Europeans Bury "Digital DNA" Inside a Mountain 161
adeelarshad82 writes "In a secret bunker deep in the Swiss Alps, European researchers deposited a 'digital genome' that will provide the blueprint for future generations to read data stored using defunct technology. The sealed box containing the key to unpick defunct digital formats will be locked away for the next quarter of a century behind a 3-1/2 ton door strong enough to resist nuclear attack at the data storage facility, known as the Swiss Fort Knox. The capsule is the culmination of the four-year 'Planets' project, which draws on the expertise of 16 European libraries, archives, and research institutions, to preserve the world's digital assets as hardware and software is superseded at a blistering pace. The project hopes to preserve 'data DNA,' the information and tools required to access and read historical digital material and prevent digital memory loss into the next century."
Quick... destroy it!. (Score:1, Interesting)
Future generations of purist can use it as a reference for "cleansings".
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Let's be real here. We're doing this so that anthropologists from other spacefaring civilizations will be able to read all the stories about us plowing ourselves to hell.
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Blowing. What the hell are you trying to say, typo gnomes?
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They are saying we will die off to unsustainable farming?
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Hopefully they'll understand the languages that are contained on all that data....
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Well, naturally we'll also archive a copy of all the Rosetta Stone(tm) language packages.
Hide it in cockroach genomes (Score:2)
Single safe = single point of failure. Distribute the information as noncoding dna in the genomes of cockroaches. That'll last.
Fuck you PC World. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fuck you PC World. (Score:5, Funny)
The key is a COBOL program written on punchcard.
Re:Fuck you PC World. (Score:5, Funny)
I sincerely hope I'm wrong (Score:2)
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Nothing else actually deserves to be stahsed away and protected. I mean frankly what artifacts of every day life that you see around actually deserve to be saved for future generations? None! Or you mean some Hollywood shit or all speeches of Reagan do?
Re:Fuck you PC World. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fuck you PC World. (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it have killed you to include the slightest mention of what "the key to unpick defunct digital formats" is in an article discussing how the Europeans have stashed one away?
Can't be mentioned, it's a stash of software, much of it copyrighted, abandonware with no clear owners, old versions of software with no proper redistribution licence, etc. Emulators for old platforms, with copyright and patent issues. And a bunch of old equipment, with as much specifications and manuals as possible. So in order to provide information to future generations, this generation's laws had to be somewhat ignored.
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But, hopefully, by the time we ever need it, the copyrights will be expired.
We can only hope Disney goes out of business soon so content created in the later half of last century will be freed by the middle of next century.
No DRMs ; limited Copyright problems (Score:2)
So in order to provide information to future generations, this generation's laws had to be somewhat ignored.
Thankfully, the whole thing is happening in Switzerland.
Given the backup/archival/musem nature of the project, it might be tolerated under the fair-use provision of the swiss copyright law.
And according the local DMCA-clone, if it is done in order to produce a legal copy, you're free to break any DRM standing in your way.
(although I find the legality of providing tools for such protection-removal ambiguous due to bad wording).
For software patents the situation seems to me less clear, although some of them a
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defunct digital formats
Hope they included blu-ray
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I love the song.
Frankly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Frankly... (Score:5, Insightful)
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can you imagine how much of the earth's surface you'd have to nuke to get rid of all the XP install CDs?
Dear God, you'd have to nuke the entire freakin' planet!
Re:Frankly... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Frankly... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, we could (Score:2)
There, problem solved.
Re:Frankly... (Score:5, Funny)
can you imagine how much of the earth's surface you'd have to nuke to get rid of all the XP install CDs?
A noble objective to be sure, but I for one believe that GNU/Linux can and should achieve world domination peacefully.
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I suspect that the logic(aside from the fact that it simply isn't economic to store everything in blast vaults), is that today's cheap, common, ubiquitous digital formats are widespread enough to more or less protect themselves through sheer numbers(can you imagine how much of the earth's surface you'd have to nuke to get rid of all the AOL install CDs?); but that the incentives and technology required for them to be readable and useful in a few decades, or after a modest nuclear exchange or something, are actually quite rare. Thus, you put the work and money into building the reading/decoding tech, and just bury that.
FTFY
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'If we are taking such precautions to insure that this data key will not be destroyed, would not in the worst case scenario virtually every piece of data that ISN'T buried under a mountain be gone too?'
