Hacking the planet with Notcurses

Posted Mar 21, 2020 5:08 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Hacking the planet with Notcurses by flussence
Parent article: Hacking the planet with Notcurses

> (naturally they didn't keep backups)
That doesn't sound reasonable. If anything, technological progress allows making backups easier.

Hacking the planet with Notcurses

Posted Mar 21, 2020 17:54 UTC (Sat) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link] (3 responses)

>> (naturally they didn't keep backups)
>
> That doesn't sound reasonable. If anything, technological progress allows making backups easier.

You are not being sarcastic right? Because I have not ever been able to backup a Smartphone (== progress) in its entirety.

Hacking the planet with Notcurses

Posted Mar 23, 2020 18:28 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

For the average Regular Person (TM) in a developed, western country,* smartphone backups work in one of two ways:

You log into your iCloud account on your new iDevice, and It Just Works.
You log into your Google account on your new Android device, and It Just Works.

Yes, I know, there are numerous issues with that strategy. But bear in mind, the average Regular Person (TM) does not care about most of those issues, and is entirely unaware of many of them. The It Just Works factor is much more important to these people, since users are generally terrible at taking backups manually.

* This is an important qualifier. Phones in non-developed and non-western countries are very different from phones in countries that are both developed and western. In some places, the same argument applies, possibly for different values of "iCloud" and "Google." In others, the idea of backing up an entire phone to "the cloud" is ludicrous because mobile data is that expensive and home internet is either nonexistent or unreliable.

Hacking the planet with Notcurses

Posted Mar 23, 2020 18:56 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

I have backups from my phones since 2010 to about 2014. At that time I stopped caring about losing my phone, since all the data was in the cloud anyway and I don't particularly care about losing a handful of average-quality photos. Meanwhile, my important data (financial docs, personal writings, etc) is now backed up on multiple NASes.

Moreover, it's not like books are somehow immune to destruction. A recent fire in the Russian Library ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/31/fire-russia... ) destroyed many books and documents that existed only as a single copy.

Digitalization would make this much less likely. And the amount of data to store most of the world's historical books is pretty much trivial by today's standards. Suppose that you want to store 130 million books (the estimated total amount), and each book is scanned in b&w without any OCR, taking around 10 megabytes. That's around 1.3PB in total - less than the capacity of an average enterprise NAS. OCRing texts would also bring that down by an order of magnitude, into the realms accessible to home users (20Tb hard drives are already here).

It's also unlikely that you'd want to store ALL of the literature, so subsets of it (like pre 20-th century English-language books) would be small enough to fit on a single SD card.

Hacking the planet with Notcurses

Posted Mar 23, 2020 20:32 UTC (Mon) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

> A recent fire in the Russian Library ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/31/fire-russia... ) destroyed many books and documents that existed only as a single copy.

And that's just accidental destruction. During World War I, when German invaded Belgium, they were so incensed by Belgian resistance that they destroyed - amongst other things - a library that contained what was then around a third of the world's extant medieval manuscripts and books.

After the war, other collections donated some of their works to rebuild the collection. During World War II, Germany again violated Belgian neutrality, and decided to punish the Belgians for objecting by obliterating the same library.

(Source: Barbara Tuchman's 1914)

Hacking the planet with Notcurses

Posted Mar 25, 2020 11:51 UTC (Wed) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]

> If anything, technological progress allows making backups easier.

Don't underestimate the political gatekeepers. They would have built a restrictions management into that cube of knowledge that makes this impossible.

You only have to look at phones, tablets, kindle etc. to see that "copying" and "backups" have enemies.