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How do you preserve digital messages for 20 years ?

forbes.com — Even though Forbes magazine has been around for 90 years, and Forbes.com for a decade, we can't simply assume that the company will be around in another 20 years (although we certainly hope so!)--or even that a database and application will be safe sitting on our servers for that long. But we can be fairly certain that if several different entities

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 27, 2006

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  • EyeChewRazors, on 10/12/2007, -7/+25You all need lives...
  • psyops2000, on 10/12/2007, -7/+15I'm sure Google might have an answer to this. :)
  • gthyb, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I know some company did a study on this. paper is still the best way to ensure it will be around.

    print it.
  • Rayor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Well it already is mostly spam.
  • anonym41414, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"The Sumerians figured this stuff out centuries ago."

    Except for the part about the zeroes.
  • FallibleDragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4psygnisfive is pretty close, with his talk of open formats. That's key; much more key than storing on paper, or having redundancy in servers. NO storage medium is any good, if the actual encoding of the data is a secret from those who want to decode it. Hieroglyphics were written in stone, but it was only when a encoding key was discovered (in the form of the Rosetta stone), that anyone could make real sense of them. There ARE open standards for storing emails: mailbox format, and the older maildir format. There are open protocols for accessing it: IMAP4, and the older POP. For sending, there is SMTP. Just don't store your mail in some company's closed webmail system, and don't store your documents in a closed format like Microsoft Word's DOC format. Use OpenOffice's Open Document Format instead -- that's exactly the reason that the state of MA, as well as the whole of the European Union, and others, are moving to this format.
  • Burritovision, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2the first thing i think of when i read this article is 'john titor'.

    i think we should keep certain servers in libraries. we may benefit from having public information servers! don't we have a public power company? a public state, even? we could also store a lot of this information on older hard drives. Some of those out of production still hold several GB of data.
  • FallibleDragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Putting it on (archival!) paper, with archival ink only guarantees that the physical medium is around -- not that the data can be successfully interpreted. For that, you need an open format/encoding, like the widely used and understood english language. So you're right, but you're emphasising the wrong part.

    However, storing stuff on paper isn't really practical any more. The amount of information produced by mankind doubles every few years, if I remember correctly. The sum of human art, writing, technology, and discoveries used to be able to sit in a large library, but now, the amount of information a single computer stores is approaching that of large libraries. And, people are filling that, with corporate records, information from telescopes and satellite data, people blogging on the net, etc.

    Do YOU want to type that all in again? Including the text-encoded binary data from infrared pictures of stars, etc.? And correct the inevitable mistakes? I think not ;) Do YOU want to be the one to say that the information on that paper is valid, and actually written by the person you think wrote it? That their signature isn't a great forgery? Paper is handy for newspapers and novels, but otherwise, it's out of date.
  • psygnisfive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's very simple. Encode it in an open format, keep updating to the most modern format every year or two, with archives of every version, and distributed it on the p2p networks.

    You could also stego the data into some popular video or audio file. This would ensure that the data gets copied a lot, so the data will be highly redundant.
  • ronmexico, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I sent myself an email last year when this appeared on Digg, four years to go until I receive it.
  • diggduggjoe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Fully encrypted e-mail with heavy use of digital signature white listing will replace the open, easily abused email of today. Potentially, your ISPs mail server may need to sign off on it, too. That would kill spam for spammers would need to encrypt everything with a separate key, so it would become more expensive. Additionally, the signatures would allow blocking at both the server and client level.

    Fundamentally, transports must be open for a standard to work, but the message must be both sealed and verifiable. Ultimately, the signature file must be password protected, too. The biggest thing that is keeping us from that today is great client software that can fully hand hold the user. Even MS has pretty poor user tools for encryption. They make sense to the techie, but the average Joe is lost.
  • vvvv, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Carve ones and zeroes into stone tablets, hide tablets in cave. Done.

    The Sumerians figured this stuff out centuries ago. Get it in together, people.
  • schabrat14, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3errr why wouldnt you just write the message down :/
  • JohnyD, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3This is rediculous. If you want to send a message to the future do it with the KEO Space Capsule. There's a much better chance of it making it back home.... and you get to give your message to Earth's inhabitants... 50,000 YEARS IN THE FUTURE!!!

    http://www.keo.org/uk/pages/message.php

    Don't delay, blast off is set for 2007!
  • Pharaoh777, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3In 20 years, email will be like snail mail - rarely used, and mostly spam.
  • xamox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1An important question to ask is how much of this data is relevant or will be relevant 20 years from now? It's like saving not only plans to build a steam engine the notes, production process, etc. on how to build one. That information is nice to have for historical purposes but doesn't really serve a purpose. Also the rate at which information that is published on the internet is growing exponentially. If you just think about the amount of videos that existed on the internet a year ago vs. today I'm sure you will get my point.
  • FallibleDragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1No, they didn't. They got lucky. Probably because of the wealth of other civilisations who also left clues, and allowed us to put together different pieces of the puzzle at different times.

    There was actually a study done, to determine the best way to mark nuclear waste, so that it wouldn't be opened until the very distant future. Basically, all they needed was a big warning sign about the hazard, that any human could understand, regardless of language or culture. The researchers concluded that there was no way to convey that information without common ground.
  • FallibleDragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Agreed. Archive.org should be public-funded, by every country with internet access, and it should be huge, storing everything online, with the clear mandate of storing data, not sifting it for legal evidence, etc. A lot of it is useless crap to us, or even illegal, but in the future, that will all be priceless glimpses into the dawn of the information age, with computers powerful enough to analyse it in new ways, and extract important information about how humans communicate, what they believe, who the great thinkers really were, what makes people buy into propaganda, etc.
  • FallibleDragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Nope, it's a very important issue, in the age of digital communication, just like how to preserve paper was, when the US constitution, the Magna Carta, and other import documents were written.
  • diggduggjoe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Put it in stone tablets!
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This could be a good study, since the archival of data on a computer hasn't really been proven like it has with paper.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Right. Now include a tablet in every major language which explains the concept of binary numbers along with a table of ascii character codes.

    And I bet the first few tablets say nothing but "Hello World" anyway.
  • fox, on 04/11/2009, -3/+1ehh, why didnt my submission of this make it?

    o well, there has to be a certain time of day or something in order for it to be promoted more.
  • EyeChewRazors, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1what will take the place of email?
  • moyness, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Last
  • scott1, on 10/12/2007, -17/+5This isn't slashdot. The first comment doesn't matter unless you want to get dugg more or risk getting burried more.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -23/+6The only thing worse than posting first is posting first then finding out somebody beat you
  • thedude1181984, on 10/12/2007, -22/+4i have one, and let me tell you how amazing it is, i come home from geeksquad (lawl) sit down on the tele, and begin my hours on end of nothing but digg. On the other hand my WoW life is where i get all of my action ; ) if ya know what i mean.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -20/+1well i guess posting first when you are third is worse
  • thedude1181984, on 10/12/2007, -24/+5well get used to it
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -25/+5look who's talking.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -30/+2god damn it. 2 people beat me to first by the time i logged in for 1st.
  • thedude1181984, on 10/12/2007, -45/+31st

    -edit

    *****, 2nd

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