BermudaHighball

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yes, exactly why I wanted to start this project. It's nice to have the Internet Archive but we cannot trust that content won't be taken down eventually. Even just storage costs might become an issue in the future for data that gets maybe 30 total views over many years. But it is nice to hear some of the data you were looking at is coming back.

Long term, it would be nice for a community of users to create a decentralized index of Internet Archive metadata so it cannot get taken down and has the torrent files of the content so people can share it and participate in the seeding for the content they care about. The Internet Archive might cooperate to make it easier to do this, for example by using Bittorrent v2 which would help us detect file duplication and not have to use padding files since all files are aligned to pieces in v2.

Currently there is little incentive for people to seed the Internet Archive content but no doubt it will become more important to do that in the future.

 

Following up from my previous post.

I used the API at https://archive.org/developers/changes.html to enumerate all the item names in the archive. Currently there are over 256 million item names. However I went through a sample of them and noted the following:

There are many, many items from the archive which have been removed. Much higher than I expected. If you have critical data, of course Internet Archive should never be your only backup.

I don't know the distribution of metadata and .torrent file sizes since i have not tried downloading them yet. It looks like it would require a lot of storage if there are many files or the content is huge (if only 50% of the items remain and the average .torrent + metadata is 20KB it would be over 2.5 TB to store). But on the other hand, the archive has a lot of random one off uploads that are not very big, so some metadata is 800 bytes and the torrent 3KB in those cases (only 640 GB to store if combined is 5 KB).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The link to the above release post has the wrong caption for me. Its title says "Ambulance hits Oregon cyclist, rushes him to hospital, then sticks him with $1,800 bill, lawsuit says - Divisions by zero"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Yes, I think so. I'll definitely use the example for downloading some of the files (.torrent, metadata file) once I have some items. But first I need to find all the items ever uploaded.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Thank you for the tips. I am actually interested in enumerating metadata for all the "items" as defined by the API page ever uploaded. For example, one item = one ID:

Archive.org is made up of “items”. An item is a logical “thing” that we represent on one web page on archive.org. An item can be considered as a group of files that deserve their own metadata.

You did cause me to look at the API docs again, though, and I think I found something that does enumerate all item names, and as a bonus, it will keep you updated when changes are made: https://archive.org/developers/changes.html

We'll see how much progress I can make. It might take a while to get through all the millions of them.

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I'd love to know if anyone's aware of a bulk metadata export feature or repository. I would like to have a copy of the metadata and .torrent files of all items.

I guess one way is to use the CLI but this relies on knowing which item you want and I don't know if there's a way to get a list of all items.

I believe downloading via BitTorrent and seeding back is a win-win: it bolsters the Archive's resilience while easing server strain. I'll be seeding the items I download.

Edit: If you want to enumerate all item names in the entire archive.org repository, take a look at https://archive.org/developers/changes.html. This will do that for you!

 

It seems like 6 or 7 years ago there was research into new forms of storage, using crystals or DNA that promised ultra high density storage. I know the read/write speed was not very fast, but I thought by now there would be more progress in the area. Apparently in 2021 there was a team that got a 16GB file stored in DNA. In the last month there's some company (Biomemory) that lets you store 1KB of data into DNA for $1,000, but if you want to read it, you have to send it to them. I don't understand why you would use that today.

I wonder if it will ever be viable for us to have DNA readers/writers... but I also wonder if there are other new types of data storage coming up that might be just as good.

If you know anything about the DNA research or other new storage forms, what do you think is the most promising one?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

This was something I suggested for this instance, since there is even a guide for hosting an onion service: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/135234

Maybe /u/db0 will have more time after the spam settles down, but it seems he's got a lot on his plate at the moment between being an admin and doing AI stuff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I often look for older or niche content, and even for that I still often have plenty of takers on public trackers. That my machine is port forwarded might have something to do with it. I'd say I have a "medium" amount of disk space and only stop seeding when I delete the files, but sometimes I limit the upload rate to keep some for other activities.

 

The more that content on the web is "locked down" with more stringent API requests and identity verification, e.g. Twitter, the more I wonder if I should be archiving every single HTTP request my browser makes. Or, rather, I wonder if in the future there will be an Archive Team style decentralized network of hoarders who, as they naturally browse the web, establish and maintain an archive collectively, creating a "shadow" database of content. This shadow archive is owned entirely by the collective and thus requests to it are not subject to the limitations set by the source service.

The main point is that the hoarding is not distinguishable from regular browsing from the perspective of the source website, so the hoarding system can't be shut down without also giving up access to regular users.

Verification that the content actually came from the real service could probably be done using the HTTPS packets themselves, and some sort of reputation system could prevent the source websites themselves from trying to poison the collective with spam.

Clearly, not all of the collected data should be shared, and without differential privacy techniques and fingerprint resistance the participating accounts can be connected to the content they share.

Has anything like this been attempted before? I've never participated in Archive Team, but from what I read it seems similar.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Have OSes evolved enough that encrypted DNS is available? If so, would someone with enough technical knowledge link a guide on how to set it up within a popular OS?

I imagine that even if you plug in one of the suggested DNS provider IP addresses into your network settings, the OS is still going to make plaintext requests that your ISP can snoop on unless you require it to be encrypted somehow.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Depending on the content, 10 or 20 comes quick

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Note that H.264 and H.265 are the video compression standards and x264 and x265 are FOSS video encoding libraries developed by VideoLAN.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I agree, and with FOSS you have the opportunity to contribute back to the software. One time I was using commercial software and reached out to the company about how to decode a special file format for use in a script and the response was that it was "proprietary". If it was FOSS or even if they just had given me the information, I would have contributed to growing the ecosystem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Software could have trojans. But why not music?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

New account created today, yeah that's fishy.

Torrents use cryptographic hashes to verify the torrent content, so if he seeds it to you, then your torrent client will validate data he gives you. If the data doesn't verify or if he wants you to do anything else like clicking a link, avoid and report.

It's sometimes possible to find the same files on other download sites, but "retrieving dead torrents" in general isn't possible without having the same data.

 

In the past, most software I used was paid and proprietary and would have some sort of limitation that I would try to get around by any means possible. Sometimes that would be resetting the clock on my computer, disabling the internet, and other times downloading a patch.

But in the past few years I've stopped using those things and have focused only on free and open source software (FOSS) to fulfill my needs. I hardly have to worry about privacy problems or trying to lock down a program that calls home. I might be missing out on some things that commercial software delivers, but I'm hardly aware of what they are anymore. It seems like the trend is for commercial software providers to migrate toward online or service models that have the company doing all the computing. I'm opposed to that, since they can take away your service at any time.

What do you do?

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