Norway's Doomsday Vault Will Now Store and Protect the World's Data (wired.co.uk) 84
Doomsday may be closer than ever, but thanks to the Arctic World Archive, at least your data could survive the looming apocalypse. From a report: Norway is already the home to the Global Seed Vault, a frozen ark for 1.5 million seeds to avoid their extinction, and now the Arctic World Archive aims to do the same for your data -- in the same disused mine in the same mountain on the island of Svalbard, famous for its polar bear population. Run by a small Norwegian archiving company called Piql, the World Arctic Archive will store key documents, books and other files on photosensitive film held in protective boxes, a technique Piql says it's tested to survive for at least 500 years and believes will last for 1,000. That longevity is helped by the storage location. More on this here.
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The Chinese government stole my background case file for my security clearance a few years ago. So, yes, I believe a government is out to get me.
I'm in the same boat – the US OPM data breach.
Think more broadly, though. Your own government could be out to get you, too.
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Think more broadly, though. Your own government could be out to get you, too.
That would require the Republicans to negotiate among themselves on a common agenda to get something done. I don't expect that to change in the near future.
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Run by a small Norwegian archiving company called Piql...
Yeah right, and no ties at all with CIA, Soros? Oh wait, Gates 'Foundation'?
Where does all that money come from?
Why not microfilm? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're encoding data on film, but you still need a digital camera or computer to read it, you still might be screwed and the data might be inaccessible. By microfilming the source docs, all you need is a light source and a magnifying glass -- both of which are decidedly analog and low-tech compared to the method being used for this project. Plus sliver halide microfilm lasts at least 500 years if properly stored. Either you're taking the digital component out of it, or you're not. Having a digital requirement in there might make the data inaccessible in a post-electricity, post-digital world post-apocalypse.
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Yes, it seems dumb to put the data in some weird non-standard film-based format.
Books. Those last.
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Storing digital on film negatives makes sense. At a bare minimum, it is equivalent ounce-for-ounce to a CD-ROM. That's if each pixel is binary. This is film we're talking about, with a huge dynamic range, so storing the digital with grayscale pixels to represent, say, hexadecimal values, increases the storage capacity by leaps and bounds without changing the weight of the medium.
And, with a human-readable portion, instructions for interpretation of the pixels (digital data) are written on the media itsel
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Books last, until someone decides to burn them.
I'm opposed to this expansion of what the vault is meant for, because by storing data, pictures and other things that some might disagree with, it becomes a target. I think that reduces the chance of the seed vault surviving a ragnarok quite tremendously.
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Playing right into the polar bears' paws (Score:3)
They've been playing the long-game for thousands of years now. But soon enough, they will make their move.
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The polar bears that found it did not touch it. They seemingly had no interest in a fresh carcass. It was left alone and started rotting away. After three years it had reached peak rotten, and all the polar bears started eating it up really fast.
It proves that even polar bears are connoisseurs when it comes to food, so this idea that they are waiting for the perfect moment is not so far away from the trut
"Doomsday may be closer than ever" (Score:1)
Stopped reading right there.
Don't forget instructions to read it! (Score:1)
Would kind of suck for the people 500 years from now to find this, but have no idea what it is or what it does.
Instructions to make alcohol.. (Score:2)
Include directions on making alcohol, the rest will happen naturally.
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Step 1: Boil up these here seeds to make a mash.
Step 2: Let the mash sour. etc.
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If they are curious enough, they will develop machines that are as advanced as the ones we had in the ancient times!
Or they'll find that film is a great way to get a really good fire going...
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It has human-readable instructions on the medium, along with the digital data.
It is exactly this that is described in US Patent 8,163,403 [uspto.gov].
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It has human-readable instructions on the medium, along with the digital data.
It is exactly this that is described in US Patent 8,163,403 [uspto.gov].
CORRECTION: My link is accurate, but the US Patent is 8,085,304.
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Admittedly, I didn't read too much into this. Mostly just expressing the first thing I thought of when I read the summary, which isn't usually very insightful stuff anyways.
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Admittedly, I didn't read too much into this. Mostly just expressing the first thing I thought of when I read the summary, which isn't usually very insightful stuff anyways.
LOL. Yeah, I should have just skipped your Comment as DNRTFA, but my Comment was most appropriate as a Reply to another – one like yours.
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and did they use the same testing protocol that came up with "100 year archival gold CD-R" disks that degrade after less than 10 years?
unforeseen problems. (Score:4, Funny)
scientist> All the world's most valuable information has been stored in this room!
politician> All of it? Then why are you asking for so much additional funding?
scientist> You see those two mountains?
politician> Yeah?...
scientist> The one on the left will be filled with porn and the one on the right with pictures of cats.
politician> My God, it's beautiful!
the SAME disused mine, SAME mountain, SAME island (Score:3)
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Let just hope that mountain in Norway isn't the target of some rouge asteroid or other geologically significant event.
Nor a rogue president or other politically significant event.
Copyright issues? (Score:2)
Copyright issues?
So if the RIAA, MPAA and others going to demand that they screen for copyrighted movies, music and more before they are stored there?
