In the back of the book, I'd like to put a 2D barcode to send folks to a static webpage somewhere, maybe for further information, an update, text changes, etc.
But where would that go? If I buy a domain I've got to renew it every year. Same goes for AWS static page hosting. I thought about using my GitHub account, but each year they keep screwing around with keys and logins and whatnot. I'm sure that most all of these places I'm using will delete both my account and data after a certain number of years of inactivity.
So where do I put a static webpage I can link to and be assured (mostly) that it'll be around 100 years or more from now?
And make sure the Internet Archive indexes it. When people find old links that don't resolve anymore, IA is where they go.
Don't overthink this. Nothing lasts forever, but right now I'd say IA is the most likely repository to survive over the longest term, certainly in comparison to any for-profit company.
There is really no "for as long as you live persistent hosting"
Self-hosting: ISPs change, people move house, power black-outs take servers offline
Hosted: providers change policies, are bought out, go bust, payment details change
If you use something like Google Sites with your own domain, which is used by a lot of paying corporations, there's a good chance you'll never need to touch it again until you die, except for using some credit card information maybe.
Seeing as that's its mission and it's got the longest track record of it.
Any even if it fails someday as an organization, its repository is the one most likely to be maintained by a new organization with the same mission.
You may still find user pages on universities that goes back to the early 90's, before that simply there was no web, and that was just 30 years back, 10 years earlier was the start of TCP/IP, mail and DNS protocols. But 20 years later from now things may be very different to what we know so far.
Maybe it would be for the better to ride the waves, and instead of doing things like we did till a few years back, rely on AIs or other systems that will hold that knowledge somewhat and that can be interacted with. And hope that where you put the today's style static web page with your book addendum gets indexed by them and used when the consumer of the content you created request it somehow.
You cannot fight change, and you cannot fight your own impermanence. And so what if it does last 100 years, then what? Should it last 200? 1000? 1,000,000? Just be, and be happy. Live, laugh, love is wiser advice than you’d think.
I'd suggest you do buy a domain, but set up a legal/financial framework so that a long-standing law firm will keep up the payments for N decades (or for as long as the firm & its successors exist).
"Free" data storage for as long as the internet exists.
Make the barcode to your transaction with the data, anyone with a brain and time can figure it out from there.
Oh ye of so much faith.
The big blockchains are robust, but I'm wondering if it's not impossible for them to not need the full blockchain at some point.
But lets imagine you found a crystalline web server that ran off sun light and was backed by rock storage. Who is to be assured that the https scheme will still exist in 100 years? Or that DNS is still the resolution method? FTP had a 20 year run before dying. Gopher lasted under a decade. Http is dying out under the weight of security and corporatization. Even DNS is under pressure to be centralized and otherwise fiddled with in the name of convenience (eg locality). So your descendents might not be able to resolve your URN locator scheme, or have a usable client to reach it, no matter how good your long term storage is.
For this problem, even Darpa created special research program and at the moment only exists one serious applicant - https://100yss.org/
You could try to ask some of Japanese oldest organizations to host your page, as they have few entities existing hundreds years. But you should ask not one but few, I think at least 3, because just few years ago bankrupted 700-years old Japanese bank.
Other possible candidates - some churches and property communes in Western countries. But also, each additional host will just make higher probability but will not guarantee anything.
Also possible to ask your family to save your site, but even if your family is reliable enough, who knows, how will look like society in 100 years, and if your book/site will be legal.
I think, if you will place something on Moon, exists high probability nobody will reach it in 100 years (I think, large share territory of Moon will be desert like now), so it will save. And yes, it is possible to make laser communication system, so somebody could buy components for some reasonable cost and make call and receive data from your site there.
More about Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.org
Not the entire book. I wouldn't have to copyleft the entire thing, right?
My current static page is just an "I like this book, please give me this free thing and put me on a mailing list" kind of thing. But that's not really the point. The point is "how can I use static pages, presumably the thing the internet was built for, to put a few pages of extra material on the book and perhaps give links for folks to follow if they're interested in the topic?"
