[00:01.320 --> 00:18.720]  The schedule for today is 11 o'clock, Genetic Algorithms, Noon, Scavenger Hunt RNC, 1 o'clock, Hacking the iPod, 2 o'clock, Why Forensics Sucks, 3, Python, TCP, IP Stack, and 4, Media Streaming.
[00:21.180 --> 00:28.300]  Right now we have Jason Scott with Preserving Digital History, A Quick and Dirty Guide, and I'll let Jason take it away.
[00:33.840 --> 00:36.040]  I appreciate that, although I haven't done anything yet.
[00:38.180 --> 00:39.200]  Alright, hi everybody.
[00:39.480 --> 00:40.600]  My name is Jason Scott.
[00:40.740 --> 00:42.620]  I run a site called textfiles.com.
[00:42.920 --> 00:57.240]  I run a number of other sites related to it, pdf.textfiles.com, web.textfiles.com, all related to different portions of digital media and, you know, digitized analog stuff, basically.
[00:59.520 --> 01:06.020]  I chose to give this speech just because over the course of the last six years, I've picked up a few things and gotten some ideas.
[01:06.200 --> 01:19.980]  Now, keep in mind that I'm coming up from a different area than most academics do, because most academics go to school and then learn something and then tell people who didn't go to school how to do it, and this is the other way around.
[01:20.640 --> 01:22.420]  School didn't really work for me.
[01:24.680 --> 01:29.120]  So, I want to let it basically lay down some foundations of what I'm talking about.
[01:29.120 --> 01:37.880]  One of the biggest problems I see when one is giving a speech is that you fall into what's called a geek relay-delay loop.
[01:38.180 --> 01:57.540]  If you've ever seen somebody who's talking about a subject that's a lot of meat on it and you suddenly see them stop talking and they look at you, it's because their brain is doing pattern recognition and they realize that, in fact, they could probably tell you a lot more than they're telling you and they're now trying to filter it real-time.
[01:57.740 --> 01:58.560]  It doesn't work.
[01:58.800 --> 02:04.800]  So, what I'm telling you is probably, for some of you, very old information, very obvious information.
[02:04.800 --> 02:06.580]  For other people, it might not be.
[02:07.300 --> 02:12.100]  I don't know where you're coming in from caring about digital history.
[02:12.220 --> 02:13.960]  Some of you might be waiting for the next panel.
[02:14.660 --> 02:16.040]  I don't use PowerPoint.
[02:16.060 --> 02:17.140]  I don't like it.
[02:17.140 --> 02:20.780]  I don't read from a screen to tell you what's going on.
[02:21.060 --> 02:22.280]  It's a personal thing.
[02:22.360 --> 02:23.240]  Some people do it.
[02:23.440 --> 02:30.320]  I don't like to have portions of the speech where I say to you, I am now going to tell you what you should bring back from this speech.
[02:30.700 --> 02:33.480]  I don't really mind what you're going to do with my speech.
[02:33.700 --> 02:36.660]  I record my own speeches and do with them as I wish.
[02:36.880 --> 02:39.240]  So, you know, do with my speeches as you wish.
[02:41.460 --> 02:47.460]  Intrinsically, I put a lot of value on digital media, digitizations and things like that.
[02:48.420 --> 02:49.700]  Some people don't.
[02:49.880 --> 02:50.960]  They simply don't.
[02:51.320 --> 02:53.060]  Arguing with them is a waste of time.
[02:53.260 --> 02:54.540]  I'm not in that business.
[02:54.780 --> 03:03.460]  If a person says to me, that fundamental half-smile question of getting my time and saying, so, why should anyone even care?
[03:05.540 --> 03:09.440]  We're not even, you know, we really shouldn't even be in the same room.
[03:09.560 --> 03:13.280]  Let's go, you know, let's go our separate ways because I'm not going to be able to convince you.
[03:13.540 --> 03:25.180]  I see inherent value in taking historical events that happened online, in my case, and putting them online for others to pull.
[03:25.760 --> 03:27.300]  I see the web as a miracle.
[03:27.760 --> 03:30.520]  It may be an inevitable miracle, but it's still a miracle nonetheless.
[03:30.920 --> 03:33.540]  I see where we've gone with it as an inherent miracle.
[03:34.740 --> 03:46.040]  While it's easy now to play games saying, talking about, you know, geo-ghetto and what people have done with live journals and stuff, I think all of it is an absolutely brilliant thing.
[03:46.200 --> 03:47.380]  I just love this.
[03:49.120 --> 03:58.940]  So, getting perspective, you know, at some point, we're very sure that the sun is going to blow up.
[03:59.720 --> 04:01.360]  We're not completely sure.
[04:01.720 --> 04:10.440]  We think that it was created at a certain point and either by the hand of God or a very large amount of ferrets or some other method.
[04:10.780 --> 04:11.900]  We weren't there.
[04:12.060 --> 04:12.800]  We're not sure.
[04:13.080 --> 04:14.040]  Records are sketchy.
[04:14.180 --> 04:17.860]  But we do know that it's burning right now and we like that.
[04:18.860 --> 04:20.120]  Eventually, it's not.
[04:20.300 --> 04:26.480]  And it's not really so much going to explode as probably go out, engulf the first few planets and then go back in again.
[04:26.980 --> 04:31.220]  At that point, people are not going to be thinking about digital history.
[04:32.380 --> 04:35.100]  They're probably going to be leaving very quickly.
[04:35.840 --> 04:42.700]  The human race is an endless, endless repeating story of, wow, there's something in the road.
[04:42.900 --> 04:44.520]  Wow, we're barreling towards it.
[04:44.760 --> 04:46.460]  Oh my God, it's coming this way.
[04:46.640 --> 04:48.480]  We really ought to do something about it.
[04:48.580 --> 04:55.760]  And at the last second, we expend every bit of energy we have just to engineer things just around to avoid it and go that way.
[04:56.080 --> 04:59.660]  When we could have just kind of dropped things and kind of gotten out of the... fine.
[04:59.900 --> 05:00.680]  That's what we do.
[05:01.240 --> 05:05.960]  People like myself took an interest in events in our own lives.
[05:06.520 --> 05:09.800]  In this case, for me, dial-up bulletin board systems.
[05:10.420 --> 05:17.800]  And as a child, I remember getting all of these wonderful files sent to me and everything else and downloading them.
[05:18.000 --> 05:33.720]  And when I reached into my, you know, mid-20s, I went looking for information and could not find it and realized that in my house on deteriorating floppy disks were a bunch of files that I had, about 8,000, 9,000.
[05:34.840 --> 05:46.380]  And so I basically started putting them online and I got a lot of attention because it turned out thousands of people had the same yearning that I did.
[05:46.560 --> 05:59.220]  It just happened to be that I had the disks, which I have to point out is the most important aspect of digital or historical collection is to be at the event when it happens.
[05:59.520 --> 06:00.680]  It's also the hardest.
[06:00.980 --> 06:05.540]  It is very difficult in doing research on Lincoln's assassination to be there.
[06:06.500 --> 06:10.980]  But it is the most important part of the whole aspect or you never get the information.
[06:11.900 --> 06:23.660]  To my great surprise, in terms of how we collect things, Lincoln's blood-stained program is in a bag in the Smithsonian institution, if you wish to go see it.
[06:25.360 --> 06:27.640]  Because somebody thought that was kind of important.
[06:28.480 --> 06:31.940]  And we can't, we would never be able to do anything about that.
[06:34.880 --> 06:45.500]  In preserving this historical data, I started out pulling out these old text files.