Well, if I've learned anything from James Bond films, their precautions ('Accompanied by burly security guards in black uniforms, scientists carried a time capsule through a labyrinth of tunnels and five security zones to a vault near the slopes of chic ski resort Gstaad.') pretty much ensure the whole thing
Hmm. (Score:5, Funny)
"The sealed box containing the key to unpick defunct digital formats will be locked away for the next quarter of a century behind a 3-1/2 ton door"..."the information and tools required to access and read historical digital material and prevent digital memory loss into the next century."
Perhaps they should include the calculations they used to equate 25 years with 90 years.
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They were specifying the years in dotBeats, or whatever in the hell they called those things.
What if... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What if... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ogg Theora with XviD inside? (Score:1)
Do they have Ogg Theora? I ask because I have some videos I transcoded a year or two ago and....
That's what They say... (Score:2, Funny)
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Always been wondering what those Swiss are doing under those mountains.
This is just a ploy, a cover, for there ultimate goal [wikipedia.org].
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Ah yes, I see the Swiss delved too greedily and too deep...
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The Swiss have long protected all their military force in underground bunkers. This is one reason Hitler did not attack them. For details, see The Swiss Army by John McPhee. [bookwormhole.net]
When I lived there 25 years ago all houses and workplaces a nuclear bomb shelters.
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Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been done before, in various guises. The BBC Domesday project springs to mind, and numerous digital timecapsules.
It seems to me that such projects have a lot in common with SETI searches - somehow providing information to someone who may not have the capability to decode it until they understand the entire message anyway. It always gets me that in such projects they don't do simple things before they lock stuff away, or send a message, like: give a bunch of (non-computing) students the devices / data and don't tell them what it is, how it works. Make sure they've never heard of the project you're working on, then lock them in a room with the data / devices and see what they do. If they can't decode it completely, your project is too elaborate and will not meet its aims. If they only decode it because of their knowledge of the area, then get someone else. Until an average mathematician / physicist / whatever can decode it, it's too complicated to be decoded by a post-nuclear generation and / or ET considering their inherent communication problems in some circumstances anyway.
I have a good feeling that the Voyager golden records would never be completely decoded in such circumstances.
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Squirrels or raccoons?
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Does this include the DRM keys? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Let's hope that there are enough pirated CDs and DVDs :)
Encrypted formats? (Score:1)
Did they remember... (Score:2)
Did they remember to include information on how to read the BBC Doomsday project laserdiscs?
I believe the required laserdisc players went out of production something more than 10 years ago and spare parts stopped being manufactured something like 5 years ago.
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Don't forget CEDs [wikipedia.org].
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Reading the "dots" wouldn't help you in seeing the image data stored on a laserdisc: It's not a binary format.
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Reading the "dots" wouldn't help you in seeing the image data stored on a laserdisc: It's not a binary format.
Doesn't that make it a lot easier to decode, then?
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Depends upon your definition of "easier"...
It may seem intuitive to us to spin the disc at a specific speed (dependent upon where on the disc you're reading from, this is all a massive oversimplification) and then read the data with a photodiode, filtering the signal with a few passive components before feeding that into the composite video input of a television but such details may not seem so intuitive in a few years when old CRT displays and their signaling technology has long disappeared into the sunset
Can't escape moore's law... in 8yrs (Score:3, Insightful)
With distributed technology, cloud servers, and bit torrent, to spend a few million to store a few formats and keycodes on moving tectonic plates seems a bit illogical. Humans didn't do it 10000 years ago and we still figured out what happened back then.
Re:Can't escape moore's law... in 8yrs (Score:4, Insightful)
Humans didn't do it 10000 years ago and we still figured out what happened back then.
Don't forget the cave paintings, scrolls, clay tablets and the like. (:
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Please refresh my memory - how did they build Stonehenge? The great pyramids? Lightsabers?
I wonder... (Score:2)
We have heard of cloning by grabbing the DNA from a cell and putting it into an embryo or stem cell or whatever. But have we ever sequenced DNA, transferred the data, used it to replicate a DNA molecule, and then make a living organism from it? If we can do that, then recording DNA is good. If we can't, perhaps we ought to first work on the restoration process. We could literally seed and populate distant worlds with DNA from our planet by building a tiny factory with a database and sending it out to lan
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Which leads me to ask the question: Why would we want to seed other planets with organisms from the earth? Just to perpetuate ourselves? What a strange idea.
