ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

FUCK THE CLOUD —

This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this position. So here we go.

FUCK THE CLOUD.

By the cloud, of course, I mean this idea that you have a local machine, a box running some OS, and a vital, distinct part of what you do and what you’re about or what you consider important to you is on other machines that you don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand. These machines are connected via the internet, and if you have a company then these other machines are not machines run by your company, and if you’re a person they are giving it to you without you signing anything accompanied by cash or payment that says “and I mean it“.

Can I be clearer than that? It’s a sucker’s game. It’s a game suckers play. If you are playing it, you are a sucker.

The term, like many of its sort, has deep, deep roots in the industry that it’s being foisted upon. I’m in no mood to find specific citations today but you can be assured that the idea of a “cloud” to represent the outside network was on whiteboards that I saw working as a temp in NYNEX research labs in the late 1980s. And even by that date, it was an understood context, one going back years before.  (Terms I’ve seen retrofitted to give both the sense of timeliness and timelessness include zero-day, warez, and the war- prefix).

But this new round of it comes pre-packaged with marketer infestation. After all, it’s a great word: it insinuates soft fluffiness, a size and grandeur, and a fuzzy meaninglessness. So if you fail to deal with the underlying hard facts and cases, who can blame you? It’s a cloud. Soft, huggable cloud, I do love you and your rounded edges.

But what this all kind of hides is the situation of how you feel about stuff you generate.

Let me step aside and say that as a historian guy, I am big into collecting a lot of cast-offs. This is what I do. I’ve downloaded thousands of podcasts and millions of blog posts and a lot of other insane stupid stuff. We’ll get from that what we can, in the future. This is not about that.

This is about your data. This is about your work. This is about you using your time so that you make things and work on things and you trust a location to do “the rest” and guess what, here is what we have learned:

  • If you lose your shit, the technogeeks will not help you. They will giggle at you and make fun of your not understanding the fundamental principles and engineering of client-server models. This is kind of like firemen sitting around giggling at you because you weren’t aware of the inherent lightning-strike danger of improperly bonded CSST.
  • Since the dawn of time, companies have hired people whose entire job is to tell you everything is all right and you can completely trust them and the company is as stable as a rock, and to do so until they, themselves are fired because the company is out of business.
  • You are going to have to sit down and ask yourself some very tough questions because the time where you could get away without asking very tough questions with regard to your online presence and data are gone.

These questions that you have all work around that other overused word: value. To me, history guy, your old junk you used to do is of interest to me. But there’s a lot of people and a lot of stuff, so I wouldn’t want you to do it just for little ol’ me. But for yourself? What about yourself?

What of your work do you value? All of it? Likely not. The time you spend downloading a lot of porn, for example, is pretty cool, and if you lost all the porn, you’d probably be unhappy, but you could probably get the porn back or brand new porn that’s like porn 3.0 and new levels of porn. Probably the same for movies, for music – oh no, this data is gone, but why worry about it, you didn’t make the music or movies, so it’ll work itself out.

Less so the things you make: the writing, the linking of friends, the combined lists you collaborate on – maybe that has some value to you. When you die, of course, everyone else starts attaching arbitrary value to things you worked on or forgot about. A childhood photo of you has new meaning because the person the child became is gone. The essay you wrote in elementary school about being successful has more meaning because you turned out to be very successful. Again, this is value imposed from outside.

So what, then? What is really of meaning to you? Your twitters? Your weblog entries? Your list of bookmarks? Your photos? What?

Because if you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service (or ad-supported service), quietly flinging you past an End User License Agreement that indicates that, at the end of the day, you might as well as dragged all this stuff to the trash. If it goes, it’s gone.

There was a time when we gave the Cloud (before it was a Cloud) a big pass because technology was kind of neat and watching it all actually function is cool. I mean, if someone gives you an amazing Moon Laser and the Moon Laser lets you put words on the side of the moon, the fact that the Moon Laser’s effects wear off after a day or so isn’t that big a deal, and really, whatever you probably put on the side of the Moon with your Moon Laser is probably pretty shallow stuff along the lines of “WOW THIS IS COOL” and “FUCK MARS”. (Again, to belabor, a historian or anthropologist might be into what people, given their Moon Laser, chose to write, but that’s not your problem). Similarly so, with those early BBS writings, or the first web forums, or the first photo album sites, or the sites from 1993 and 1994. Interesting, neat, but your “work” among these halting baby steps isn’t causing you despair if it goes away. (And you’re pleasantly surprised when it shows up again, sometimes.)