[06:46.000 --> 06:54.340]  But my mission has expanded over time because I realized how easy it was to be at a location or be somewhere and pull it down once.
[06:54.580 --> 06:57.220]  It has become enormously easy.
[06:57.540 --> 07:02.200]  Whereas once, say for instance, you had to get every issue of Life Magazine by buying it.
[07:02.600 --> 07:12.180]  It's very simple now to pull a website down with a wget or a wget dash dash user agent string because they won't let wget attack it.
[07:15.280 --> 07:17.900]  Because people don't want their stuff saved, I guess.
[07:18.720 --> 07:20.460]  And put it away.
[07:20.780 --> 07:28.360]  I have a lot of .tar.gz files and a lot of locations for things that may or may not have any meaning in another 4, 5, 10, 20 years.
[07:29.680 --> 07:32.440]  You know, like I said, eventually the sun blows up.
[07:32.580 --> 07:34.800]  But sometime before that, we still care about this.
[07:35.540 --> 07:40.780]  And if we play the game of like, well, who's going to care about this in 20, 50, 60 years?
[07:41.220 --> 07:43.660]  We can really work ourselves into a hole anyway.
[07:43.940 --> 07:45.700]  If you do that with anything, you know?
[07:45.860 --> 07:50.040]  I mean, why do I have this lunch when I'm not going to be, you know, I'm going to be hungry tomorrow?
[07:50.420 --> 07:51.440]  You can play that game.
[07:51.540 --> 07:52.080]  Live in the future.
[07:52.200 --> 07:53.320]  Live in a way that doesn't exist.
[07:53.840 --> 07:58.560]  And, you know, convince yourself that inaction is the best action.
[07:59.220 --> 08:00.120]  And that's fine.
[08:00.280 --> 08:01.860]  I mean, you know, TV is good.
[08:02.060 --> 08:05.500]  And I like going out and not working with computers.
[08:05.640 --> 08:07.660]  But that's just part of the part of the game.
[08:10.400 --> 08:18.500]  In terms of archaeology that has come out from work that I've done, I'm doing a documentary on dial-up bulletin board systems.
[08:18.820 --> 08:21.020]  I've spent about three years on it.
[08:21.160 --> 08:23.140]  I'm at 200 interviews.
[08:24.100 --> 08:25.840]  I've traveled many thousands of miles.
[08:26.400 --> 08:31.780]  One of the things that really struck me was how fragile some information was and some wasn't.
[08:31.980 --> 08:37.060]  For instance, people remembered stories very well, but didn't really have any recording of it.
[08:37.820 --> 08:43.200]  To my great surprise, I conducted Ward Christensen's only video interview.
[08:44.120 --> 08:46.460]  This was the man who created Xmodem.
[08:46.680 --> 08:48.840]  He co-creates the first BBS.
[08:48.840 --> 08:58.580]  He may have created several other things for the first time, but there was no visual recording of what Ward Christensen looked like when he was talking.
[08:59.280 --> 09:02.020]  There were a few dim recordings of his voice.
[09:03.320 --> 09:05.540]  I made this recording for my documentary.
[09:05.920 --> 09:11.560]  I intend to digitize it and put it up in various locations, including archive.org and other ones.
[09:12.700 --> 09:15.260]  He doesn't always talk about bulletin board systems.
[09:15.440 --> 09:17.960]  In fact, sometimes he talks about what coffee he needs to get.
[09:18.300 --> 09:24.640]  But just having that information available means that I'm not the filtering process.
[09:25.260 --> 09:31.140]  And that's something that's very hard to understand, that it's not always the information itself.
[09:31.520 --> 09:34.900]  Because information is itself a political event.
[09:36.860 --> 09:48.180]  Sometimes you have... well, when you're reading something, if you're reading a historical perspective, you are actually reading three different levels of time.
[09:48.460 --> 09:51.500]  You're reading about the time that is being written about.
[09:51.820 --> 10:01.080]  You are reading about... you're in the time of the person who wrote it, wrote the description, and you are in your own time of the person reading it.
[10:01.800 --> 10:08.260]  You can pull from all three levels at the same time, decide that this person was avoiding telling people about this.
[10:08.460 --> 10:12.460]  This is why there are so few pictures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a wheelchair.
[10:12.700 --> 10:22.520]  An event that certainly occurred is because it was a agreed-upon situation not to portray the President of the United States in a wheelchair.
[10:24.120 --> 10:25.880]  Now, that has value.
[10:26.080 --> 10:32.920]  Not only does it have value, but it has value because it tells about the time of the people who are talking about Roosevelt and what they thought was right.
[10:33.160 --> 10:40.100]  And then it tells about now, about what your opinions would be about the fact that people were doing this back even then.
[10:40.740 --> 10:49.460]  One of the least shocking now, but shocking when you first get involved in it, is how there really isn't a golden age of forthright information.
[10:49.700 --> 10:58.080]  That fiction and storytelling being used to sell an idea is an inherent process.
[10:58.320 --> 11:01.300]  That it's something people have always done.
[11:01.440 --> 11:10.520]  And if you read about an event and you say that is too good to be true, then yes, it probably is too good to be true.
[11:10.520 --> 11:23.740]  I do not think, for instance, that Alexander Graham Bell, with acid dripping down his pants in Boston, said calmly, Watson, come here, I want you.
[11:25.200 --> 11:36.860]  But it doesn't matter just, you know, in the grand sense of things, other than to know some of the events of the invention of the telephone to remind people about how that inventive process went.
[11:37.540 --> 11:49.760]  A piece of paper written from a Civil War man to his wife saying, chickens are good, had a battle yesterday, looking forward to seeing you and the baby.
[11:50.780 --> 11:53.980]  Perhaps he's hiding a lot of information that will not be of any use.
[11:54.100 --> 11:55.260]  The battle didn't happen.
[11:55.260 --> 11:59.040]  He actually isn't in, you know, that part where he's saying he was.
[11:59.380 --> 12:09.480]  On the other hand, perhaps somebody down the line will look at this piece of paper and say, this has got a watermark of a company that said they never gave aid to that side in the Civil War.
[12:09.940 --> 12:16.300]  And suddenly, all the amount of lying he does has no relevance to the political information that comes in there.
[12:17.180 --> 12:36.220]  While talking with Bob Mahoney, who was the BBS operator of Exec PC, which billed itself as the largest BBS in the known universe, at one point during our conversation, he said, yes, I did this and I did this, and I came up with the term ZIP.
[12:38.480 --> 12:45.960]  I took this, as I take all things, quietly, and then put it aside, and said, well, how will I know this?
[12:46.920 --> 12:49.420]  Because, if you ask Bob Mahoney, the answer is yes.
[12:49.980 --> 12:56.960]  The creator of ZIP, Philip Katz, is dead, having died in a hotel room surrounded by empties in 2000.
[12:58.800 --> 13:00.100]  He wouldn't answer.
[13:00.260 --> 13:01.960]  His mother has passed away.
[13:02.360 --> 13:07.560]  This is not an easy question, unless you have old shareware CDs.
[13:08.240 --> 13:23.200]  Some time ago, I started collecting shovelware CDs, and created cd.textfiles.com, a site that's kind of on the edge in terms of what's acceptable, what's not, but I have been putting up these old shareware CDs, dating from 83, when they were just packs of discs,
[13:23.260 --> 13:27.520]  up to relatively frequently, relatively new.
[13:27.900 --> 13:40.440]  And I found ZIP version 1.0, and in the README file, buried in this file from long ago, he thanks Bob Mahoney for coming up with the term ZIP.
[13:40.940 --> 13:44.140]  And this piece of information will get out there.
