This combination of "Nonprofit" and "Permanent" is an oxymoron. And the fact that the people who run this operation don't realize this means this initiative is doomed.
These people use museum endowment as an analogy, but especially judging from that analogy I don't think they have any idea how this thing works. Storing someone else's data forever is completely different from how museum is run. The analogy is so ridiculous that it's not even funny.
Where this analogy may apply is sites like Waybackmachine, because they're at least doing it for the greater good. But I'm pretty sure these guys will throw away some random guy's private file archive the moment they run out of money.
Normally I'm all for silly experiments that come from ignorance, and I'm fine with various consumer startups that come and go along with their user data, because sometimes this ignorance leads to success. But in this case these people are playing with someone else's data AND asking for money, and claiming to store these forever in my view is no different from a scam artist. Intentional or not, this to me is no different from a scam.
I would say the companies who are at least honest about exploiting our data such as Google and Facebook are more ethical.
In today’s world though Google or FB decommissioning that product segment is just as likely. Just because it is Google doesn’t mean they will spend every last penny to keep it running. Once it stop becoming profitable, you better figure out what to do with your data. Hopefully one still has the primary local copy and not wondering how to do bulk download
Apart from that I agree this non-profit competition should only be used to kill industries that charge an exorbitant amount for there services. At least many of the popular cloud storage companies are as “non-outrageous-profit” as it gets. They make money from efficiency/dedup or other management efficiency
Yes, i am just pointing out a simple thing here. At least Google is not lying. They don't claim they will "permanently" store private data forever for free. These guys are. And while doing so, using companies like Google as the devil in order to present themselves as the savior.
It's almost like a conman claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine and asking people for money, and furthermore, going around criticizing all the other people who build and sell normal machines are the bad guys for selling inferior products.
> They don't claim they will "permanently" store private data forever for free. These guys are.
No, they're not. They're claiming they will permanently store private data for a one-time fee.
Yes you're right. In fact the fact that they are asking for you money is what ticks me off the most.
Let me put it this way instead. They are essentially saying they will pay for the hosting and data access usage and networking costs forever, and you can enjoy all these things for free forever, if you "only" pay an upfront cost. And that's a lie. There's no such thing as forever, especially if it's run by beings that won't be around forever. The scammy people behind this initiative will all die in hundred years. Without an economically viable model, it will all go.
In my eyes, what they are doing is essentially trying to make it big with a one time splash, and don't care what happens next. No different from all the scammy blockchain ICOs that promise "forever immutable storage".
So it's a ponzi scheme for cloud storage dependent on people continuing to pay to store new items in order for them to pay for their current costs.
Although the idea is to create a fund and operate off the interest. Let's look at their prices.
$1000 for 100 Gigabytes or $100 for 10 Gigabytes. Basically it's $10/GB. With like a very safe dividend allocation they can probably get a 2% annual return on their investments, which means they need to only spend $0.20/year on my 1GB of data.
They say their plan is perfect for phone or hard drive backups, and they offer continuous file migration. Let's say I completely replace the contents of my GB every 3 months. We can't use AWS S3 One-zone because they advertise "Redudant backup".
S3 Standard Infrequent access is $0.0125 per GB per month, so that's $0.15/year/GB. Maybe they can use AWS S3 Glacier although I'm not exactly sure how it'd work with the continuous migrations. That would be $0.048/year/GB which is a lot more feasible. Data ingress into AWS is free, but egress isn't. If we download our GB 4 times per year that's $0.04 in egress. There's also some costs for PUT, COPY, POST, LIST, GET, SELECT requests, so let's say that for our 1 GB it'll amount to $0.01 per year.
That means it'll cost us $0.098/year/GB for our storage service that we can only download from 4 times/year and does not give us millisecond-access to our data.
I'm sure they can find a storage solution that's cheaper than using AWS S3 Standard Infrequent Access so they still have a good response time for data, but overall it seems feasible.
if these people actually cared about people owning their own data, they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described. Instead of asking for money.
This is a somewhat ridiculous position. If I hope to preserve data for my children, I'm not going to hand them a box with jerry-rigged software and hardware that they then have to maintain. I want someone to maintain that for them.
If I'm looking for my blog, or my tweets, or a set of family photos and videos to live on forever, I absolutely want them under control of a foundation that outlives me and my relatives interest in maintaining that data.
So you just made the claim this is essentially a scam and the people don't know what they are doing (considering the people on the board that's quite a rich claim). JCharante just showed with a back of the envelope calculation that it seems feasible.
Why don't you refute the argument and tell us why it isn't? You made some pretty bold claims, so I would be nice if you can back them up.
>>> There's no such thing as forever, especially if it's run by beings that won't be around forever. The scammy people behind this initiative will all die in hundred years.
> if these people actually cared about people owning their own data, they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described. Instead of asking for money.
The only way human beings can successfully store data (especially symbolic/digital data) for long terms is by creating institutions to maintain it.