Traditionally, you'd issue a new edition with such information, but that seems like a hella work and expenditure, and small stuff like this should be the kind of thing you'd be able to stick somewhere online, if nothing else as a parking spot until you eventually publish a new edition.
I wonder if the Internet Archive would be interested in this kind of archival.
Unfortunately, with the recent attack, the purl.org resolver went offline and remains so. All the purl data is still there and is accessible to the public, you just don't get resolvable URLs for them.
Nowadays, it seems like ARKs are the better way to go, anyway, and the attack on archive.org proved it perfectly. Look into <https://arks.org/>
(The Internet Archive mints ARKs for every item uploaded to its collections. You may have noticed them in the infobox below the fold when looking at a given item.)
As for your latter remarks, the Internet Archive will take just about anything. Create an account and start uploading. Ted Nelson has a huge chunk of his papers on there.
Possibly even some useful legitimate fodder for those fashionable AI data sinks!
Basically spreading the risk to maybe 10 platforms instead of 1, hoping that at least 1 always survives.
One issue would be that if you lose the login access to one of those platforms, their content might be deprecated on that page, and more recent content would be displayed on others. But that might be a small enough problem to ignore it. You could also encourage readers to visit 2-3 of the links, instead of 1, to increase the chances they read the one with the most recently updated content.
And/or maybe each of those pages could embed a system that "fetches" the status of the other 9 pages, and display the version number of the content of each of them, so that the reader can navigate to other pages if they see that another one has more recently updated content.
And/or you (the author) could manually have to go on the 10 pages every month/year and "confirm" that the content is still up-to-date. Each page would display: "the author has last confirmed the validity of this page on date X". This stops working after you pass away, though, but since all pages would show the same last confirmed date, that might be ok. You could also add a warning on those platforms: "If you see that I haven't confirmed the validity of the content in more than X months, I have either lost access to this page or passed away. Please check some of the other links from the book to see if their "last confirmed by author date" is the same, and if so, please try and check online whether I have passed away".
In any case, a fun problem to think about, thank you!
If you setup multiple domains or url shorteners, each can redirect to whatever free platform is available (facebook groups, reddit, github, web.archive, etc). It does require a bit of maintenance tho.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:arweave.net+book
As Arweave is designed for this exact use case. Even if arweave.net disappears, one can still find the content one the Arweave blockchain via the hash. The chain is built in a way that it creates a very high incentive for people around the world to keep hosting the content.
Which kinda proves the concept works. People shitting on web3 are clueless what it is.
- Make your static data small.
- Pick a version scheme and use it.
- Gather your static data into a release, including an indicator of the version, and sign it.
- Also gather your static data into a form easily transmittable by others. If your static data will fit into a few pages of PDFs, it can be read by just about anything with a CPU that real people touch, and can also be printable. There are many tools that create PDFs that aren't Adobe.
- HTML archives, such as those that SingleFile make, are better than PDFs but less accessible (e.g. not viewable on phones, require extension to be installed).
- License the content in a way that encourages sharing.
- Make sure the content itself encourages sharing. Good, unique artwork tends to do this, in addition to the data itself being interesting or important. Comics from the 1940s made it to the Internet age and they'll probably make the post-Internet age too.
- Discord, Telegram, and Github would be an example of three places that would understand the concept of "here's a PDF of a site, here for archival purposes, feel free to share this to anyone or print it."
Since it’s a static blob, you don’t need to host it at all. The url itself is the code for the webpage
IPFS could be a contender, though I don't know where it stands now, but it's the ambition, at least.
print the code of the static webpage on a piece of paper. Even better, archival paper [0], so it will really last a long time.
In the future, anyone would be able to point a... smartphone, or a camera, to the paper, and instantly retrieve the webpage. An AI will ask them if they want to render the page using one of these very, very old things called browsers.