Re: Copyright issues? (Score:1)
There are no copyright issues at play.
In every country in the world signed to the Berne convention, it is legal to obtain any copyrighted material you wish.
It is also legal to do almost anything with it, the exception being to distribute it.
Material going into the mountain is fine.
Material leaving the mountain would be subject to copyright law.
Since the announced plan is to NOT let the information out until after a global disaster, no laws will be broken until after said disaster.
Let the MPAA/RIAA enforce t
good idea? (Score:3, Interesting)
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noone is going to take an army to go to Arctic to destroy seeds, but they might to destroy an Archive, and while they are there they'll trample the seeds...
It goes both ways. If the day comes we actually need the seeds, whoever is fighting over them isn't going to give a shit about a couple of books. Every additional target you put in one location increases the risk to each of the others.
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This is my concern too. It makes the vault a target for anyone who wants to suppress history or knowledge, like most dictators.
It better not contain any climate change research...
Heck, it probably makes it a target for big media too, who won't care one bit if they bankrupt the entire vault and its future operations for what it was originally meant for.
Re: like most dictators (Score:2)
Screw with em (Score:1)
Who invented the time machine? (Score:2)
So this magic film has been tested to last for 500 years, eh? Was the film really invented (and the testing started) back in 1517? Or has someone finally invented a time machine or maybe a telephone to the future, at least?
It simply is not possible to test something's viability for an extended time period with having that time period actually elapse! Some real-world processes simply cannot be rushed or physically simulated. Just because a thing survives one year at 500 times normal usage or exposure or
Re:Who invented the time machine? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you fully understand the behavior of a material, you should be able to give a pretty good swag at it's lifetime. Nothing magical occurs, the material loses an average of xxx molecular connections upon exposure to xxx photons, or xxx heat, or whatever. You can test using various acceleration environments and extrapolate based on what you learn. If half of an iron bar rusts out over a month, you don't need to wait another month to know that the rest of it will rust away in a month.
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Yes, science is the key word. It allows you to make predictions about materials. In my example, obviously if the conditions change, then so will the corrosion rate of the iron. And here is the important bit - in a predictable way. If you tell me what the conditions are, I can make a pretty good swag at how long the iron will last.
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Let's see...bar rusts in half in 1 month, so you have len(bar)/2. The next month it rusts in half and you get...ah, nevermind, we've all been down that rabbit-hole before. Mod me redundant and we'll move on.
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I think that is the main thrust of this whole effort - creating a safe controlled space. Plus, if you notice, he's given himself an enormous amount of wiggle room, basically 750 years, give or take 250.
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I can't help but notice that you are using sciency language to describe a known phenomenon. That's great, and it's why we can rate a bridge without running heavier and heavier cars over it until it fails.
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I think everything you just said jibes very well with his statement. He's basically guaranteeing 500 years, and then saying it could be as high as 1000. That's nearly parallel to your example of a bridge being guaranteed up to a rated weight limit, but in reality the upper bound is not known. As for duration, I'm sure you could design a bridge that would last 500 years if it were stored in a hermetically sealed container deep in a dry cavern.
Preserve the languages (Score:4, Insightful)
Languages change. 500 years from now, will people be able to understand our current writing?
For the languages of the data that is stored in Norway, I suggest that they store a dictionary in those languages.
They should also store books on how to learn those languages. They might store books like the ones I used when I studied German in high school. Those books were completely in German. In the beginner's book, the first page had a small red rectangle, a small blue rectangle, and a small green rectangle, etc. Next to each rectangle was the German word for that color. So we learned those colors in German. Then the book showed the picture of hands pointing to rectangles of various colors. Next to them were the German words for "This is red.", or "This is blue.", etc. So we learned how to make those simple sentences. Then the book built on that, making the sentences more complicated, and introducing more words.
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I think any decent cryptanalyst with a copy of a dictionary and even the barest type of translations (e.g. thousands and thousands of books, documents, etc. in easily-readable electronic format) would make mincemeat out of learning any language.
It really is such "day one" junk of discovering such an archive that would occupy almost no effort or time at all compared to actually interpreting the archive as a whole.
Most of our efforts to translate ancient languages come from there being not enough data stored,
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Languages change. 500 years from now, will people be able to understand our current writing?
We can read Babylonian, Egyptian Heiroglyphs, Old English, Mayan. 500 years isn't that long.
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Yeah, anything that's Rosetta Stonish should work. Another thought is that languages aren't changing as quickly now due to mass literacy.
Not very high (Score:1)
Tempting fate (Score:2)
I have this vision of aliens landing and finding the vault on Svalbard as the only trace of humanity's existence. The head researcher sticks the flash drives in the ground while vainly attempting to extract all of our books and films from the seeds. Glumly, they radio home to file a No Contact and move on to the next planet.
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**Doomsday may be closer than ever,**
That is a stupid fucking statement to make.
Not so much. Doomsday is real––the sun will engulf the earth, eventually.
That time is approaching, and ever-closer, albeit not on a human time-scale. It's true, but irrelevant.