[13:44.140 --> 13:57.100]  Um, and the only way I could do it was by assuming that the information inside this file wasn't of interest enough to, um, falsify.
[13:57.820 --> 14:09.880]  One of the things that happens now, a very interesting situation that's happening now as we speak, it certainly happened in the mid, uh, in the mid 80s on USENET, and has happened now, is the professional troll.
[14:10.780 --> 14:27.160]  And this is a concept that's very new and is an unintended byproduct of heavy information being available, uh, and information tools, is that you can have somebody, um, if you have somebody, um, say this movie is good, this movie is bad, this product is good,
[14:27.260 --> 14:28.040]  this product is bad.
[14:28.400 --> 14:40.040]  Sometimes a mere amount of research on the person who says this product is good will reveal that they have a money trail that reveals that they are somebody who was paid by an organization that happens to make that product.
[14:42.180 --> 14:45.960]  What do you do if that person has no affiliation?
[14:46.240 --> 14:53.580]  And in fact, the reason they are claiming things is because they just want to break you.
[14:54.140 --> 14:57.220]  They want you to waste time.
[14:58.080 --> 15:22.120]  I have a person who I dealt with, uh, who explained to me quite earnestly, and I must preface this for the sake of recording, that it is false, but who explained to me in all earnestness how the whole earth electronic link was actually the front for a child slave trade organization in which children were bought and sold on secret boards among the founders,
[15:22.500 --> 15:26.880]  and that the whole purpose of it was to provide them an easy nationwide access.
[15:27.700 --> 15:41.060]  Again, this has turned out to be false, but it is impossible to trace back this person's motivations to some other easily motivatable thing other than, she's pretty f*cko bazoo.
[15:43.340 --> 16:13.140]  The, um, some amount of research into USENET, into Google Groups, revealed that when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986, two days later, she claimed that the reason it had been blown up was because there was a woman on board and needed, um, it was a way to demonstrate to women not to reach for places they shouldn't go.
[16:14.420 --> 16:25.040]  This generated some conversation, which is obviously the motivation, but if I had not had that bit of information, I wouldn't have that vector, and I could have wasted an awful lot of time.
[16:26.220 --> 16:30.300]  Over time, people change stories in their mind, that's part of the nature of things.
[16:31.080 --> 16:38.500]  Digital artifacts that come back from then provide people with a way to say, we have alternate theories.
[16:39.120 --> 16:41.020]  Uh, we have alternate statements.
[16:41.240 --> 16:42.420]  Could you explain this?
[16:42.640 --> 16:45.360]  It's the question that they're otherwise unable to answer.
[16:45.620 --> 17:00.740]  Over time, it goes from everybody who was at Haight Ashbury, to everybody who was in San Francisco in the 60s, to everybody who was alive during the 60s, to everybody who remembers their parent who was alive in the 60s.
[17:00.880 --> 17:04.740]  Each time, the information quality deteriorates.
[17:06.040 --> 17:08.040]  Granularity of information is a major problem.
[17:08.440 --> 17:25.000]  Right now, um, um, for an example, uh, Death Vegetable hit in the pie with a, hit in the face with a pie on Friday, which I must point out again did not happen, uh, would happen on stage by somebody hitting him with a pie.
[17:25.620 --> 17:35.480]  Because it's being done on a stage, and because it was ideally chosen by the person who hits him with the pie, it would be recorded by one of these two fine individuals over here on their video recorder.
[17:35.800 --> 17:47.880]  Some of you might have, at this point, uh, either recording, uh, through your own camcorders or your own recording devices, this event of him being hit in the pie from various angles.
[17:48.640 --> 18:06.300]  Um, some of you have weblogs, have platforms in which you speak to an audience of four or five people, people, and you tell people about, um, what you experienced, uh, watching Death Vegetable hit with a pie, and what your feelings must have been for him.
[18:06.620 --> 18:15.580]  Death Vegetable himself outside might have pictures of himself running away getting this pie, because of course the pie was made out of a flavor he hates.
[18:15.920 --> 18:23.780]  And all these reactions and times become this event with different levels of granularity, because it happened here.
[18:24.260 --> 18:37.660]  Meanwhile, a thousand conversations are taking place in the Hotel Pennsylvania, some of which may be unbelievably important, some of which may be the roots of things that will change the nature of information technology in another five, ten years.
[18:37.840 --> 18:42.500]  Two guys who bumped into the Blarney Rock and said, hey, you know, I know this guy and this guy.
[18:42.640 --> 18:45.120]  And later, a conversation ensues in which things happen.
[18:45.340 --> 18:46.720]  There will never be a record of that.
[18:46.860 --> 18:48.060]  They might not even mention that.
[18:48.120 --> 18:49.180]  They might say, we met somewhere.
[18:49.280 --> 18:52.060]  You'll never know why, what was said, what was happening about it.
[18:52.220 --> 18:53.600]  This is the nature of information.
[18:53.780 --> 18:57.680]  If you spend too much time concentrating on it, you will go crazy.
[18:58.600 --> 19:01.360]  It's a problem that I call the spotty floor problem.
[19:01.600 --> 19:07.340]  If you have a floor that's dirty, dirty, you say the floor is dirty, and deal with it.
[19:07.520 --> 19:11.940]  You go, eh, or you step over it, never thinking of it, because what?
[19:12.120 --> 19:13.580]  A thousand people have been here.
[19:13.860 --> 19:17.740]  Never think about how many people have been on a hotel slipcover.
[19:18.300 --> 19:19.160]  Don't do it.
[19:20.080 --> 19:31.820]  If you clean a floor, or you clean something, every single step made, every single imperfection is now blaring and in your mind, and driving you insane.
[19:32.360 --> 19:40.160]  If you sit there and say, I have some files from the 80s, from back when I ran my bulletin board system, that's one thing.
[19:40.360 --> 19:46.520]  But if you, like me, find yourself in the position of going, I have issues one, two, three, four, and five, and nine.
[19:48.040 --> 19:52.140]  After a while, you can go crazy that six through eight don't exist.
[19:52.620 --> 19:59.500]  To my great surprise, I found an e-zine that was numbered one, seven, nine, eleven, and fourteen.
[19:59.980 --> 20:04.440]  Tracked down the original authors and found out that's all the issues they ever produced.
[20:04.780 --> 20:09.440]  And it was, that it was intentionally to cause trouble for people like myself.
[20:12.350 --> 20:14.770]  That sort of information just does not pass along.
[20:16.310 --> 20:22.510]  When I was tracking back the, the root of the phrase K-RAD.
[20:23.750 --> 20:28.010]  K-RAD now has a lot of alternative meanings applied to it.
[20:28.270 --> 20:29.370]  Kilobyte-RAD.
[20:29.490 --> 20:30.990]  Thousand times-RAD.
[20:31.270 --> 20:32.170]  Kick-RAD.
[20:32.370 --> 20:33.430]  Killer-RAD.
[20:33.590 --> 20:36.530]  That it stands for dark backwards.
[20:37.590 --> 20:39.310]  I received a bunch of that.
[20:39.490 --> 20:41.270]  I was told it was created in 1993.
[20:41.370 --> 20:44.350]  I was told it was created in the mid-90s.
[20:45.310 --> 20:55.930]  I found through papers and interviewing people that it was created because a gentleman named Apple Bandit spoke too fast on the telephone.
[20:56.510 --> 21:00.450]  And because when he would hang up, he would say, OK, bye.
[21:00.730 --> 21:03.370]  But turn it into one word and say, K-bye.
[21:04.250 --> 21:09.090]  And this was something he did so often with his friends that they started signing their messages.