Contrast, though, when people are dumping hundreds of hours a year into the Cloud. Blowing out photos. Entering day after day of entries. Sharing memories, talking about subjects that matter to them. Linking friends or commenting on statuses or trading twitters or what have you. This is a big piece, a very big piece of what is probably important stuff.

Don’t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff. Hell yeah, use the Cloud, blow whatever you want into the Cloud. The Internet’s a big copy machine, as they say. Blow copies into the Cloud. But please:

  • Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of.
  • Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid. Make fun of these people, and their shitty little Cloud Cities running on low-grade cooking fat and dreams. They will die and they will take your stuff into the hole. Don’t let them.
  • Recognize a Cloud when you see it. Are you paying for these services? No? You are a sucker. You are giving people stuff for free. I pay for Vimeo and I pay for Flickr and a couple other things. This makes me a customer. Neither of these places get my only copy of anything.
  • If you want to take advantage of the froth, like with YouTube or so Google Video (oh wait! Google Video is going off the air!) then do so, but recognize that these are not Services. These are not dependable enterprises. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties are cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.

So please, take my advice, as I go into other concentrated endeavors. Fuck the Cloud. Fuck it right in the ear. Trust it like you would trust a guy pulling up in a van offering a sweet deal on electronics. Maybe you’ll make out, maybe you won’t. But he ain’t necessarily going to be there tomorrow.

And that’s that.

Update:

I wrote this article in January of 2009. Naturally, people who make/made their living off of the concept of “The Cloud” had awesome opinions, some of them by phone. In response, I’ve written a number of follow up articles:

Dancing on Magnolia’s Grave: Fuck the Cloud II

Oh Boy, The Cloud

Outlook is Cloudy

Finally, people who go “wow, I don’t even care about this, I just like that you write long rants that drive people insane” should probably be directed to FaceFacts.

157 Comments

Google Catalogs, RIP —

I’m rather conflicted about the death of Google Catalogs, an excellent tech demonstration by Google of reading and browsing through catalogs of all stripe, implementing near-seamless searching of the content via OCR, so you could search for, say, “tuna hat” and if any of their catalogs (which went into the hundreds) had a tuna hat, you would see it instantly, along with a contextual shot of the catalog page with this text. I mean, that’s pretty amazing. It blew me away back in 2001 when I saw it. It was like magic.

I know the story of this being a side project scanned in a back room at Google and that it grew in attention and space and eventually had a pretty amazing site going. I know, on a historical basis, that these catalogs are themselves historically interesting. Maybe I’m weird that way, but if you browse, for example, the Shelburne Holiday Catalog from decades ago, you can find in it all sorts of perspective on consumer electronics, the process of selling these items, and all the attendant history of that 1983 period. It makes me sad to think all these scanned catalogs will now disappear, although I’m sure within the context of google it will not disappear. We just won’t get to see it.

But having said this and having been sad about the prospect of Google Catalogs’ impending death (and hey, nice 24 hour fucking warning, guys) is the other secret situation, which is Google totally dropped the ball on that site.

The LAND’S END catalog, a constantly updating entity if there ever was one, wasn’t updated for years. Many of them hadn’t been updated for years. The weblog entry that announces the closure indicates that it “hasn’t been as popular as some of our other products”, well fucking yeah. If your site is about catalogs and you don’t update the catalogs for years then people tend not to go to you for catalogs. The “popularity” they speak of is internal popularity, the willingness of people within the company to allocate resources for the somewhat unsexy prospect of scanning catalogs.

They could have opened connections with companies to send them TIFF or JPG files directly. They COULD have offered PDFs. They COULD have set up something where they got some money for doing all this service. But they didn’t and I’m not in the Second-Guess Google’s Business Model business.

But I’m right. The shine is off the apple, the bloom is off the rose. I’m really glad I got to see it before things turned grey and I have one or two very specific people to thank for that; I will never forget it.

I think we have some interesting time ahead.

Oh, and P.S., I’m adding 12 gigabytes of product manuals to pdf.textfiles.com today.

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Haloooooooooooooooooooooooooh. —

DELICIOUS GHOST SANDWICH

To everyone I have ever played a game of Halo with, who was spectacularly good when their levels indicated they had barely started within the game; to all those folks whose profile implied they were but mere novices in the Halo 3 universe and yet showed surgeon-like precision in playing against me, utilizing tricks I’d never seen before… I apologize.

