Reposted from c/politics since it violated their rule about needing to have a link:
Now that the fascists have taken over, what books, academic studies, and pieces of knowledge should take priority in personal/private archival? I’m thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany, especially with the burning of the Institute for Sexual Science(Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) and what was lost completely in the burnings.
Some of us should consider saving stuff digitally or physically. Redundancies will help preserve stuff.
If you’d like to support archival in general, consider donating to https://archive.org/ . They regularly archive books and media that can be potentially banned. It doesn’t hurt to download parts of the archive on your machine if you want to be extra sure, but keep in mind the internet archive is massive with petabytes of data.
As @hollyberries pointed out, archive’s servers are on American soil, if there’s a federal ban on improper(“fake”) knowledge, their assets could easily be seized. No laws would have to change from today for them to do this, they’d just have to think up a somewhat reasonable excuse…
Probably they’d use obscenity laws. Or they might bring lawsuit after lawsuit, dmca after dmca, until it drains them of their funds.
Archive is on American soil. They got sued for lending ebooks during the pandemic and lost, so they are not a safe bet. Archive elsewhere. Anywhere else.
Depebding on the country, Europe has significantly worse copyright law than the US, to the extent that archiving a web page is illegal.
Fun fact:
In Germany you have to pay a special tax for anything that could be used to violate copyright. It ranges from 0.10€ for USB sticks to 90€ for faster printers to 14,000,000€ for opening up a public library - all going to a bunch of publisher organizations.
How, exactly?
They should sure, who’s coughing up the tens of millions of dollars that might cost?
If they don’t have the resources to do it, they can’t.
Distributed filesystems that self hosters can support may be the future for resilient data, but we’re not really there yet in a scalable way.
Why can’t humanity seem to learn that storing all of our knowledge and cultural artifacts in just one place with no backup is a BAD IDEA? Don’t let the library of Alexandria burn again!
And also good to keep in mind is that digital storage is volatile. Yes it’s impractical to have a few terabytes printed out, but if stored properly, it’ll last longer than digital media storage.
Another thing to consider:
If things go full on crazy, like they seem likely to do, being in possession of improper knowledge could be a capital offence when the thought police come knocking.
Another thing to consider: If things go full on crazy, like they seem likely to do, being in possession of improper knowledge could be a capital offence when the thought police come knocking.
Ehhh, fuck fascists. They can’t get all of us if a bunch of us do this.
It’s all hypothetical for now. But with control of the house and senate, there’s not a single thing actually stopping them as long as the rank and file of the GOP stay in line and push everything through. Hopefully there’s enough liberal and further left inclined “Well organised militias” to fight back against anything super fashy…
Good argument for encryption and servers within a privacy respecting country
Digital data stored right is extremely non-volatile - but it takes an effort to do so,but the same goes for printing out terabytes.
And digital data can be hidden far easier.
Depends on what medium it’s on. Some are far better than others, so as a generalisation I said what I said. A majority of folk these days, when they think digital media storage, think solid state. Which is, in fact, not suited for long term storage. A piece of paper stored correctly is going to outlast a usb drive, SD card or SSD.
With the internet as it is it’s extremely unlikely we’ll see an information purge like nazi Germany. We might see censorship and destruction of art but information will survive internationally.
They put porn behind a government ID in most places. Expect it everywhere
Canada will do the same once Pierre takes over. I’m already having to stockpile porn because of the fact he has a 99% chance to win and he’s going to implement digital ID bullshit (even though Pierre claimed to be against digital IDs before If I remember correctly) which will end up being a privacy nightmare. I hope to fuck it’s not going to be linked to social insurance numbers because the only way to get a new social insurance number is if there is actively fraud happening with your social insurance number, and then you have to fight to prove that you’re you. We are so fucked.
I’m going to do a shameful plug here, but I have made a sharing protocol & implementation that can be used to store data safely and also to safely share this data.
It’s called Tenfingers
It’s working but it is still in its infancy, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Please do say what you think about it!
Lets keep the morale!
Nice to know. I’m starting to think targeted groups will either use stuff like this or IPFS, or have to resort to Tor/I2P
This looks really interesting, so if I have a folder on a computer and I have it setup to share, then any time something gets added to that folder then is it automatically updated for anyone with the link?
Also, where should people go to help, or find out how to help?
Thanks!