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I did. But as another responder pointed out, the term "Digital DNA" got me to thinking about this OTHER idea. Perhaps I could have chosen my words better, but still... it got me thinking and that's what I was thinking about. DNA data about various life forms are being recorded even now. I just wonder about "assembly" instructions and the ability to make viable organisms.
Hope they don't lose the key to the door (Score:5, Interesting)
I can just imaging after the next war / asteroid / depression / pandemic all these people standing outside this massive steel door, wondering what the hell was inside it?
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People have been able to figure out how to break rock for a very long time.
The barrier to entry keeps out those who panic, yet rewards diligent effort in future.
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I remember reading in some sci fi book about a vault that was sealed by attaching a chunk of a long-lived radioisotope to the back of a tight fitting steel door such that the heat released caused the door to expand and jam tightly into the frame. The idea was that it could only be opened by a fairly advanced civilisation that was capable of artificial refrigeration, plus of course able to recognise what was needed. I always found that an intriguing idea although anyone sufficiently determined could probably
Hallelujah? (Score:1)
Let the great age of Apple IIe emulation last forevermore.
Lack of foresight (Score:2)
In twenty-five years, there will be no way to decode the data format they used to store their data about decoding data formats. :P
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On a tangentally related note... (Score:3, Insightful)
With modern CNC/rapid prototyping tech, stone or fired clay tablets could actually be surprisingly painless, if still rather bulky. Printing with good toner on high quality paper(or something paper-esque but more durable, like Tyvek) would last pretty well, and be a lot smaller.
The more important decision would probably be how to express yourself: You'd probably want to use common world languages and math as much as possible. If you have to include binaries, you might even describe your own simple VM. If you needed better storage density, you could plaintext a description of, say, a barcode format, assuming that the future will have optical sensors good enough for the purpose, and then store the rest as barcodes printed/etched onto tablets...
And don't forget (Score:1)
Great idea, but... (Score:2)
The only flaw in their plan: the documents describing how to read these formats are stored on eight-inch floppies.
Obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/593/ (Score:3, Interesting)
What did they find? DRM Hell.
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Here's a clickable link of the xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/593/ [xkcd.com]
Torrent Time Capsule? (Score:2)
Loooong term storage (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been thinking about long term storage solutions for a while, and if we're looking at solutions that would survive floods, EMPs etc., pretty much all methods we have available today are done for. Also they require access to readers that may be ruined for whatever reasons.
Essentially I keep coming back to punch-cards or similar. Not into paper, but into something like anodized titanium [wikipedia.org]. The colour spectrum available there could allow something like 4 or 8 bit encoding per dot. Not entirely sure about how small you can make the dots, nor how close together you can put them if you want more than just two colours.
It'd be somewhat human readable, in that you just need a microscope to view the dots, and then it's just the usual translation method of course. And you could store a simple "dictionary" of cards with large dots + words/characters to make it easy to translate (a Rosetta Stone). And since it's titanium it's unlikely to be affected by the usual disasters. It doesn't melt until 1,668 C, so it's probably going to be quite stable in most types of fires, it pretty resistant to acids, the anodizing should go through the metal, so even sandblasting it won't remove the information (unless you cut through it of course).
Depending on the size of the dots, I think you could even make a simple credit card sized object, that you could show to a web cam to use as a private key for private/public key encryption, logging on to your workstation, getting in to a secure facility and so on.
And if done properly, you could probably disguise the key if necessary. You can already get custom backs/covers for your iPod/iPhone. Why not get one with this kind of back on it? Hide the key via something like steganography, making every n pixel a part of the key.
Re:Loooong term storage (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not paper?
Documents on papyrus and parchment will last 2000+ years if properly stored.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_sea_scrolls [wikipedia.org]
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If properly stored. Notice the possible disasters I mentioned? Or even if you store them properly. What happens when you start looking at them? Accidents happen.
And just how small can you make the characters, to make them readable later? The smaller the ink dot, the easier it is for it do disappear over time.
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Water - there are metal, stone, plastic casks that will remain water resistant over time. Or in a container in a salt mine, cave system, or geographically located where it won't flood. Like Jordan/Israel where the Dead Sea Scrolls were. Or...Black Hills of South Dakota, Wasatch range of Utah, Yucca Mountain, Missouri Karst.