I thought you were playing the game. To that end, starting over with a new account so that you would be matched against folks slowly gaining in rank and skill and who were unbelievably overmatched by your tsunami of Halo-induced terror.. well, that would be a dick move.

But today, while talking with a young sprite I’d been matched up against in a doubles match, and faced against two users whose names were, I am not kidding, you can get and it on ebay, a new perspective was foisted upon me.

They’re playing for money.

I know I will sound sarcastic and mean here, but I’m not: this explains everything. It’s a total load off my mind. I was trying to figure out this insane, bizzare behavior by some of these guys. They would have 20 games under their belt and be just massively ranked up. And when they played, well, fuck. They’d run through deadly power drains, run straight at me, drop down from high heights to crack my shit up. It was like fighting The Alien over and over, and I kept wondering what joy there was in playing like an insane kamikaze in a game that encourages, at least peripherally, some strategy.

But see, if it’s for money, then it all makes sense.

What they do is get the accounts up to the top tier (Level 50) as fast as possible, and then sell it on Ebay. Go do a search for “Halo” and “50” and you will see “Halo 50 for Sale” and “We do Halo 50s” and even the scratched out beginnings of a competitive market, with laudings of “we do any variant” and throwing around words like “guaranteed” and “ready to go“, indicating they have, of all things, a stock.

Oh, the confusion and anger that has drained away from me.  These aren’t players, these are wage slaves. They’re not playing a game, they’re at their second job. With this cash, all manner of pot, beer, road trip, food and accessory money is being made. They’re hustling. I can get behind hustling.

Shit, son. Do you know how I made money from 1993-1995? Let’s make that one clear. I used to draw caricatures while dressed in a cow suit. I should make a whole weblog entry on that, but let me just say, that when I was out there at 10pm, dressed like a moron and taking it from crazy college drunks, hangin’ with the homeless and listening to that completely burnt out musician play “No Woman No Cry” for the hundredth fucking time, it was because I’d walk home with a couple hundred bucks. Money I used to pay rent, or be able to take my date out to a nice place, or otherwise get myself a little something to get through the day. That’s right. I’d buy 100-packs of 3.5″ floppies for my Amiga.

I know, I know, a lot of you are going duhhhhhh but that’s because I didn’t think it through. I play Halo because it is a game. I forgot how far things had gone. They’ve gone quite far indeed.

I’ll let you guys have a pass next time. After all, times are tough. And when you’re at the bottom of the wage barrel in an online sweatshop, a little hand up anywhere probably makes your day.

6 Comments

Rob Swindell and the Synchronet Museum —

I interviewed Rob Swindell for the BBS Documentary. At the time, he looked like this:

This is, believe it or not, officially 6 and a half years ago. Time really does fly!  And if you need any further proof of that, his kid was asleep next to me during the interview, here:

And here she is (with younger sister and mom) roughly nowadays:

It is awesome for me to be this old.

Rob’s interview took place around 1 in the morning, too. As I wrote in the journal entry for this particular interview:

I entirely misjudged how long it would take me to drive to Los Angeles, and by the time I got in, it was very late. It was late enough that Rob Swindell’s wife got on the phone when I called in and said it would probably be a good idea for me to sleep somewhere, and not risk crashing the car pushing myself. As it was, I was less than 20 miles from their house at that point, so I went for it. Rob and his wife were very gracious to have me show up so late for an interview, and although the footage doesn’t demonstrate it, it is in fact not an appropriate hour for people to be showing up with cameras.

One thing that’s important to demarcate for Rob over a lot of my other interviewees was that he was one of the few BBS software authors still actively writing and maintaining his software. In fact, he still maintains it to the present day. Add on top of this that he was originally a commercial developer of the software, closed the business, and then turned his product into a totally free one, and you start to see why his perspective was so cool.

Just to bring up one bit of back and forth; Rob and I disagreed on the tone of my movie (it makes it seem BBSes are over) and I completely agree with his position. It was a total oversight on my part.  Here’s some of the original debate about it. We settled this a long time ago. He rules. I rule. Everything rules.

Anyway, Rob, not content to just merely maintain his software and to keep his work alive, and to do so basically for free, and have a full and cool life besides, recently compiled a whole bunch of material related to Synchronet into a museum. Here is his Synchronet Museum, which I have mirrored on bbsdocumentary.com. 

