Inspired by this recent post from insomniasexx:
... and this recent post from mk:
IPFS is a new architecture for the web which - instead of using a client-server model - is more like bittorrent, in that everybody who visits webpages helps serve those pages. It also creates a new hash in the URL for each file every time a file is added or changed, which prevents the "link rot" of today's web, so that a certain URL will always point to the same unchanged content. IPFS's website and readme call it "The Permanent Web".
I'm a fan of IPFS and supporter of the Internet Archive, but after reading insom's post linked above, I thought a bit about whether I want a permanent web. I haven't seen any philosophical discussion in IPFS's github issues or irc about whether it's truly a desirable thing (although it does definitely have big advantages for making publishing content easier and ). There are search results that include my name that I hope are unfindable at some point. On one hand, the EU's right to be forgotten law seems like a win for privacy; on the other hand, it feels censorship-y and it really works against the nature of the internet.
Is a permanent web worth it if the price is a person's shame and embarrassment following them for the rest of their life? Or maybe it would lead to greater societal acceptance that people say and do and post dumb things when they're young, and that's okay? It's easy enough to publish content anonymously, or share things privately over the internet, but what are the chances that throughout adolescence a person won't accidentally give away one too many identifying characteristics, or decide to publicly publish one opinion that they'd later regret? With today's web, we at least have a hope of burying these details.
I think a permanent web and the Internet Archive are good, because the internet is a record of our culture and knowledge, and preserving our culture and knowledge for future anthropologists and historians and students is immensely important (regardless of whether the data is embarrassing). (And anyways, even if we were to conclude as a society that it were a bad thing, it's hard to imagine development stopping. The technical advantages of a distributed web are too great.) But what implications does this have in an internet culture filled with shame, false accusations, and hostility?
These discussions always suffer from an either/or treatment of privacy and permanence. Your choices aren't "things are remembered forever" and "things are wiped from the face of the earth" they're a spectrum between "easy to find" and "impossible to find." People also forget that we're having these discussions because there's a natural "censorship" in the decay of information and that rate of decay has been retarded, not eliminated by the advent of the Internet. Something printed in a local newspaper 40 years ago was non-existent for anyone who wasn't willing to schlep down to the library and cruise the microfiche stacks. That presumes that the news was on microfiche. That presumes that your library had the reader. Thing is, even now the information you want may very well be behind a paywall you don't want to enrich. Is that censorship? Is that capitalism? Gather 'round, kidz, as I share a tale of fake IDs in the era before the Internet. See, there were two approaches: you could steal a laminator and get good with forgery (before Photoshop - this meant finding the right typewriter and making the correct forms to photograph and print, in your basement, in color) or you could get the birth certificate of a dead kid and do it for realsies. If you wanted to do it for realsies, you needed to find obituaries for someone about your age who happened to be dead. This meant reading obituaries. As babies die, and teenagers die, but people in the middle rarely die and you happen to be a teenager, you ended up pretty much reading every newspaper available from 4 or so years before you were born. And it took hours. And you probably discovered that there were only two or three newspapers from your entire state with archives going back that far. So if you found one, and you applied for the death certificate (by pretending to be a geneologist) and then the birth certificate (by pretending to be an insurance adjuster) you could age the birth certificate with tea and sunshine and walk into the DMV and get yourself a legit driver's license. You would be committing felony fraud but hey - what price booze? Now it's the internet and theoretically you should be able to accomplish the same thing with an Internet search. Ignore for a minute the fact that the paper loopholes exploited in the process above have been closed; it wouldn't matter because those newspapers still aren't much on the web. Sure - Google scanned a whole bunch of 'em in, but the newspapers said "fuck you" and pulled a lot of it down. I had friends that did some extremely stupid shit back in '98 or '99 and while it made the national news, the local reportage on it all has vanished down the memory hole. It's not coming back. Another perspective? I am Eternal September. My buddy's first Compuserve login was 1991; my first email address was September 1994. Mosaic was what you used at the computer lab and what you used in the dorms was a unix prompt at 2400 baud and Usenet was browsed at the command line. And I browsed the shit out of it. I was all over at least three newsgroups, using a singularly unique ideogram in my signature for upwards of 20 posts a day. And Deja News started archiving it all in '95, and Google bought Deja News in 2000 and there is no search string on google or groups.google.com that will bring up a single thing I said. I'll bet it's in there. I'll bet Google could serve it up instantaneously. I'll even wager that somebody clever here, probably bfv, can demonstrate exactly how to find myself. But a reporter won't. A prospective girlfriend won't. An employer won't. It exists beyond a reasonable doubt but it is effectively gone. Since the dawn of time, we have argued about information retention. Branding is all about making society forget that you once committed a crime. That's what The Scarlet Letter was about. What's changed is the level of forgetting, and I don't think we're any more likely to settle on one answer today than we were back when records were committed to cuneiform.
Since you summoned me, sure. The Internet Detective Way: You've mentioned mixing at clubs in Seattle around that time. Wanna bet you never mentioned mixing at one of them on one of the relevant newsgroups? The Propellerhead Way: You know how people recognize your alt accounts because your writing is distinctive? It's pretty easy to write programs to do that too. One way, not the best, is to use the same algorithm Bayesian spam filters do. Back when I still cared about reddit I wrote a script to match users to accounts on a handful of forums reddit trolls tend to come from along those lines. I'm not proud, but it worked fairly well for users who weren't too terse.
Amusingly enough, the Internet Detective Way doesn't easily go back before 2000. Also, using known aliases search actually pops up my real name for two innocuous messages I wrote in 2001 that I'd completely forgotten about. So that's useful. The propellerhead way impresses the hell out of me, by the way.
Yes. We shouldn't hold back because people will be idiots. We don't ban cars because cars can kill people. People are people. This will never happen, outside of "this person was a kid". What needs to remain is that the web, and all posts on it, should be under pseudonyms.Is a permanent web worth it if the price is a person's shame and embarrassment following them for the rest of their life?
Or maybe it would lead to greater societal acceptance that people say and do and post dumb things
But we do enact laws on their usage and safety standards they must meet. Ease of publishing content, searching that content, and keeping it around for longer are all awesome things for a variety of reasons, but I wonder about the effect that it may have on people who have trouble escaping something dumb they did or said once. No doubt it's already easy to publish and search things with today's web, so I'm curious the effect it'll have when it's even easier. Regardless, I agree that we shouldn't hold back technological progress because of this.We shouldn't hold back because people will be idiots. We don't ban cars because cars can kill people.
Honestly, I have no idea where IPFS's "permanent web" thing comes from. Content on IPFS is only available as long as people seed it (or "pin" it, in IPFS jargon). If there's only one ipfs user with a certain piece of content left, and he removes it, it's still gone forever! I don't know why they seem to be acting like ipfs content is any more permanent than torrents are. Regardless, I still believe it's a great step forward, and they have my support.
I think that it would be very durable. the reason is that the Internet archive (or failing them, the Archive Team) would make the effort to pin every IPFS page. even if keeping them live is cost prohibitive, parking them on an offline storage cluster until the cost comes down is likely an option