[21:09.350 --> 21:10.030]  K-bye.
[21:10.690 --> 21:34.610]  And as surfer language overtook BBSes in the early 80s, Radical, Dude, Bitchin' started to make its vernacular and mostly because of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the Valley Girls song, people started to say that stuff was K-RADICAL, K-COOL, K-CIA.
[21:36.130 --> 21:48.930]  And when one group, multiple groups referred to their boards as K-F-K-RADICAL on Apple II crack screens, that this started to get a use.
[21:50.630 --> 21:58.150]  Now, some people would say, wow, you've just wasted 45 precious seconds of my life.
[21:59.170 --> 22:02.610]  I am never going to get that back, thank you.
[22:04.550 --> 22:07.110]  Because to them it has no value.
[22:07.550 --> 22:18.090]  To me, it's not just about the word, but how this particular meaning changes over time until you have where it's used now.
[22:18.090 --> 22:26.930]  In the mid-early 90s, a new group of kids rose up in bulletin boards, aware and cognizant of the giants that had been before them.
[22:26.990 --> 22:31.270]  The CDCs, the LODs, the Phracks, the 2600s, the private line.
[22:31.390 --> 22:32.810]  Does anyone remember the private line?
[22:33.530 --> 22:34.050]  Excellent.
[22:34.510 --> 22:36.510]  The private line was 2600s BBS.
[22:36.910 --> 22:43.070]  It was seized for doing very bad things early in its life.
[22:43.070 --> 22:51.330]  It was seized in early 1985, about June, as part of a string of busts in the New Jersey area.
[22:53.830 --> 22:58.010]  But people saw these original boards and said, I can do that.
[22:58.130 --> 22:58.850]  I can do it better.
[22:58.850 --> 23:04.150]  When they speak in strange uses of ones for zeros, I can do nothing but that.
[23:04.430 --> 23:06.490]  I can do this ironically.
[23:06.490 --> 23:08.790]  See, I'm doing it, but I'm not really doing it.
[23:08.890 --> 23:10.910]  I'm acting like these kids used to do it.
[23:10.990 --> 23:14.230]  But now I'm doing it in this kind of post-modern, funny way.
[23:14.410 --> 23:15.890]  That itself is a comment to me.
[23:16.070 --> 23:26.570]  And I have a lot of collections of these very complicated zines where people are putting together these ironic events where they're talking about traveling back in time to the 80s and you get their impression.
[23:26.570 --> 23:31.730]  All of it, I just pull down, I put it on my website, and I leave it there.
[23:33.370 --> 23:37.330]  And wait for what happens next, which I will have no control over.
[23:38.290 --> 23:42.510]  I get a lot of mail from people about it, which I'll mention at the end.
[23:45.130 --> 23:49.390]  The problem that arises, of course, is the viability of the media in which I am storing it on.
[23:50.310 --> 23:55.790]  It's a very precious time in terms of bandwidth, in terms of storage space.
[23:56.890 --> 24:12.470]  In 1984, you could buy a 10 megabyte CIDR drive, which was one of the first commercially available hard drives that wasn't in scientific, military, and other professional capacity.
[24:13.010 --> 24:14.570]  In other words, you could go to the store and buy it.
[24:14.770 --> 24:17.790]  It cost about $700, about 10 megabytes.
[24:17.790 --> 24:21.090]  The nature of the Apple system was that you couldn't have subfolders.
[24:21.850 --> 24:25.110]  So you had to kind of define it as a bunch of large floppy disks.
[24:25.990 --> 24:28.490]  But it cost you $700 for 10 megabytes.
[24:28.690 --> 24:36.390]  And I bought a 250 gigabyte hard drive for $159 on sale at CompUSA two weeks ago.
[24:37.330 --> 24:45.130]  In 20 years, we have gone from 10 megabytes to 250,000 megabytes.
[24:46.390 --> 24:49.410]  I'm not concerned about storage space.
[24:51.810 --> 25:10.410]  When they save Google, when Google saves USENET news, the amount of data being saved, this precious data, this impossible block of human history, was between 3 and 6 gigabytes.
[25:11.770 --> 25:13.430]  Not a big problem.
[25:13.970 --> 25:18.870]  You don't think about that now, when you're downloading an enormous amount of media.
[25:20.150 --> 25:26.770]  One of the reasons I did textfiles.com was to turn all of the 1980 text file writing into a ware.
[25:27.590 --> 25:32.570]  Because to keep people's attention, a 2k file is going to get lost now.
[25:32.890 --> 25:38.490]  So I turned them into 700 megabyte torrents that get downloaded.
[25:39.230 --> 25:41.910]  So I go, you had none of the history.
[25:42.250 --> 25:45.050]  Now you have most of the history.
[25:45.710 --> 25:47.150]  I'll never have all of it.
[25:47.390 --> 25:49.110]  I still get stuff sent to me.
[25:52.490 --> 25:56.630]  Part of what ends up happening is this interesting peacock effect.
[25:56.990 --> 26:03.170]  Because I'm the fellow who's known for collecting digital history, people who didn't know what to do with their stuff send it to me.
[26:04.450 --> 26:05.410]  Just stuff.
[26:06.210 --> 26:10.910]  So when I'm called up and someone says, I have 300 shareware CDs.
[26:11.550 --> 26:13.170]  I guess you ought to have them.
[26:13.830 --> 26:14.890]  I say, okay.
[26:15.490 --> 26:17.430]  And I take them and I digitize them.
[26:17.530 --> 26:18.890]  And they're coming to me shortly.
[26:19.210 --> 26:21.350]  I'm coming after the Library of Congress.
[26:21.530 --> 26:23.910]  They visited his house and copied them all and left.
[26:24.070 --> 26:25.210]  And now I get them.
[26:27.530 --> 26:37.850]  When I was interviewing Ward Christensen, it turned out that on his desk, in a small thermal roll, were printouts from the first months of the first BBS.
[26:39.090 --> 26:39.570]  1978.
[26:40.470 --> 26:42.210]  That he had kept.
[26:42.950 --> 26:44.470]  Not sure what to do with them.
[26:44.910 --> 26:46.230]  So he lent them to me.
[26:47.330 --> 26:48.830]  They were so faded.
[26:49.150 --> 26:55.230]  I've been using a flashlight to shine across the indentation on the paper to figure out what was written.
[26:55.750 --> 26:59.090]  And I am transcribing it as accurately as possible.
[26:59.370 --> 27:04.090]  So that the weird printout form is what survives.
[27:04.570 --> 27:11.630]  And then I am applying it to my massive 700 meg collection and saying, take it.
[27:11.790 --> 27:13.070]  Oh, there's something else in there.
[27:13.150 --> 27:13.730]  Don't mind it.
[27:13.770 --> 27:14.650]  It's a stowaway.
[27:14.950 --> 27:16.490]  To ensure that these words...
[27:16.490 --> 27:18.030]  Do they say interesting things?
[27:18.210 --> 27:18.630]  Maybe.
[27:19.250 --> 27:24.890]  Somebody uses ASCII art to wish everyone a great Memorial Day in 1978.
[27:25.570 --> 27:33.450]  Someone at one point is talking to somebody else and says, that is cool, and writes K00L in 1978.
[27:34.450 --> 27:39.650]  This all provides information that we just didn't have before.
[27:40.450 --> 27:45.250]  And to my great surprise, I had printouts of the private line three months before it went under.
[27:45.930 --> 27:47.450]  So I've been transcribing them.
[27:47.530 --> 27:52.130]  This may be one of the only remaining evidences that this board ever existed.
