When the Internet is my hard drive

This morning I came across a commentary by Bruce Schneier at Wired entitled When the Internet Is My Hard Drive, Should I Trust Third Parties? Schneier worries about the loss of data that is stored on the Web, including web pages and websites that are not under his control.

Schneier first notes how the Wine Therapy web bulletin board, a place where wine aficionados posted and shared information since 2000, was lost when someone hacked the site and deleted the database. The site owner had been sick and was not keeping a backup. (Join the club.)

After a few anecdotes about broken travel links, the loss of the blogging website Greatest Journal, and MySpace losing control of members' personal data, Schneier says of our online data: "there's no way to predict what will disappear when." And although there are some emerging personal archiving tools, "we don't know which bits we want until they're no longer there." He sadly concludes that "there's not much we can do about it."

Some of the comments are interesting to read. One reader says that "Link rot is actually a healthy way for clutter to evaporate from the web leaving room for useful information." I'd like to see this person's reaction when their blog "clutter" disappears one day.

Someone named Daniel commented that there's no simple way to backup your dynamic website, but they remain hopeful: "[I] Also expect that somebody will make it easy to backup your site--and not just from a browser perspective--and then we'll just have to wait until it becomes so cheap it's ubiquitous." hmm... maybe I'm on to something here.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 events, articles, or stories:

1. The CACM has several excellent articles on the science of gaming. Once of the articles discusses Carnegie Mellon's masters degree in video games which sounds like something I would leap at in a heartbeat if I was a graduating senior. I also enjoyed Kelleher and Pausch's article on Storytelling Alice which I would seriously like to investigate using at Harding in the near future.


2. While on the subject of gaming, who is preserving our video games for future generations? An interesting article in the Guardian laments the fact that, besides a few game archives (like the new one at Univ of Texas), there is no industry initiative to preserve video games and consoles like the Amiga CD32, Pioneer LaserActive, and Bandai Playdia. The article concludes with a statement that may have been tongue-in-cheek, but there's some truth to it:
   

   The Virtual PC thing is worthy, but are you really telling me that the preservation of obscure census data is more important than saving the software catalogue of the Sega Dreamcast?
   

3. I stumbled across a link to Pagefactor while scanning the Wikipedia article on link rot this week. Pagefactor is attempting to use humans to locate pages that disappear. I'm not sure if the approach is going to work (hmmm... I can't find the web page I'm looking for, oh now I found it, and now I'll go do some work to let others know the new location), but it's interesting nonetheless.
   


4. Six months into Vista, and users are still griping. So am I. I got a new PC in June loaded with Vista, and although I have enjoyed the much improved graphics and speed, I've been annoyed by two blue screens of death, video that won't play smoothly in QuickTime, and constant pop-ups asking if I really meant to do what I asked the computer to do. So why don't I give up and buy a Mac? To quote For Your Consideration:

   You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater because then all you have is a wet, critically injured baby.

   Actually there are two main reasons: 1) I've invested an incredible amount of time learning Windows and don't want to start over, and 2) I want to be running what most people are running. It's embarrassing be asked a computer question (by family, friends, or students) that I know nothing about. And as a CS faculty member, I should be very familiar with how the majority of the world is interacting with their computer.
   


5. This week some masked bandits cracked a safe and stole $12,000 with the help of Google. After struggling with opening a safe for over an hour, the buglers went to a nearby PC and Googled "safe-cracking" which led them to an article on "How to Open Safes". Soon they were in and left with $12,000.
   

Link rot irony

What do you get when you do a search on Google Scholar for the paper titled

Runaway Train: Problems of Permanence, Accessibility, and Stability in the Use of Web Sources in Law Review Citations

(a paper about how problematic link rot is) and then try to access the link? Irony at its best.

Linkrot on Tamalak's Realm

Evan Williams finds an ironic interview on link rot.

Link rot in CACM

I was really surprised this afternoon to see an article in the Communications of the ACM that cited a cached URL from the MSN search engine in place of a missing web page:

The link to the U.S. Secret Service “Operation 4-1-9” report at www.secretservice.gov/alert419.htm appeared to be broken when this column was written, but cached copies remain available (for example, cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q=3910458378891〈=en-US).
Communications of the ACM, Volume 49, Number 12 (2006), Page 18.

The editors of CACM may not be aware of this, but search engines do not keep cached copies of pages long. In fact, they will often purge their caches of any web page that returns a 404 when crawling. (You can read my paper on an experiment which illustrates this.) Citing a cached page from a search engine should never be done in academic writing. Instead of citing just one broken URL, CACM has now cited two.

If you are interested in learning more about link rot and how to combat it, check out this Wikipedia article that I contribute to.

Speaking of link rot, Baden Hughes of the University of Melbourne has recently published a study entitled Link? Rot. URI Citation Durability in 10 Years of AusWeb Proceedings. (Not sure why he used a question mark in his title.) He used many of the methodologies that I used when examining link rot in D-Lib Magazine last year. Turns out AusWeb URLs have a much lower half-life (6 years) than D-Lib article URLs (10 years). This is probably because authors of D-Lib articles are more aware of link rot than authors in other professions.

I’m curious if any other on-line magazine or journal can beat D-Lib’s 10 year half-life. I have a suspicion JMIR articles could since many of them use WebCite.