Rob’s attitude in the BBS Documentary as he appears is that of feeling like if you weren’t part of The Club you tended to get shut down or out of a lot of the happenings in the BBS “Industry”, and that he felt like an outsider or not being given a fair shake. His full interview will be on the archive.org collection soon, so you can hear his full discussion, but one of his points is my favorite because it involves a blimp.

At ONE BBSCON, the BBS Conference held by Boardwatch/ONE Inc., the Synchronet company had a blimp. A big ol’ blimp:

I think we can all agree; this is a very noticable blimp.  Rob indicated that throughout all the photos and coverage of ONE BBSCON, they never showed the blimp, and that this possibly was intentional. I did not speak to Jack Rickard or Phil Becker about this, but I am sure they have a different opinion about the blimp. Or no memory of the blimp. What I am saying is that all conflicts should include a blimp. 

Rob’s museum is excellent. It contains flyers, advertisements, writeups, press releases, photos, and all other sorts of materials related to his years with Digital Dynamics (the company) and Synchronet (the software). Were that all people involved with a product that forthright in coming up with their old stuff!

Rob’s the real deal. Check out the museum and enjoy his history.

5 Comments

STAND BACK, WE’RE ARCHIVISTS —

Well, when I wrote my initial angry screed and then followed it up with an angry screed responding to the resulting angry responses I knew I had to act, so I registered archiveteam.org, sat on the IRC channel I mentioned (#archiveteam on EFnet) and waited to see what would happen. I’ve called for projects with collaborators before and most of them tend to die out or not get off the ground.

Not so here.

archiveteam.org is growing by leaps and bounds, we’re having discussions on how best to use our energies, and a heady amount of debate and contentiousness is happening without being accompanied by the attendant bullshit usually cropping up in these situations.

Some people have known me for years. Others never heard of me until now. I won’t so far as to say we’re all friends now, but we’re listening to each other, things are getting done, and I am very, very appreciative.

I’d say more, but the site is the place to go. I am very excited. We’re doing something about it.

archiveteam

4 Comments

Tennis Court Phone —

There’s a strange bit of editing in Debbie Does Dallas I wanted to point out, since there’s something filmatic to be learned from it.

Debbie Does Dallas, in case you’ve missed it, is one of the most successful porn films of all time. The plot, such as it is, concerns some girls who are cheerleaders and want to go to Dallas. They need to raise money, and after they utterly fail at this, they determine that they can make money if they have sex with men for cash. I think I’ve caught the whole zeitgeist.

To this end, the movie is split into two distinct arcs: before and after the girls (Debbie, specifically) figure out that just flashing customers or employers will get even more cash than working. This set of arcs means that situations (working in record store, working in sports store, tennis instruction) are shown twice. Because the film was low budget, they shot both scenes concurrently.

So, in the shots I grabbed here, there’s a scene in the beginning where one of the girls helps two guys play tennis. Later, after this ground-breaking alternative funds acquisition methodology is discovered, she wears no underwear and she goes to a sauna and hooks up with them.

Somewhere in here, though, someone made an interesting choice.

It was decided that she needed to communicate with other characters that her approach of seducing/being seduced by the tennis players was a good idea and the other characters should do it. So they have her call them.

Except she’s on a tennis court. And a setup in another location is more needless filming.

So they combined it. They put a phone on the tennis court.

It’s really completely odd, when you look at it.

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I mean, it is literally that – a phone in the middle of a tennis court. It’s not on a table, or in a booth, or inside a cooler, or anything. The cord just kind of goes in another direction, off screen. She picks it up and talks on it.

Someone decided this was a good enough idea to bring the phone into the shot, set it up, and leave it while they did the filming. Someone decided this was a proper link between scenes. It is so jarring, I get re-surprised by it every time I see this movie, or catch a reference to it… the Tennis Phone. What the hell, man.

A lot of times, I see films with metaphorical Tennis Phones, jammed into places they shouldn’t be.  When desperation sets, when you find you have no link between two scenes or a character utterly lacks motivation, you sometimes have to fall back on your tennis phone. But the tennis phone should have been fixed long before you stepped on the court.

Either that, or you need lots and lots and lots of hardcore pornography. Just saying.