[27:53.890 --> 27:57.410]  So for me, it's very, very important.
[27:58.590 --> 28:00.450]  But how long will it last?
[28:01.290 --> 28:16.430]  Certainly, there is a large amount of wonk policy and debate among people with very, very tiny voices and very, very quiet eyes about how long certain storage media will last in today's world.
[28:17.690 --> 28:31.010]  Certainly, if you were to look at things from the point of view of somebody who lived a thousand years, a lot of history would seem like a mixing bowl where things get mixed up.
[28:31.270 --> 28:36.950]  Some things arbitrarily crust on the side and never go away.
[28:37.210 --> 28:48.210]  Old jokes, certain kinds of bricks, certain things, while so much else gets whipped up and removed and taken away through a thousand recipes until you never know what happened anymore.
[28:48.450 --> 28:50.530]  That's the nature of being human.
[28:50.530 --> 28:54.970]  Trying to act like it's not that is the great tragedy of technological people.
[28:55.190 --> 28:57.250]  Making human people non-human.
[28:57.630 --> 29:02.570]  Or treating non-human, you know, humans non-humanly in trying to evaluate them.
[29:02.890 --> 29:14.030]  If you spend time trying to treat people like they're a value, a certain kind of exponential, you know, mathematical theory, they will always fail you and you will always be sad.
[29:14.510 --> 29:19.030]  Instead, you do best to organically approach life like everyone else does.
[29:19.030 --> 29:20.950]  Pull things towards you that you like.
[29:21.150 --> 29:22.710]  Throw away things that you don't like.
[29:23.050 --> 29:24.550]  Or throw them to people who like it.
[29:25.030 --> 29:25.650]  Hence, eBay.
[29:30.270 --> 29:33.570]  So, I collect a lot of things simply because I think it might be interesting.
[29:33.910 --> 29:35.810]  I have my own personal biases.
[29:35.810 --> 29:43.810]  I love watching people screw with history in a kind of, you know, parodying manner.
[29:44.010 --> 29:47.070]  I like it when they make fun of things that used to be because you can get their opinion.
[29:47.310 --> 29:53.710]  I love everything having to do with Apple II pirate boards from 1981 to 1985.
[29:55.250 --> 29:55.970]  I love it.
[29:56.210 --> 29:57.290]  I can't get away from it.
[29:57.470 --> 29:58.170]  It makes me...
[29:58.170 --> 30:01.450]  It's like the guy who loves Ferraris and they open up the hood of the new Ferrari.
[30:01.610 --> 30:03.170]  He just goes...
[30:04.210 --> 30:04.610]  That's...
[30:04.610 --> 30:04.810]  Oh...
[30:05.390 --> 30:07.110]  Leave me alone with it for a while.
[30:08.490 --> 30:09.850]  Because that's what I enjoy.
[30:10.070 --> 30:11.290]  That's the time of my...
[30:11.290 --> 30:17.130]  You'll find, as I found in 200 interviews, the golden period is when you started using it.
[30:18.630 --> 30:22.890]  The golden age blossomed and bloomed the first time you did it.
[30:23.810 --> 30:24.870]  Whatever it is.
[30:25.190 --> 30:26.370]  Your first con.
[30:27.130 --> 30:28.870]  Your first love.
[30:29.110 --> 30:30.090]  Your first car.
[30:30.290 --> 30:31.450]  It was the golden age.
[30:31.850 --> 30:33.050]  It had its flaws.
[30:33.190 --> 30:33.850]  It had its greatness.
[30:34.110 --> 30:35.150]  But it's your golden age.
[30:35.330 --> 30:36.370]  And that's fine.
[30:37.070 --> 30:41.390]  Telling everyone else that the golden age has passed is not effective and not true.
[30:41.890 --> 30:43.330]  Your golden age has passed.
[30:44.450 --> 30:45.890]  Again, that's fine, you know.
[30:46.790 --> 30:49.830]  I happen to find that that time for me is my golden age.
[30:49.950 --> 30:52.890]  That's when I grew up and I found out that there were lives outside of mine.
[30:53.050 --> 30:54.850]  I found out there was a state called California.
[30:55.150 --> 31:04.150]  I found out that people could have cars and girlfriends and talk about it and have a great time and I wanted to be part of them too.
[31:04.610 --> 31:06.010]  So that for me is mine.
[31:06.190 --> 31:08.810]  So that comes to me and I get them and I pull them away.
[31:08.810 --> 31:17.510]  And you get these events where people... A gentleman who... I had the canonical collection of Apple II text files.
[31:18.190 --> 31:22.430]  You'll never get them all, but you can usually say, I've got pretty much every one that made it around.
[31:22.690 --> 31:28.770]  And I can happily say that as of 1992, I've got pretty much all the big BBS files.
[31:28.770 --> 31:37.070]  And that was a very important milestone for me from 1998 when I couldn't find any online to... I could find pretty much all of them.
[31:39.530 --> 31:48.130]  And I had somebody come to me and I found out his story that he had been on Apple bulletin boards in 1982 and then his parents had moved to Brazil.
[31:48.130 --> 31:48.750]  Brazil.
[31:48.890 --> 31:50.510]  And he went to Brazil.
[31:50.890 --> 31:53.410]  And then in 1985, they moved back.
[31:53.750 --> 31:54.610]  Dad was in military.
[31:55.250 --> 32:00.130]  He came back and he loved the time with Apple so much that he found them again.
[32:00.310 --> 32:08.430]  He found the bulletin boards and he went and he saved everything he could from every bulletin board ever because now, coming from the outside, it was like a time travel.
[32:08.610 --> 32:11.610]  He came back and it was all back and he collected as much of it as he could.
[32:11.850 --> 32:15.450]  And so he put it all together and he said, I want you to have it.
[32:15.450 --> 32:19.710]  And it was like... it was like the second camcorder.
[32:21.030 --> 32:24.670]  It was like the second point of view that gives you the 3D image.
[32:24.810 --> 32:31.090]  It was a set of ones responding to the files that I knew as the canonical ones going, the canonical ones are shit.
[32:31.630 --> 32:32.650]  Completely wrong.
[32:32.910 --> 32:34.270]  Here's the real story.
[32:35.670 --> 32:42.590]  And so his sudden perspective on his golden age was what changed things for him.
[32:44.390 --> 32:44.870]  Um...
[32:49.420 --> 32:51.800]  Is it true that stuff will deteriorate?
[32:52.360 --> 32:52.840]  Yes.
[32:53.680 --> 32:55.720]  Uh, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.
[32:56.000 --> 32:57.020]  That's not your problem.
[32:57.640 --> 32:58.120]  Again.
[32:58.540 --> 33:08.180]  That's a problem for people like myself who say, have copies of my stuff, put it on DLT tapes, put it on CDs, and at the end of the day, we go, oh well.
[33:08.500 --> 33:09.840]  We got a lot of it.
[33:10.620 --> 33:11.960]  We got most of it.
[33:11.960 --> 33:12.820]  Uh...
[33:12.820 --> 33:15.820]  This newspaper got ripped when it got transferred.
[33:16.000 --> 33:17.580]  But we have the other 400 issues.
[33:19.580 --> 33:20.100]  Uh...
[33:20.960 --> 33:25.920]  If you don't save it, and by saving it, I'll explain that, but I mean...
[33:25.920 --> 33:27.680]  But if you don't do that, no...
[33:28.780 --> 33:32.540]  No amount of restorative technology can make something from nothing.
[33:32.540 --> 33:34.880]  It's very hard to restore a dodo.
[33:36.540 --> 33:37.060]  Um...
