Geocities To Be Made Available As a 900GB Torrent 215
An anonymous reader writes "Felt a shortage of the blink tag in your life lately? Well, have no fear. One year after Geocities was shut down in a cost-cutting move by Yahoo, a group self-styled as 'The Archive Team' have announced they will be releasing a ~900GB torrent file archive. It doesn't have every single site, but they believe they got most of it. The team believes that it's important to not just delete our digital culture, and as crazy as Geocities may have been, it was an important cultural milestone in the history of showing that anyone could create content online."
might be interesting to host it? (Score:4, Interesting)
if I had the bandwidth for a good price, I'd consider it.
Re:Well, crap (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:might be interesting to host it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Considering that I'm already seeding a certain 790 GiB torrent [nyaatorrents.org] this shouldn't be a big deal.
Its true. its digital history. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:might be interesting to host it? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.geocities.ws/ [geocities.ws] has been doing it for a while already.
Internet Archive should pick this up. (Score:4, Interesting)
Good.
The Internet Archive should pick this up, if they haven't already. I'll talk to some people.
Archiving is getting easier. I had a minor part in preserving the archives of the Stanford AI lab. That required weeks of loading 6250bpi 2400 foot open reel tapes.
Re:might be interesting to host it? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, its architecture is very well suited to doing exactly what you want, having content intelligently hosted by a large number of independent nodes.
Seriously, have you tried it? If you don't need anonymity, then Freenet is extremely underperforming and extremely dumb. A much better solution for this use case would simply be to create a special torrent client that would only store say 5% of the torrent, because you have global statistics at the tracker each new peer will download the rarest parts so in total you'd have a full seed. It could be trivially adjusted to work across many torrents, so that it'd continuously choose the least populated torrents and slowly rotate that content in.
Re:On the contrary, the web must forget (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and and for an example in the digital realm: the Apollo Guidance Computer is now flying Apollo spacecraft around the Earth and Moon in simulators, which was possible primarily because packrats kept old software listings in their basement for decades which were scanned, OCR-ed and then hand-fixed where required in order to recreate the original binaries to run in an emulator. The Saturn guidance computer which put the Apollo spacecraft into orbit is not, because there were no packrats to keep the software and IBM appears to have thrown it away or lost it.
Re:On the contrary, the web must forget (Score:3, Interesting)
It sure does... (Score:1, Interesting)
I am (I assume) younger than you, but I also have very fond memories of the site. I am now in college (turning 21 soon) and began studying HTML when I was 11 or so.
The thing is... My father was a software engineer and I was intrigued by computers but didn't really know anything about them. You know how some kids tell stories about how they've seen monsters and whatnot? Well, when I was in the second grade I told stories about how I tried to hack CIA and got through the first two firewalls but not past the third... Of course, I had no idea what a firewall was but I knew it had something to do with hacking. (Actually, I seem to have possessed the amount of knowledge that is required if one intends to write or direct a hacker movie)
Anyways. I eventually asked my father to teach me some computer language. He was boggled by the question and asked what exactly I would like to learn. My answer was "What is, for example, the computer word for 'red'?". Oh, the memories... Anyways, he ended up teaching me some HTML. The first actual "site" I created was a website for IDGR (Imitate Demons Group. Inside joke.), which was my operation Flashpoint clan. That would put it somewhere around 2001-2002...
I put the "site" in quotes because it was... Well... It was what could be expected. :) A dark green background, text flowing from top to bottom, some links at the bottom to act as a navigation... The text might or might not have been red. There was definitely an animated skull GIF... But that's not the point. The point is that it got me interested in creating stuff on a computer. (I now study Software Engineering, following in my father's footsteps [Okay, he studied electrical engineering at the time... But the point remains])
Perhaps even more importantly... I have some very fond memories. Fond memories of the pleasure of learning. Fond memories of spending time with my father... Parents, remember to be geeky with your kids. They'll appreciate it just as much as some kids might appreciate memories about playing baseball with their father!
But alas... I'm rambling. And I'm too young to have nostalgic ramblings like this. Geocities was indeed an important milestone, both for the internet and for many individual people. As horrible as the sites were, it warms my hear to know that all that content isn't lost. It still exists somewhere. And 50 years from now, some sociologist browsing through it might find himself at the dark green IDGR website and dedicate a few second to wondering what is the story behind it, before he moves on to the next site.
Re:might be interesting to host it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, so Freenet is not dumb it's blind. It's got plenty intelligence in trying to navigate in the dark, but it doesn't come close to a tracker that keeps an overview over who and how many have each piece. All the guesswork you do on Freenet can basically be replaced with "Part 252 exists in 12 copies. The IPs that have it are: aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd, ...." The performance would be just like a normal torrent because it would make direct connections, not via tons of other nodes. You could download the whole thing with a normal torrent client because they're all just act like torrent peers, they just start "seeding" after reaching their wanted percentage.
Here's a rough draft of the changes:
1. User sets a size limit, say 10 GB.
2. We calculate sum(size of torrents) = 1000 GB.
3. We download (10/1000) = 1% of each torrent
4. A timer will delete the 5% most redundant pieces
5. The client redownloads from 0.95% to 1.00%
Granted that doesn't actually balance across torrents, it gives each torrent a fixed pool relative to the total size so it could be smarter. But that's a first iteration that could probably be up in a day.