I have wondered about how to manage a 100 spool of DVDs as long term cold storage of the most important data. Would need some way of splitting the data up automatically and building a straightforward burning workflow, with redundancy incase a disk is destroyed, and a way to find a given file.

Seems like a lot of work for 400-ish Gb, but 1. Its very cheap, 2. Archival disks could last a lot longer in cold storage than anything else affordable, and 3. Anyone could recover it in the future because DVD drives have been manufactured by the billion and are still being put in some office PCs. 100gb blurays are also an option but that means sourcing a burner and at least a few drives capable of reading them to store alongside.

Edit: at first blush, plain files to make recouvery easier plus par2 files scattered across enough disks to be able to lose a whole disk or have many damaged disks seems like the right format. Some sort of index would need to be built and left on every/most disks or maybe printed on paper. Its mainly the workflow to do it that would be a PITA. Then maybe vacuum seal the spool with some moisture and oxygen absorbers and put in a lightproof container. Good for decades later? Maybe.

I just restored from some 20 year old dvds and they had visible yellowing at the edges and lost data at the end. A few videos were unrecouverable, not many.

It has been almost a trope that every time the discussion of them buying up the used market and cutting them up to scan, some apologist comes along and says that these books are mass produced garbage and not rare.

Use a gell cell lead acid battery (the kind that go in regular UPSs). No fire hazzard, ans bonus, they can survive freezing temperatures just fine if outdoors. Downside is replacing a cheap battery every 3 years.

Wouldnt productivity have two knobs? Efficiency and energy/effort input?

Also efficiency sometimes goes against “right”? If you need resiliancy you then “right” migh include redundancy. In software, that could also be guardrails like memory safety that necissarily take some extra abstraction to implement and a processing penalty?

Case in point: Alberta. As a landlocked province, they have been struggling to get oil and gas to markets, being limited by the pipelines other provinces or the US is willing to build. Now, the vast, vast majority of the planned ai datacentres in Canada are in Alberta, with insane sweetheart deals from government.

They found a way to get paid to burn gas within their borders and are going whole hog.

For a while, I thought their end-game was simply to get “too big to fail” before the bubble burst and get that bailout. But you are right - they either overshot or have some other idea in mind because now they are too big to bailout.

Security by obscurity is when the design or archetecture of the system is obscure enough to supposedly styme attackers (it doesnt), and as soon as people understand the design, your security is broken.

A hard to guess unpublished subdomain is a transparent and standard archetecture - nothing obscure about it and publishing that you use such a scheme doesnt break the security.

The subdomain is a bearer token that serves as an access control and just like a key or passphrase, has a security value proportional to the bits of information an attacker has to guess.

The real limitation is that browsers and humans are not great at not leaking domain names, so its very possible it will get leaked eventually and hard to rotate. Thats the reason they are weak. Still, they can be usefull to stop scanners just trolling for unpatched services.

I am just about to start experimenting with opencloud.eu. It is another developer revolt fork of Opencloud (this time their infinite scale project) so it is supposed to be a lightweight single binary that uses a real filesystem and no database at all. Lacks all the add ons of nextcloud, buy I am tired of maintaining it.

Anyone try it?

The web client is full featured.

Hopefully they get access back and someone learns enough to at least apend a few grand on some cold storage tapes.

Heck its pbs. They should have publically archived it so anyone could keep a copy. At least the old stuff.

That sounds like the vast majority of “app” developers.

These things are a casino market.

You are conflating micropayments (sufficient to pay creators) with gateway monetization, which would need to be small enough you could still use the internet (lets say thousands of pages a month) but high eough to dissuade scraper bot operators. I am not sure such a price exists. Maybe for some bot operators, but the various AI companies have more money than all regular internet users.

In other words - car usage expands to the limit because human nature is to use the resource until it gets inconvenient. The gas expands to fill the container.

Overlay networks are also feasable.

The term was useful back when we used coal gas. It stopped being useful 100 years ago.

Indeed, I log in pretty rarely.

Their admin interface is slow and awkward, but otherwise happy. Their deals are always changing and I currently have good specs for the money. EU company and my machine is in Montreal, so I was happy with non-American hosting and green electricity.

Not going to disagree, but “web usage” is basically everything. You can literally run an entire desktop operating system from 2007 on a virtual machine emulated in JavaScript in your browser now.