[33:37.060 --> 33:38.740]  You know, because...
[33:38.740 --> 33:39.560]  You know...
[33:39.560 --> 33:41.680]  By the way, dodos were stupid.
[33:43.660 --> 33:44.180]  Unbelievable.
[33:44.280 --> 33:45.300]  They'd walk right up to you.
[33:45.820 --> 33:47.360]  Because they had no natural enemies.
[33:47.840 --> 33:58.400]  And it got to the point that they would shoot them because they couldn't get to the latrines on the Galapagos.
[33:58.400 --> 34:00.560]  It'd be, let's go down.
[34:02.080 --> 34:03.120]  Goddamn dodo.
[34:03.740 --> 34:04.260]  Bam!
[34:04.680 --> 34:05.720]  Get to the latrine.
[34:06.820 --> 34:11.700]  Now we apply some vague amount of value to the dodo and the history and everything else.
[34:11.840 --> 34:14.780]  But, you know, the last dodo skin, uh...
[34:14.780 --> 34:18.560]  got destroyed in, you know, the late 1800s, early 1900s.
[34:18.940 --> 34:19.180]  You know?
[34:19.700 --> 34:20.500]  That's gone.
[34:20.800 --> 34:28.240]  However, our stories of the dodo, the stories of things that were learned, Darwin's work studying Canary Islands, I think it was.
[34:28.240 --> 34:31.240]  Galapagos Islands and other islands like that to learn about species.
[34:32.080 --> 34:33.000]  That persists.
[34:33.120 --> 34:33.780]  We do our best.
[34:37.280 --> 34:41.040]  As a person, you know, you say, well, what can I do?
[34:41.220 --> 34:42.600]  What can I possibly do?
[34:43.460 --> 34:46.160]  This sounds like something you do that nobody else does.
[34:46.280 --> 34:59.880]  And my answer is, if you enjoy something on the Internet, a joke site, a person's writing, uh... somebody writes you an unbelievably horrifyingly angry mail, just put it somewhere.
[35:00.320 --> 35:01.180]  Drop it off.
[35:01.280 --> 35:01.840]  Forget about it.
[35:02.620 --> 35:03.280]  Don't sort it.
[35:05.020 --> 35:13.080]  The great scourge are people trying to be the filter of what's good, what's bad, what's useful, what's gone.
[35:13.080 --> 35:14.380]  Don't waste your time.
[35:14.960 --> 35:20.320]  In the early 1990s, it was 30 seconds to render a JPEG on a Macintosh.
[35:22.940 --> 35:26.340]  So you could find out if you actually did download a girl.
[35:29.640 --> 35:34.940]  In Windows XP, the default view is a thumbnail gallery of all the pictures.
[35:35.860 --> 35:39.040]  Brought up to you as if it was just another page.
[35:40.320 --> 35:47.980]  The process of sorting the girls from all the badger photos is almost instantaneous now.
[35:48.360 --> 35:50.580]  The 30 second process you do while you're on the phone.
[35:51.060 --> 35:53.300]  You say, oh, the girl, badger, girl, badger, girl, badger.
[35:54.300 --> 35:56.580]  Back then, that would have been three days.
[35:57.300 --> 35:59.080]  Three days of going through the badger photos.
[36:00.480 --> 36:02.880]  You, you, you don't need to do that.
[36:04.500 --> 36:13.780]  If we can go from 10 to 250,000 gigabytes in 20 years, in 20 years from now, we're not going to slow down.
[36:14.560 --> 36:16.160]  We're not going to get...
[36:16.900 --> 36:20.660]  I stand at odds with a lot of people when they...
[36:21.840 --> 36:32.880]  It's a common activist technique to tell people that if they do not take action immediately within this aspect, an entire way of life and living and technology will be completely destroyed, never be seen again, and you will lose it and you will miss it.
[36:34.020 --> 36:35.020]  And sign here.
[36:37.780 --> 36:39.160]  That's true and not true.
[36:39.740 --> 36:40.760]  Fights are made.
[36:42.680 --> 37:04.700]  But, it has been the trend as long as we have been in existence, certainly within the last hundred years, that there has been great profit in making it faster, easier, quicker to take the world around you and make an image, a video, a memory, a remembrance of it and store it somewhere for easy retrieval.
[37:06.080 --> 37:08.760]  Perhaps the things used will work or won't work.
[37:09.140 --> 37:09.740]  You know?
[37:10.600 --> 37:12.740]  We certainly have with education...
[37:14.040 --> 37:19.260]  I fully, fully endorse education to go, wow, the new Sony Walkman is really good.
[37:19.820 --> 37:22.960]  Uh-oh, the Sony Walkman uses this weird format.
[37:24.280 --> 37:25.700]  Bye, Sony Walkman!
[37:25.900 --> 37:29.420]  Hello, you know, creative Walkman, which doesn't use that.
[37:29.940 --> 37:34.000]  Hello, big file on PDF on how to build my own goddamn Walkman.
[37:35.160 --> 37:35.800]  Great.
[37:36.740 --> 37:39.600]  But Sony's gonna keep making better and better things.
[37:39.960 --> 37:49.640]  They're gonna keep getting companies to make them internal mechanisms that will store things better, will do things better, cheaper, faster, quicker.
[37:50.940 --> 38:00.840]  I fully think that the era of the constantly running video input will be soon.
[38:01.560 --> 38:10.180]  And by that I mean augmentative reality where you are pulling in information all the time to you.
[38:10.720 --> 38:18.040]  Text information, people information, wireless things being told to you from different tags, saying, you're walking now in this location, it's doing this.
[38:18.240 --> 38:19.180]  People who have been here.
[38:19.380 --> 38:33.200]  Location-based bulletin board systems where you walk by a place and all the messages in electronic form of all the people who have been there are read out to you on a screen or in other some certain retinal implant or spray that you want to do.
[38:33.740 --> 38:34.280]  You know?
[38:35.480 --> 38:36.680]  People will do this.
[38:36.820 --> 38:38.020]  Because they like it.
[38:38.160 --> 38:39.360]  And they've been doing it.
[38:39.520 --> 38:44.060]  So your job is to throw it into a little box.
[38:44.560 --> 38:52.860]  Let the box robot come for it in 100 years or 10 years or go through your estate or go through your, you know, your equipment.
[38:53.520 --> 38:55.220]  Yeah, some of it's going to be thrown out.
[38:55.420 --> 39:00.420]  But without that important piece that you play being here, you know, do it.
[39:00.520 --> 39:05.900]  And you'll always find a complete maniac like myself that will do this.
[39:06.280 --> 39:12.380]  That will take your stuff and say, I'll deal with it.
[39:13.480 --> 39:19.580]  It is only for the efforts of four people or five people that Google has all those USENET news groups.
[39:22.240 --> 39:30.100]  The Department of Zoology at Toronto stored all the incoming USENET information on 9-track tapes.
[39:30.960 --> 39:34.220]  And it was transported by one gentleman one day when they were going to get rid of it.
[39:35.020 --> 39:37.280]  And that's how that information persisted.
[39:37.500 --> 39:40.580]  Out of all the people who had it, that's how they got it.
[39:42.280 --> 39:59.800]  In Afghanistan, there was a gentleman who worked at a radio station who collected reel-to-reel tapes of all the Middle Eastern shows, all the albums, all the radio, and kept them in this beautiful little room where he sorted everything.
[40:00.180 --> 40:02.920]  When the Taliban came to power, they outlawed music.
[40:03.500 --> 40:08.400]  And in that process, they would go to different locations and destroy albums, recordings.
[40:08.400 --> 40:11.860]  This gentleman recognized this was not a good idea.