EMP - Paper/parchment is remarkably resistant to EMP. I mean, a fractional orbital bombardment system with a multi-megaton nuke could go off over the US and all the paper would remain usa
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Essentially I keep coming back to punch-cards or similar. Not into paper, but into something like anodized titanium [wikipedia.org]. The colour spectrum available there could allow something like 4 or 8 bit encoding per dot. Not entirely sure about how small you can make the dots, nor how close together you can put them if you want more than just two colours.
My god: why?!
Let's say 3000 years from now someone were to discover such a tomb - a scientifically advanced civilization skilled in the sciences of the earth, sky, and mind.
What do you think their response would be if they were to find a tomb full of complexly-encoded data? Might they even not recognize it as such, initially?
It's somewhat presumptuous that their encoding methods would be even remotely similar to our's: they may have made an entirely different approach to "computing", for instance. Maybe the
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A major problem with using non-corroding metals is that they are usually valuable. So, for very long term storage there is a good chance that someone will come along and "loot" your archive, valuing the materials over the content.
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Not at all.
Just because titanium anodic films cannot be made thicker than about 300 nm, doesn't mean they can't ... uhm ... you know ... make you a 600 nm thick card?
*clears throat*
Okay, so that was me forgetting a rather basic fact.
I suspect it was because I started out with the punch card idea. The hole goes straight through ... so if we replace the hole with a colour, that'll work as well ...
swiss fort knox really exists! (Score:2)
at the data storage facility, known as the Swiss Fort Knox.
When I read that, I immediately thought that must be journalist speak with the intelligence level turned way down for the mass media. However, it seems to really exist:
http://www.swissfortknox.ch/swissfortknox-english/index.html [swissfortknox.ch]
"highest protection against ... " Blah blah blah long list of unlikely events. But it seems to exclude the extremely likely event of landslides and avalanches.
In related news... (Score:2)
Researchers reported that the combination to the door has been misplaced, possibly inside the vault itself. When asked, the grad-student replied, "Dude, I though you had it."
Rosetta Disk, Language Archive (Score:3, Informative)
"Digital DNA"? (Score:2)
Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary says they are trying to preserve data into the next century. It seems to me if you want to ensure the availability of information into the next century, the least efficient thing you could do is lock it in a highly-protected vault deep under a mountain that nobody can get to. Instead you ought to be distributing the information far and wide in as many formats as possible. Post it on Wikipedia and various other sites that are likely to be preserved and distributed themselves. Print lots of physical copies and put them in all the libraries around the world. Otherwise you're just hoarding it.
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I know the article is poorly written, but you could at least read it.
"...adding that the project had made open-use software available online to enable people to decipher data stored in defunct formats."
Isn't that what you're asking for?
Furthermore, what about the hardware? The article didn't say clearly, but it sounds like they've included hardware, so I would expect to see gear to read 9-track, Exabyte, paper tape, punchcard, QIC, floppy (about a dozen formats), WORM, Zip, Diablo, and more. (All of which -
Should I be scared? (Score:2, Insightful)
DNA is already digital (quaternary) (Score:2)
Put a copy online (Score:2)
I would think that it would be more productive to put a copy of this "digital key" online as a community accessible and editable (with moderation) resource. Open source programs that read these old formats (i.e., a library of sorts), ASCII documentation on each one, schematics of reference hardware, and the fostering of a community to maintain such a library (perhaps with funding) would probably go a longer way to ensure that an *.odt or *.xlsx document from today is still easily readable in 25 years.
That
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Obviously, it's in "key.doc"
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Ok, but this begs a simple question: how is the information describing the file formats itself encoded?
It's printed on surplus thermal fax paper from the 70's. That stuff will last forever!
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Just a demonstration of why the most important thing about data preservation is choosing the right technology: I went to Wendy's last week and found out the hard way that they use thermal paper to print their receipts. By the time I got to where you're going, the heat from the food had turned my receipt into a charcoal-grey blob with indistinct writing....
Acid-free paper goes a long way, but ultimately they need to put acid-free paper maps TO the vault all over the place, paint them on sides of buildings,
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Err... by the time I got to where I was going.... This is what happens when you completely rewrite a sentence one too many times.
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Acid-free paper goes a long way, but ultimately they need to put acid-free paper maps TO the vault all over the place, paint them on sides of buildings, etc. so that if civilization collapses, somebody millennia from now will be able to find the vault.
Hey, perhaps they should store all the stuff in a MySQL database. I've heard that it's ACID-free as well.
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We have a similar vault (warehouse) of old tech at my work. Our data recovery folks have to deal with computer generated data going back to the 60's. Bleah!
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Klingon of course.