7 Comments

Team Archive is GO —

Registered, set up, and now live, ARCHIVETEAM.ORG is a wiki dedicated to saving data, assembling mirroring or retrieval efforts, and providing simple links to methodologies of archiving data. Think of it as a really profane, rough and tumble version of a library sciences convention.

If you are suddenly filled with a sense of outrage or helplessness about the datapocalypse, then stop on by.

9 Comments

Datapocalypso! —

Well, nothing like coming back from a holiday trip to find yourself slashdotted. Actually, there’s really nothing like finding yourself slashdotted back in 2001. Nowadays, not so much; a mere six thousand visitors over a couple days with a few more crawling in days after that.  Web servers have gotten pretty good at what they do and Slashdot has changed over the years, not representing the bottleneck and hit-gun it used to be.

What hasn’t changed at all is that awesome level of Opinion Tourist that accompanies the wave of page views and commentary. Within a short time, both on the Slashdot site itself and in my comments section of my entry, came a gaggle of responses ranging from insightful to, shall we say, distracted.

This jury of my sort-of-peers arrived as a result of this weblog entry, in which I describe the absolutely shitty way that AOL Hometown was shot behind the shed, and the deeper meaning and ramifications of this act with the amount of shared data resources we now depend on, not to mention the cultural/anthropological loss.

Positive responses were enjoyable/informative to read, as anybody agreeing with you tends to be an enjoyable read. Non-positive responses can be lumped into the following general headings:

  • Allow me to explain that I keep backups. I am awesome.
  • HOLY CRAP YOU SAID LAW I HATE LAW NOT SURE WHAT ELSE YOU’RE SAYING BUT HOLY SHITFUCK YOU SAID LAW
  • If The Service Is Free, No Compassion For Thee
  • Your comparison to evictions is terrible, based on a number of criteria that I mostly made up
  • I sure do hates me some AOL Hometown and the People Who Use It
  • Watch as if by magic I say something indicating that not only did I fail to read your weblog posting or consider what was discussed, I apparently didn’t even read the slashdot summary or, possibly, my screen.

Getting hung up on the solution set is a classic problem of a left-brained person: they see the issue being discussed and then a proposed solution, and instead of acknowleding the problem, they start re-engineering and insulting the solution, pointing out where the problem is. So a lot of people got way-laid by me saying “law”, some using the example of “I do free hosting, I would never be able to do this” or “How dare you consider passing a law, that’s like shoving radioactive rods up the nose of children.”

Let’s talk terms here. A guy who is giving free hosting to a couple buddies or even a business or two, especially if he’s not actually incorporated or a business, is a fucking couch. Obviously when we’re discussing the liability of hotel chains your lame RV parked over in the Wal-Mart down the street doesn’t count with regard to Innkeeper Legislation. OK? OK.

Similarly, I happen to think law is the solution in this case, because I am convinced the stakes are so high, with data being so critical to our infrastructure, not to mention our history. You may differ, and that’s why some places require almost no formal education to become a teacher while other places subject you to massive interview and evaluation cycles to get anywhere near a group of students alone. The Spectrum of Opinion, welcome to it. The fundamental discussion is whether this data retention is of sufficent importance to warrant attention.

One brain surgeon or two explained to me that real-live eviction law doesn’t allow for maintaining of space for an orderly exit. I beg to differ.

And as for “free”, I think we’re going to have a few rounds of root beers over whether a place, like Google, that browses through your e-mail via robots and uses it to generate statistically relevant advertisements on your page, or places like Flickr that do in fact have advertisements for seeing your content and charge you on top of that for additional features, or places like Ustream that have profit-sharing and used to do indirect advertisement but now overlay ads on your content, are “free”. Some people confuse “no money down” with free and that’s why they’re getting fucking kicked out of their houses, finding themselves at the mercy and procedures of actual eviction law.

But then again, people are people, and they turned a lot of this into a discussion of AOL Hometown specifically, and AOL Hometown policy, and what’s “right” and “good” and what they “had” or “didn’t” do, as if this wave of “sorta” was going to be convincing under any harsh light.

So let us be crystal clear about what the situation was with AOL Hometown’s shutdown; this was not a case of catastrophic disk failure or a revelation of bad data integrity practice. We’ve had plenty of these, most recently with a site called journalspace.com that was primarily mirroring but not backing up data and had a loss, permanently. This happens all the time and is really sad and we all get to stand here in the future and point fingers and giggle at the past, but it is not the situation being discussed here. AOL chose to shut down the site and pulled the data from being accessible; the webserver was disconnected and the URL redirected to a new location, where a smug little weblog posting was all that remained to mark its passing. The fact that you utilize a multi-tier self-started backup operations paradigm across geographically variant hoo-ha is not what we’re talking about, Poindexter.