[40:12.540 --> 40:20.660]  Went through the tens of thousands of tapes and relabeled them so that they said that they were something else.
[40:20.960 --> 40:24.720]  Spoken word or readings of different files.
[40:25.140 --> 40:28.440]  And then put the spoken words in front.
[40:29.200 --> 40:35.400]  When the Taliban came to inspect his collection, he pulled out random tapes and demonstrated to them this is just spoken word.
[40:36.240 --> 40:43.660]  When the Taliban fell a little while ago, he then went through again and relabeled them all again.
[40:45.760 --> 40:47.120]  People like this exist.
[40:47.360 --> 40:49.980]  They care about it to that level.
[40:50.660 --> 40:53.360]  I think you'll find them if you look for them online.
[40:53.560 --> 40:55.320]  You'll find the archive.org people.
[40:55.500 --> 40:57.560]  You'll find me, the textfiles.com guy.
[40:57.960 --> 40:59.700]  You'll find the...
[41:00.400 --> 41:05.140]  They'll use phrases like the archive, the media center, the collection, the library.
[41:05.600 --> 41:07.440]  The great wonder about...
[41:07.440 --> 41:15.180]  The great happiness and the great tragedy of digital is that there is one, and now there is two.
[41:16.060 --> 41:17.220]  And then there are more.
[41:19.080 --> 41:22.900]  That strikes happiness in some, and terror in others.
[41:24.080 --> 41:24.780]  So be it.
[41:25.040 --> 41:26.000]  Nature of the game.
[41:27.120 --> 41:32.720]  Take advantage of the fact that there can be two, and three, and give them to people.
[41:33.380 --> 41:36.440]  The more you give, the more there are.
[41:37.000 --> 41:38.140]  I love that.
[41:38.520 --> 41:40.200]  I'm never getting tired of that.
[41:41.180 --> 41:42.380]  And every...
[41:43.000 --> 41:59.440]  every week, sometimes every day, I get mail from somebody who says, I wrote a file about a subject that was kind of funny to me, and I uploaded it to some old friends on their BBS.
[42:00.020 --> 42:01.260]  You have it.
[42:02.480 --> 42:03.600]  From 1982.
[42:05.400 --> 42:07.000]  One of those friends is dead.
[42:07.940 --> 42:10.480]  I haven't had that computer in 20 years.
[42:11.020 --> 42:13.120]  But you saved it for me.
[42:13.820 --> 42:15.240]  And I thank you for that.
[42:16.100 --> 42:20.900]  I get people who mail me and say, what happened with BBSs?
[42:20.920 --> 42:22.940]  This is the greatest time that ever existed.
[42:23.400 --> 42:25.280]  It sucks now with the spam.
[42:26.220 --> 42:28.340]  People were so much nicer back then.
[42:29.580 --> 42:31.000]  It was so wonderful.
[42:31.640 --> 42:33.860]  And I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we loved each other.
[42:37.940 --> 42:41.240]  People love, you know, people come back, and they dive into this pool.
[42:41.580 --> 42:43.740]  I never put advertising banners up.
[42:43.740 --> 42:45.660]  I don't make people pay to click through.
[42:45.880 --> 42:46.480]  That's my choice.
[42:46.700 --> 42:49.360]  If somebody grabs it and makes a four-pay site, hooray.
[42:49.680 --> 42:50.700]  It's still somewhere.
[42:50.860 --> 42:56.320]  And when they run out of money, and go out of business, someone will buy their thing at auction, and it'll go somewhere else.
[42:56.480 --> 42:56.800]  Great, fine.
[42:57.620 --> 43:06.080]  People go in, and it's just that first oh shit feeling of jumping into the textfiles.com site, and there's 56,000 things for you to read.
[43:06.380 --> 43:07.160]  Right now.
[43:07.340 --> 43:08.260]  If you need to.
[43:11.000 --> 43:17.200]  It doesn't matter to me when the sun blows up, how much of it's still around.
[43:18.300 --> 43:23.840]  It matters to me the 10,000 people a day who come and are affected by my collection.
[43:24.340 --> 43:27.480]  And without the people who collected it in the first place, I wouldn't be where I was.
[43:29.360 --> 43:30.160]  We weren't...
[43:30.160 --> 43:31.460]  We were supposed to do Q&A.
[43:31.640 --> 43:33.140]  Unfortunately, it looks like I'm out of time.
[43:34.020 --> 43:34.900]  Are we out of time?
[43:34.900 --> 43:35.860]  What's the smile?
[43:36.500 --> 43:37.220]  Stage manager.
[43:37.900 --> 43:38.780]  Two minutes.
[43:39.400 --> 43:42.120]  Would somebody like to foment a question for me?
[43:42.720 --> 43:44.400]  Just walk up to the microphone.
[43:44.780 --> 43:45.680]  Whoever wins.
[43:45.860 --> 43:49.200]  If your question is really long, winding, and not really to me, I'll stop you.
[43:51.420 --> 43:52.460]  Just to...
[43:52.460 --> 43:58.140]  Kind of to get over the whole immediate intimidation value of textfiles.com.
[43:58.240 --> 43:59.520]  It's 56,000 files.
[43:59.640 --> 44:03.180]  You ever thought of, you know, putting forth a little...
[44:03.180 --> 44:07.780]  textfiles.com slash 100 are my top 100 files to read if you really don't like reading.
[44:07.920 --> 44:08.600]  Yeah, I've read that.
[44:08.720 --> 44:13.900]  And also, I was thinking maybe you could do some sort of, like, little message board and people could post comments on things.
[44:14.060 --> 44:20.120]  I don't like forums for my stuff because I can't run it properly.
[44:21.320 --> 44:24.520]  Foruming used to be a fun process you and your friends did.
[44:24.800 --> 44:26.760]  Now it is a geopolitical nightmare.
[44:27.800 --> 44:29.340]  I simply don't have the energy.
[44:29.780 --> 44:33.600]  I encourage people to start mailing lists to discuss it.
[44:33.680 --> 44:39.480]  There's something called 80s BBS list on Yahoo and so on where people discuss these different things.
[44:39.700 --> 44:42.600]  I like forums, but not when I have to run them.
[44:42.780 --> 44:43.340]  You know.
[44:43.860 --> 44:47.540]  I've watched Rob Malda be turned into a gibbering wreck of a man.
[44:48.140 --> 44:49.640]  And he doesn't even care.
[44:51.220 --> 44:51.740]  Anyway.
[44:52.780 --> 44:58.140]  Doing historical research, some of the most valuable stuff you can find is people's personal correspondence.
[44:58.440 --> 44:58.720]  Right.
[44:58.920 --> 45:07.740]  Given, with email, how widely spread this is and how much of it is located on individual servers that aren't being properly maintained, aren't being properly backed up.
[45:07.940 --> 45:12.440]  Is there any strategies that you're thinking of of ways that this information can be saved?
[45:13.940 --> 45:14.860]  One of the...
[45:15.340 --> 45:20.200]  Certainly, for instance, people generally put no weight in their own words.
[45:20.200 --> 45:21.500]  And it's very frustrating.
[45:21.840 --> 45:24.080]  They provide no meaning to their own words.
[45:24.240 --> 45:25.040]  I see that a lot.
[45:25.160 --> 45:26.080]  Certainly on LiveJournal.
[45:26.240 --> 45:29.460]  I think LiveJournal is one of the most important things to have happened in the past five years.
[45:30.080 --> 45:31.140]  I think that...
[45:32.560 --> 45:33.320]  People talk...