You have to manually update your folder (but that can obviously be automated) otherwise yes that’s it!
For more i formation, you can just follow the link in my post. I have also set up a community tenfingers@lemmy.mindoki.com but it is very empty at the moment.
Or just look for me, Valmond, and pop a question :-)
To help? I confess I’m a disaster for PR so I’m just doing my best, but if you’d set up a node that would really be helpful to iron out problems, and with feedback make the setup&usage simpler etc. For example, small files are shared “for free” (configurable) but if your folder is big (for example), then you need nodes in the network to want to share big things too.
You can obviously just put the links to bigger already shared data in the folder to make things smoother.
So trying it out and giving feedback would be fantastic!
Cheers
Valmond
Sure! Here it is:
For a while now I’ve wanted to start a project of shit politicians say. Video as much as possible. Every shitty immoral reprehensible thing that they come out and say and do logged into a searchable archive. Make it super easy for regular people to stitch together anti-political ads using the politicians own words with context.
Why? More than 50% of US voters just elected a convicted felon and rapist. Using the politicians’ utterances against them is not going to do anything.
It’s not for now, it’s for our kids, or their kids, assuming we get some morals in a couple of generations.
Seriously! I just dont understand how so many people can just overlook this. Honestly they have openly approved it all. They never again have a right to expect justice for themselves, because they approved rampant criminal behavior in about the most formal way.
This is truly sickening. Clearly he can get away with anything just as he has always known. I just cannot figure it out. How can people do this? It truly makes me sure our species stands no chance.
I have to believe in a future where people look back on this from a world with less hatred in it than it currently has. I want to give the perpetrators of hate as little plausible deniability as possible.
I have to believe that even though looking back on history didn’t seem to help us avoid this situation, that there will be people in the future who are wiser and empowered to make better choices for them and their communities.
It’s a fantasy, and I honestly don’t care if it’s unrealistic. It’s what I need to believe to keep going. I need to believe there can be something better after this, regardless of whether I’ll get to experience it.
Because advertising is what wins?
There’s no such thing as bad publicity anymore. If you can gain a lot of publicity with well-timed and poignant collages and snippets that target audience on say tic Tok. That’s an extremely powerful tool.
Currently things like this take not insignificant time and effort. Reducing the time of production is valuable.
Samesies…
It’s very difficult though, sourcing material is difficult enough, archiving and making it actually useful and valuable even moreso. It takes a lot of intelligent processing.
LLMs can reduce that effort a lot, on the searching side, but that’s very expensive either in hardware or in API costs. And either way, would likely involve the efforts of a team to achieve.
Honestly I think the hardest part is identifying it and locating it.
Probably need to start a community around it. People link to stuff. Pay walls would have to be dealt with. In the vast majority of cases that’s not too difficult. No it does start getting less available around video sources. IP restrictions will be a pain in the ass.
Recording the video is messy. YT-DLP could work for some things, But honestly with the level of what’s coming I’d be afraid of leaving fingerprints on anything. Probably throwing a full screen player up in a 1080p window and using OBS on it would be the safest. Could probably get away with using an elgato to capture the HDMI signal up to 4K.
Speech to text models are light enough to run on raspberry pi. They’ll need to be vetted. They’re not highly accurate. Captioning is a great community task.
Organizing an indexing the captions, there’s no shortage of free database software. I probably start with sqlight to keep things portable and fluid. Moving to Maria or Postgres when things get too slow, But then we’re going to have to host it. Anonymous hosting is a completely different ball of wax.
Storing the data would get out of hand quickly. It’s trivial enough to buy a single 20 tb hard drive and store more than we’d need for years. But then hosting it anonymously would be difficult to say the least. Even the markers of these conversations would be traceable enough for us to be located. Paying for a private enough nude to be safe is going to be pricey over time.
I’m sure archive.org would take it, But honestly I wouldn’t put $5 on them surviving a couple of years into the new administration. What they’re doing is to inconvenient to too many corporations with deep pockets.
IPFS would work, well about as well as it works anyway, but that’s the opposite of anonymous.
Edit: come to think of it it would be a hoot to run it on the short video federated platform. Just keep the database somewhere else. Again not anonymous enough for my tastes, But what I had a little bit of fun to the project.
Pack everything and leave
In reality we (the internet people) still have the stuff.