This was a case where someone or a group of someones made a decision to take the site down, and by take down, they chose to rip it down posthaste, with a specific amount of “warning time”, and accompanied by a flawed, scattershot attempt to mail everyone associated with the sites, and then doing a massive, global redirect of many tens of thousands of “sites” to a single weblog posting. This procedure happened because of money issues, most certainly, and likely not out of a sense of evil or meanness, but it also happened in an environment where this approach was considered legitimate and valid. This is the heart of what I’m trying to get to: they saw absolutely nothing wrong with this.

They could have spun the data off to a separate firm. They could have contacted archive.org about a transfer of sites. They could have alerted the media in the manner that, say, some entities have posted public notices about auctions or bankruptcies. They could have made the timetable six months intead of four weeks. And, once the data was down, they could have provided a read-only, FTP-only, or otherwise non-browsable accessibility point that a person with the proper credentials could retrieve said data from for months from now, just like (for another real world example) a commercial entity will tell you that the material you used to keep with them is now being kept in a new location and with proper ID, you can retrieve it. They don’t just burn the fucking building down and then put up a sign saying “We burned the building! Thanks for visiting!“.

But right now, this approach is considered so inherently A-OK that a good percentage of people writing responses or nib-nabbery paragraphs about this situation totally skipped over it. Not only was the situation acceptable, it was beyond that – it’s considered normal. One of the core points I’m trying to make is that it shouldn’t be considered normal. As a archivist, this horrifies me. As a historian, it saddens me. And as a fifteen-year user of what people now call The Web, it infuriates me.

I happen to think it specifically being AOL Hometown is besides the point, but some people have decided to focus on it being AOL Hometown and ignore the larger issues, and never let it be said I can’t drill down to the specific from the general. So let’s go enjoy a history lesson.

September, 1998. The internet is still new enough that Jon Postel will not be dead for another month. Google has just been incorporated as a for-profit company, Paypal has been founded, and MySQL has been introduced. A 25 gigabyte hard drive is about to be announced by IBM. And does America Online have a deal for you!

If you are a member of AOL, your dashboard has a new service announced, called AOL Hometown. All you need to do is tell your AOL dashboard to pull in your site and they will double your disk capacity. For the majority of people pulling over to the service, this is a offer that’s almost impossible to refuse: people crow at the expansion of their sites up to 12 megabytes of disk space. Remember, though, that you can’t just be any old schmuck to sign up; you have to already be an AOL member, and it’s provided as part of your service with AOL.  As you can see in this message, it definitely costs money, and isn’t even cost competitive, in a world where you can get an extra 10 megs of hosting space for a dollar, “like you would use that much space to begin with”.

A lot of people hate AOL. AOL caused the September that never ended a mere five years previous, and even though Netscape and Microsoft were in the middle of what was called The Browser Wars and had done their part to turn the previously-more-technical Internet into a graphical interface, AOL was the leader in the ratio of preparation-to-deployment for users. People were being shoved onto the Internet at large and being given very little in the way of direction, but they all knew that one of the best values in the world was having A Web Page.

With A Web Page, you see, you could create a full-color, hyperlinked, beautiful page about any subject you wanted. At a time when color printing could cost you a dollar a sheet of paper, you could have a full-color presentation available all over the world. Perhaps a person who now carries a music machine with 80 gigabytes can’t envision this, but this technology was amazing, vast, and falling into the hands of people who wouldn’t have ever composed a newsletter, or even a diary. While it probably would have been great if everybody had been given Netcom accounts and made to learn about HTML the hard way, the trend was towards easier and easier methodology, and most importantly, some very non-technical people were given a voice.

AOL itself was purchased by Time Warner in 2000. Its fortunes rose and declined. Through this, AOL Hometown was shifted around, customer service experienced deep and wide-ranging changes, and over time it became harder to get customer service, to make sure you were notified of changes, and to be given news of your website, one which you might have not changed for a half a decade but which contained information, hopes, dreams, history.

The approach by which AOL deleted AOL Hometown was haphazard, obviously ad-hoc, and internally inconsistent. If you try and see the page where they explained to people how they might export data, you will find that this page has been deleted and backdated.

