the teams and player names. and lots of licensed music.
I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly.
Reveal how inventions and large companies work, as opposed to the old cloak-and-dagger method of 'secret formulas' and such. Then allowing anybody to see the method and licence it from the company, or be liable for a lawsuit.
What we used to have is if somebody somehow stole the secret to an invention it became fair game. Nowadays though companies try to game the system by having intentionally labrinthian patchworks of patents that do their best to not reveal anything about how the invention works while still being able to be used to sue people.
Rightly so-- and nothing of value would be lost. SV companies don't have much in the way of "secret sauce", they just have $$$ to burn (from VC weenies buying equity stakes) for hosting costs and for developing increasingly-crappy web frontends.
A lot of it was about album collecting which frankly is not working the same anymore
Personally I am sad iOS poorly supports listening mixes plus Soundcloud slowly destroying itself...
Back then, they were just servers you downloaded stuff from.
Edit: it shut down in 2001, and everyone I knew at the time was using it. vanderZwan might have misused the word torrent, but the rest of his post is spot on.
We still have communities like that, but you need the right connections to get in.
Just until the people with guns come.
Donating to Sci-Hub today.
The EU just passed the directive for the new copyright package which further cements the status quo (the two often mentioned articles are just the worst of it), so don't expect any progress if people don't start to elect more progressive politicians.
The projections for the EU election show that the shares of the fractions won't change much, beside a slight shift to the right. The composition of the Conservative wing, however, will become more Euroskeptic and nationalistic.
And from an economic perspective, I don't see any big shift towards more consumer-oriented party programs, while the right-wing generally tends to be liberal(classical), or neoliberal even, anyway.
P.S.: To avoid DNS blocking, use a DNS server from a private party; and since in some countries such data streams are manipulated, use encrypted DNS to ensure integrity. https://dnscrypt.info/faq
>Opposition in the European Parliament is led by populist parties including Poland's ruling Law and Justice party, Italy's ruling Five Star Movement/Lega Nord coalition, and the UK Independence Party. Other opponents include a large number of smaller parties at either end of the political spectrum.[66][72] Notable among these is the Pirate Party Germany, whose sole MEP Julia Reda has been an outspoken opponent of the proposal.[73]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
I did not orientate my statement based on party names and official affiliations, but the overall political and economical nature and priorities of the copyright directive and actual policies the EP fractions vote for.
There is a difference between "left-wing" as in economic AND social leftism vs the sort of neoliberal, "Third Way" politics, which equal socially left-wing, but economically center-right.
Most of the "social democratic" parties in Europe are that way these days. They don't really champion economic populism, wealth redistribution etc.
And IMO there are no (neo)liberals in Spain, if you listen to facts instead of words.
Every party currently in Parliament is big-state. PP raised taxes over Zapatero levels and public expenses even more, systematically breaking expense limits every single year they were in government.
They're pro choice, pro LGBTQ etc. but also very much pro things like privatization.
As for "Is that something that doesn't cost money?" - that's a childish question that is almost not worth answering. Maintaining a functioning society always costs money, there's infrastructure & services to maintain.
Taxes are going to get collected, so for me the only real question is if they're going to be spent on moving the country forward, supporting those in need of support and improving services, (healthcare etc.) & infrastructure, (bridges, roads...), making sure publicly funded research stays public, going after corporate tax evasion and so on... or if they're going to be spent on bloated military contracts etc.
Sadly, the supposed left-wing in most of Europe today is not focusing on healthcare, infrastructure etc. in a major way and thus the distinction between them and the right seems rather thin. They're both fairly pro-corporate, thus the main distinction is the social politics, which rarely address people's economic concerns.
As for big state, I don't know, Mariano Rajoy, a right-winger was willing to send "the State" to violently suppress an independence referendum. Not sure how that squares with you.
Wow, thank you. That actually saves me time. Once somebody answers like that, it's clear that any effort to reason would be a waste.
Progressive = Left = Good
Right = Bad
I don't believe that the access to what public funding pays (public research) is intrinsically linked to the left, quite the opposite.
In the past for example while the US published a lot of information in public journals, Soviet Russia was very secretive about theirs(while benefiting from the West). US was not leftist than Soviet Russia.
While the left wants to link themselves to the idea of "progress", hence the auto denominated name "progressive", I don't see the progress anywhere after watching the process take action in Europe multiple times(North Americans have not experienced real left in power), quite the opposite.
The left wants to create a monster State. Once in place individuals have no power at all. Everything is controlled top down and as there is only one entity, there is no competition.
There is way more risk of "regulatory capture" when there is only one entity than when competition exist. Journals ownership of what public funding pays is a case of regulatory capture.
Scientists should demand their work to be in the open, or it will not really be science.
Neither brightest human achievements nor genocide happen only under a single political orientation flag.
There are people that are admirably altruist and awesomely creative regardless of the main political forces going on where they live. And there are people seeking to concentrate always more power for themselves regardless of socioeconomic consequences for others under any flag of the day which would serve this purpose.
You started by criticizing a simplistic analysis of Left == good, Right == bad, but you just flipped Right == good, Left == bad and offered such a juvenile, simplistic analysis, it's honestly laughable.
When it comes to the left, you'd have to distinguish between neoliberals, (socially left, economically centre-right), which is who's been in power in Europe when it comes to the left. You fail to realize that there is a thing called "left-wing libertarianism", in fact libertarianism originated with the left and most people, apart from Americans, understood libertarianism to be left-wing.
There's no "monster State" advocated there. It's more about ensuring equality of opportunity, (not outcome(!)), promoting cooperatives etc. In reality, these would be beneficial for competition, because it promotes more people being able to take the risk of having a business, since there's a social safety net.
Yesterday there weren't any, let alone good, alternatives. Even today with good alternatives, the way publishing in "high impact" journals is tied to pay can make the issue not really have other options.
Free access to knowledge is fairly foundational to science and something that's has been talked about for a while. This isn't a new problem. It comes as a surprise to no one.
This is doubly true given the amount of government money spent on this research that is then being kept from the public.
The scientists are often paid be the government. So it is the government that creates this situation and makes "high impact" journals what they are. It is the government that doesn't mandate free access to the knowledge.
My case, by the way.
I agree, however, that receiving government funding should require open access publishing.
Yes, for now governments only caught up to DNS level blocking, but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.