> In the back of the book, I'd like to put a 2D barcode to send folks to a static webpage somewhere, maybe for further information, an update, text changes, etc.
How are you going to put the update/text change into the printed book? I think the point was tobe able to change the info when the books are already distributed.
One shout might be to link to internet archive instead of the resource directly. Though we can't be sure internet archive will keep the current system working as is (e.g. search params may change etc)
The only solid solution I have is to set up a foundation and pour money in so that they will be responsible for upkeep. But that would be an hassle to execute.
100 years in internet time is very long, internet as we know it now hasn't been along for 100 years.
I wonder if there aren't services that specialize in this.
The foundation has a remit to also do some related "good works". The idea is that the pot of money (and the interest it throws off) acts as an incentive to keep the foundation going. Eventually the cost of hosting "legacy" data should drop close to zero. You could run it as an overlay on two clouds initially to avoid capital outlay.
I think you would want librarians / archivists on the board. It wouldn't require much in the way of software, making something that could last in the long term is more of a governance problem than a technical one.
2. Put it in a Ethereum transaction.
More seriously, I have no idea.
But I suggest not just one stone, but build many hills on large piece of land and place them to form giant QR code, for example 1px=1m (resolution is not random, but it is typical for modern Earth imaging satellites, and for other Earth imaging technologies).
I think, in 100 years, most probably, will exist technology to make photo (or drawing) from height and then translate it into bits and decode text.
And to find it, I think will be enough to place in book geocoordinates and even most probably, Earth will be still round and even if GPS will not exist, somebody will know, how to convert GPS coordinates to what will exist.
With some luck, possible that these giant pictures will notice few big information entities and place in their archives, so history will save them.
Sure, here quality have not less importance than quantity, even so powerful entity as Life could disappear, so need to somehow attract attention of few, not only one.
It allows you to write public blogs/ideas and is hosted on Github. Users can view it without logging in. In theory, if Github doesn't close down, your content will exist permanently.
If you’re OK with your website having a big ugly URL (which might not be a problem if you use a QR code to point to it anyway) then hosting a static website on AWS S3 might be your best bet. There’s so much money flowing into AWS right now, I imagine there will be enough interest to keep it going for several decades to come.
EDITED TO ADD As far as i know you can prepay your AWS bills, so you could prepay a massive amount and hope it outruns future price inflation
At least that's the case today, but the policy may change tomorrow. It's not easy to guarantee anything 10 years from now, let alone 100 years.
I for example wouldn't know what to do with a barcode even today.
I’m not.
The ink degradation might be a concern. And it would require some expertise to reassemble.
Or just assume that if your writing is as valuable as you think it is, others will recognize its worth and keep it alive.
I don't expect it to last 100 years though, they may very well change their free policies a year from now, hell, i don't know if AWS or even Amazon will be around 100 years from now.
The physical book can contain a QR Code, Barcode, printed URL and so on, that’s correct at the time of print.
But then leave hints on how to search and find the book online if those resources are not available.
Such as a promise to list the book with your Author name, book title, ISBN and so on.
Then replicate the content across the internet, and try to cross link to all the resources.
The only thing you can really trust is your own domain name, so that has to be the base right now.
Derek Sivers is planning something similar with Digital Legacy Trust: https://legacytrust.nz/
You print it and add it to your book (not sure if any ink will do, though)
I do mantain a stripped-down ZIP of one of my key sites in Zenodo:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10119195
But maybe you could just host a plain-text or similar file there or at Dryad and hand out the DOI / URL?
They make money with Adsense, and it turn Google does to.
Google has killed a lot of products but in my opinion they will keep this. There are just so many blogs, little and small, some who have posts dating from '99 even, still online.
Google in 2024 feels like IBM in 1974. The brand will surely exist fifty years from now, but possibly much diminished. I wouldn’t count on any specific product surviving the “legacification” of Google.
Poe’s law at its best.
-Take a screenshot and submit it to the patent office