While four weeks seems like more than enough time for warning to some folks, the question rests: why? There are some very specific rules with the retention of financial data for a licensed company. Logs of Yahoo Searches are currently kept for 90 days, but that’s just Yahoo making stuff up based on social pressure; there’s no law in effect regarding this. Google simply says they will maintain your deleted mail for a limited time; there’s no policy with regard to how they would bail out Gmail data to you if they went under or shut down the service.

What? Google? Pshaw you say. Google is forever! Well, just look no further than their shutting down of Lively, a goodbye message that clearly states that “thousands” of chat rooms, locations and avatars were built by users, and which represented probably hundreds of not thousands of hours of work. And what was the export policy by Google? Well, please take a gander at their announcement: “We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.”.

FUCKING AWESOME. If a place that encouraged you to come in and place items you’d created, and was suddenly going to shut down, told you that you could use a point-and-click camera at the window to capture your “hard work”, you would be setting motherfuckers on fire.

The point is not “Google”, not this or that, but a general malaise and terrible lack of ethic with regard to this work. It’s considered a normal thing to ask if a discontinued product will be open sourced. They might say no, but it’s considered quite normal to ask. Similarly, it’s totally within the realm of reason to throw ideas of Creative Commons at any generated artwork; places like Flickr and now Wikipedia kind of force-funnel you down that road. You can choose not to, but it’s weird and a special case.

By the way…

Need further proof that AOL is just making stuff up like everyone else? Throughout November and halfway through December, all the files were still accessible. You could log in via an FTP site and download your files. It is believed they had 25 servers with this data, and they decided to delete them all at once, with no retention. AOL never explained this. Why should they? There’s no social stigma other than being told they suck, which the remaining employees are quite used to hearing. There’s certainly no law on retention or accessibility of this data. There’s just the chortling echos of technically-savvy website owners or people sitting on equally-shaky footing wiping their brow and being glad this sort of thing will never happen to them.

Until it does.

So what do we do?

Well, let me give a personal example.

Through one of the weblogs I browse, I found out a website called podango.com (a podcast hosting site) was going down. The word had gone out to subscribers of the service that the company was going to be going through some rough times, much as a hedgehog being thrown into a blender was in for some tough times, and maybe you should get your shit off our servers immediately. In line with what I’ve been talking about, they gave everyone five days at the end of December 2008 to do it. Five days. Five days versus four weeks; what’s the gooddamn difference? Technically savvy people given less than a week, over Christmas, to figure out how their data was going to be transferred, to figure out how to get RSS feeds transferred. Some people came back from holidays and found all their shit gone. Didn’t check e-mail during Christmas? Sorry, podcaster!

So what did I do?

I fucking downloaded it.

Check this out, kids:

30506       applephoneshow.podango.com
8242        caseclosed.podango.com
4           developer.podango.com
58280632    download.podango.com
5916        gildersleeve.podango.com
4           image.podango.com
14          insidepodango.com
4           my.podango.com
20          sites.google.com
2835048     supernova.podango.com
18128       suspense.podango.com
4           www.ilifezone.podango.com
8512904     www.podango.com
# find . -print | grep '[Mm][Pp]3' | wc -l
    4080
What you’re looking at is about 70 gigabytes of data from podango.com, lock stock and barrel. Over 4000 distinct episodes of podcasts. It took my machine five solid days to do it, but I downloaded all of that lame site. Do I have a favorite podcast on there? No. Did I know someone with a podcast on there? No.

I did it because I had the means (disk space), the motive (the sense of history and the recognition that this was historically relevant work representing thousands of hours) and the opportunity (a fast connection and five days before they were to die). A back-of-envelope calculation tells me I just rescued 41 days of podcast, along with all relevantly hosted images, show descriptions and XML data.

This one will pay back immediately; people are already contacting me, profusely thanking me.

So what am I saying here?

We need the A-Team.

archiveteam

ARCHIVE TEAM would be like CERT (the Computer Emergency Response Team) used to be, where it was a bunch of disparate people working together to solve a problem in a nimble and networked fashion. They’d find out a site was going down, and they’d get to work.