[45:33.320 --> 45:36.980]  A lot of talk about, wow, wouldn't it be really great if everyone got their own voice?
[45:37.140 --> 45:38.100]  And now it is.
[45:38.220 --> 45:41.180]  And now they're all surprised it's a canaphanous din of cats.
[45:42.180 --> 45:43.500]  But that's the nature of humans.
[45:43.820 --> 45:46.080]  That's the nature of humans coming online is that they do that.
[45:46.360 --> 45:47.060]  And so, great!
[45:47.580 --> 45:53.560]  An MIT research project downloaded four gigabytes of web logs to do it.
[45:53.680 --> 45:54.760]  I grabbed that database.
[45:55.040 --> 45:56.060]  I don't even know how to read it.
[45:56.860 --> 45:58.400]  I just grabbed it and put it somewhere.
[45:58.740 --> 46:02.400]  Because at some point someone's going to go, wouldn't it be nice if we had an example of all that?
[46:02.520 --> 46:03.780]  And run correlations against it.
[46:04.520 --> 46:07.220]  I think that some of that is relegated to never be found.
[46:07.740 --> 46:15.420]  I think that sometimes you will have weird situations where machines will be decommissioned from an ISP and they will take the information.
[46:15.500 --> 46:16.040]  Oh, that's horrible.
[46:16.120 --> 46:17.060]  It's a violation of privacy.
[46:17.260 --> 46:22.640]  But on the other hand, it's this, you know, sense, you know, that's the classic problem, right?
[46:23.180 --> 46:24.080]  Our worst...
[46:24.700 --> 46:29.820]  Our worst president had his papers burned upon his death.
[46:30.440 --> 46:31.840]  Why am I forgetting his name?
[46:32.360 --> 46:33.480]  God, did he suck!
[46:34.820 --> 46:35.660]  He was...
[46:35.660 --> 46:38.160]  He never passed one single piece of legislation.
[46:38.940 --> 46:40.660]  He only had parties.
[46:41.000 --> 46:43.580]  He dressed in three different outfits every day.
[46:45.060 --> 46:46.160]  Boy, did he suck!
[46:46.780 --> 46:48.640]  I don't know why I'm forgetting this man's name.
[46:48.680 --> 46:49.740]  He was a vice president.
[46:49.880 --> 46:53.860]  He got it because the other guy died, got shot, and 30 days later died because of an infection.
[46:54.020 --> 46:54.720]  30 days into his...
[46:54.720 --> 46:54.960]  Anyway.
[46:56.600 --> 46:57.020]  Harrison!
[46:58.080 --> 46:59.040]  I think it was Harrison.
[46:59.200 --> 46:59.640]  Was it Harrison?
[46:59.860 --> 47:00.260]  Harrison?
[47:03.820 --> 47:04.460]  Oh, well.
[47:04.820 --> 47:05.380]  Look it up.
[47:05.680 --> 47:07.540]  There are some very bad presidents.
[47:07.540 --> 47:10.760]  It's not just this constant bar graph going down.
[47:12.040 --> 47:13.560]  There are some suckos!
[47:13.840 --> 47:14.280]  Okay?
[47:15.340 --> 47:19.040]  My question is about how do you authenticate the...
[47:19.040 --> 47:20.300]  with digital media?
[47:20.500 --> 47:28.260]  I mean, I can send you a text file saying that I came up with the word KRAD in 1989, and it was posted on some VBS.
[47:28.400 --> 47:30.900]  If I just send that to you, are you just going to believe that?
[47:30.900 --> 47:33.280]  And how do people who see...
[47:33.280 --> 47:45.160]  You know, if I go to textfiles.com, how do I know that those files were gotten from sources that were honest about, you know, this actually being Apple, you know, VBS?
[47:45.440 --> 47:46.700]  I do work for the wiki.
[47:47.700 --> 47:49.020]  I've done work for the Wikipedia.
[47:49.360 --> 47:50.740]  I've run my own wiki.
[47:50.920 --> 47:52.100]  I've run textfiles.com.
[47:52.100 --> 47:55.160]  I've submitted articles to the Rotten Library, the Rotten.com Library.
[47:55.440 --> 47:57.880]  I can tell you that I don't believe anything anymore, ever.
[48:00.080 --> 48:00.960]  I fundamentally...
[48:01.980 --> 48:04.280]  I fell for that hook, line, and sinker.
[48:05.880 --> 48:09.380]  Fundamentally, the answer is, I don't believe any of it.
[48:10.560 --> 48:13.420]  I just put it up, and keep putting up everything I can.
[48:13.660 --> 48:16.160]  At the moment, it's Bob Mahoney made the zip file.
[48:16.280 --> 48:21.860]  In another five minutes, it might turn out, oh God, Pete Seeger made the zip file, and Bob Mahoney stole it from him.
[48:23.000 --> 48:25.540]  Across the river, over in Weehawken, or is it across the river?
[48:25.660 --> 48:27.760]  Over in Weehawken, they're...
[48:27.760 --> 48:32.940]  The reason I'm thinking of Hamilton is because they're reenacting the Burr-Hamilton duel today.
[48:34.320 --> 48:36.180]  Whereby, one...
[48:36.660 --> 48:40.220]  Hamilton shot over Burr's head, and Hamilton was killed.
[48:41.620 --> 48:44.680]  There are three different conflicting stories as to exactly what happened.
[48:45.360 --> 48:54.120]  Some say that the guns were modified, and Hamilton was cheating, and modified it, so that when he shot it, the recoil was way more than he expected, and wacky took it.
[48:54.500 --> 48:59.960]  Another one says that he intentionally shot over because he could not see himself killing a man over such a minor thing.
[49:00.540 --> 49:03.420]  And the third one just says, Burr was a great shot.
[49:05.360 --> 49:06.280]  We'll never know.
[49:06.840 --> 49:09.580]  I mean, there are two secondaries were there, but they don't...
[49:09.580 --> 49:10.680]  They have conflicting stories.
[49:10.800 --> 49:11.380]  We'll never know.
[49:11.480 --> 49:12.160]  We do our best.
[49:12.340 --> 49:13.400]  We absolutely do our best.
[49:13.480 --> 49:15.160]  We try to put up all the information we can.
[49:15.360 --> 49:17.620]  Maybe some way down the line, we'll find a way of knowing.
[49:19.080 --> 49:25.420]  Inherently, over time, I am encountering more and more people politically coming after me to try to change history.
[49:25.800 --> 49:33.120]  The best that I can do is grab stuff from sources and people that nobody cared about and nobody talked to to get their opinion.
[49:33.760 --> 49:35.080]  Because everyone knows...
[49:35.080 --> 49:37.660]  A lot of people know Tom Jennings, who created Fido.
[49:37.920 --> 49:42.360]  Not as many people know John Medill, who was FidoNet node number two.
[49:43.180 --> 49:44.220]  And I interviewed him.
[49:44.400 --> 49:48.660]  So his opinions really helped me with Tom Jennings because Tom Jennings is such a famous figure and all that.
[49:48.920 --> 49:50.000]  What a strange thing to end on.
[49:50.180 --> 49:53.280]  I'd like to thank you all for getting up so early on a Sunday to come speak to me.
[49:54.220 --> 49:56.100]  And I want to thank you for listening.
[50:01.000 --> 50:12.440]  And I also really wish to thank Emmanuel for lasting through 20 years of backbiting and pain, which is what comes to anyone who creates things.
[50:13.100 --> 50:24.740]  And that I hope that over time the tykes who look up to him and point an insult will eventually dream of achieving stature that he has.
[50:26.440 --> 50:27.280]  Thank you very much.