They’d go to a site, spider the living crap out of it, reverse engineer what they could, and then put it all up on archive.org or another hosting location, so people could grab things they needed. Fuck the EULAs and the clickthroughs. This is history, you bastards. We’re coming in, a team of multiples, and we will utilize Tor and scripting and all manner of chicanery and we will dupe the hell out of your dying, destroyed, losing-the-big-battle website and save it for the people who were dumb enough to think you’d last. Or the people who, finding you’d been around forever, had the utter gall to not be near their computers during your self-created, arbitrary sunset period.

Archive Team would also help publicize your demise in their mailings and discussions, getting the word out to a greater audience that you were dying. If law isn’t the answer, vigilante teams of mad archivists are the answer.

I really don’t have the time to formalize this, so feel free to take up my torch and run around setting barns on fire. I’ll stay on #archiveteam on EFnet for a while, in case people want a place to hang out. Set up a bot. Set up a way to communicate things are dying or that a site needs reverse engineering to yank the crap out. Find out where a mirror ended up, or what needed said mirror. Let’s do this thing.

Anyway, so there’s my clarification.

UPDATE: Holy crap, Archive Team is now real. Check it out.

40 Comments

The Little Black Diamond —

This little guy showed up in my “pending” folder of suspected spam:

FleexuplixBes
SOMEWHERE/members/natashha
SOMEWHERE@gmail.com
91.124.200.77
Submitted:

Great web-site!!! You did an amazing job!!! I enjoyed watching the videos!!! You guys are great!
Talking about ideas, there\s this really good show, which I like a lot, and I\m sure you\ve heared about it. It\s called STOMP. What these guys do is so cool, I saw them live in NY. I\m sure you can do the same and even better. It really turns people on. Just an idea, hope it could be any helpful.
figa nere
boy love
vacanze in brasile
immaggini diddl

I am fascinated by this little guy on several levels.

First of all, any attempt to be a real person is gone; this thing has no gumption between talking in friendly terms but then switching over to telling you about boy love and going to brazil. (And aren’t I delighted that I will match searches for these terms.)

It compliments freely about any number of things that might be on my website. It tells me about the musical STOMP, and then indicates that the person running the weblog might actually surpass this production. The name is nonsense, the URLs sprinkled around (I took them out) go in all directions.

Honed down to a near science, there must be profit in leaving comments like this, talking in this way. If a script or a hired person is doing it, they must be doing so at the behest of someone trying to accomplish something. This black diamond of text is a years-honed art now poked into any of our communications. It is a dense creation meant to attract attention. It is small and manageable, but has a diverse number of payloads. It wants to inject itself among regular people, saying this incantation, this spell, of phrases that trigger off a range of responses.

Spam makes me angry, yes, but sometimes, observing it with a new eye, I am amazed at what’s involved in hacking the human mind.

2 Comments

WELL HI THERE —

img_0590

So, 2009. It’s a tradition that people use the arbitrary time of the first day of the year to talk about where they’ve been and where they’re going.  Indulge me while I do same.

This weblog has worked out pretty well for me; besides being a place where I can work out essays of thought and announcements of projects, it also functions as a great location to let loose with a stream of consequence-ignorant profanity. I’m going to keep going with it.

The question always comes down to frequency. Post too much and you end up with multiple stories a day and real commitment to making people wade through your weblog (and a great propensity/tendency to repeat yourself) and post too little and you lose readership, unless they subscribe to the RSS feed.  I tried both approaches, and I think I’m going to go for the frequency of Jeff Atwood‘s beyond excellent Coding Horror: post often but each one is an island of good work by itself, and meaty enough to be enjoyed without clicking a single link. I like that approach best. Something about a single quote from somewhere else and going “Me too!” has a potential to drive readership insane.

(Speaking of driving insane, Jeff wasn’t entirely entranced with my article on a forum thread gone wrong (I recall the term being applied was “creepy”) but I forgive him. I hope I continue to be that level of creepy but without too many people leaving because of it.)

The documentary will now consume the majority of my free time for the forseable future. When I write here it will be because I have something that needs to get out, more than something along the lines of “I think people will enjoy this”, like my recent mention of PinPin. I just got slashdotted, so I better respond to the dust that one kicked up.

Along that line, my plan is to do a lot more “doing” this year, so expect a lot of things to come from me over the next few months and throughout the year. I’ll be sure this page will talk about those things, such as my appearance at ROFLthing in just a couple weeks or the ensuing Blockparty 2009 happening in April.

So yes, I guess it’s steady as it goes for 2009. Thanks for listening. Feel free to chime in with suggestions.

2 Comments