Even granite tablet buried in a cave for 10,000 years will require a continuous series of institutions maintain the knowledge to successfully interpret it, otherwise you'll just end up with something like Linear A.
> they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described
Where is this individual going to store their data? On the unreliable hard drive on their personal computer, which they never back up?
A toolkit or an application isn't hardware. Solving the problem of reliable long-term data storage requires hardware. Hardware costs money. Basically this service is competing with my ISP, my hosting company, etc. to be a long-term data storage provider.
I don't know whether they will be around forever, but if we assume they're not trying to scam people, the math can be done. How much does storage amount X cost per year (=$Y), how much money would you need to continuously generate $Y per year? The one-time fee you'd need is $Y.
Whether their math is sound, I have no idea. Whether it's a good idea I don't know either. I don't need "permanent" storage as in "for ever and ever and ever". But that's not necessarily a scam.
I think people all seek a permanent legacy of some sort. I don't think our digital junk really fits. There are IRL costs to hoarding junk; I'm really not sure any benefits - of keeping _all_ someone's digital miscellany - justify those costs?
> I think people all seek a permanent legacy of some sort. I don't think our digital junk really fits. There are IRL costs to hoarding junk; I'm really not sure any benefits - of keeping _all_ someone's digital miscellany - justify those costs?
I think with a lot of things there's a J shaped value curve. Over long periods of time, things of small value (including literal garbage) become historical and archeological treasure.
Also this doesn't seems like it's really mean to be storage for random "junk":
> Permanent.org isn't just another digital box or drive. It's a digital archive.
> Upload your most important digital materials to your archive and customize the archive profile to represent you. Create multiple archives for other people and organizations. Then establish relationships to share materials between them and create everlasting connections. Collaborate with your community by adding members to any archive to curate a shared history.
That implies there's a certain level of curation that's supposed to go into the archive, so more diaries and important records than your "Downloads" folder.
> I think with a lot of things there's a J shaped value curve. Over long periods of time, things of small value (including literal garbage) become historical and archeological treasure.
Isn't that mostly because of it becoming a rare insight into a time that is long gone? With perfect preservation, would literal scraps of garbage from 10k years ago be individually interesting?
And keep in mind the cost per Gigabyte stored is going to decrease over time.
The math will work out, sure..
The question is if you can trust this non-profit?
Maybe if other credible non-profits were backing it.
Their governing board includes Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Mark Surman (Mozilla Foundation), Stephan Wolfram (Wolfram Alpha), and Paul Vixie (Internet Systems Consortium).
they offered me a gigabyte for free
> These people use museum endowment as an analogy, but especially judging from that analogy I don't think they have any idea how this thing works. Storing someone else's data forever is completely different from how museum is run. The analogy is so ridiculous that it's not even funny.
OK, enlighten me. Because to me (an admittedly financial layperson) it makes sense. I give them a one-time payment, they put it in the bank with lots of others' payments and live off the interest. I don't see where the problem lies.
And yeah, I'm sure they will close down the minute they run out of money. That's no different than a for-profit doing the same as soon as it stops being profitable. To me though, this is way easier to understand how it could be around forever unlike the for-profit boys which have a totally different goal.
I give them one time payment, store a gigabyte of video, and share with millions of people. People keep watching and using up all the network costs and hosting costs. How are these guys going to keep going "permanently"?
It says storage, not streaming. I think you're making an unsupported assumption about the nature of the service being offered.
I don't think that is the service they are offering. It simply says storage. The only sharing mentioned is sharing with other user's archives.... not public access.
But regardless, we have no idea what backend they are using. Hell, I can go to S3 right now, put a gig out there, and a million hits only cost me pennies. And in theory, that cost will only continue to shrink.
It looks like some kind of sharing is part of the offer: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/exclusiv...
I would like to see more details on this. Bandwidth-limited sharing would still be economically feasible up to a point.
If they have run the numbers and are careful to leave a generous safety margin, I can see this working out. Eventually it will fail, as everything does, but it could last a very long time before that happens.
One more thought: if they are successful, they may accumulate a substantial endowment, at which point the primary risk is capture of that endowment by unethical board members. They have a good board right now, but will that always be the case? Time will tell.
We're making a lot of assumptions about a service that should probably be making things a lot more clear before they start taking money. My assumption is that "sharing" means sharing with family, etc. as opposed to publishing.
*> My assumption is that "sharing" means sharing with family, etc. as opposed to publishing.
You don't have to make any assumptions. It's right there on the web page that was linked to:
"You choose what files or folders you want to share, who you want to share them with and what level of access that Archive should have."
> Hell, I can go to S3 right now, put a gig out there, and a million hits only cost me pennies.
A million hits on a 1 gig file would cost you $50,000.
Traffic is as close to free as it's going to get. Sure, AWS/GCP/Azure charge a lot as a lock-in strategy, but for example DigitalOcean charges $5/TB, while Hetzner and OVH don't charge for traffic for dedicated servers at all.
Okay, your previous post was pretty unclear, but given this explanation, I'm giving you a rare (for me) downvote. You're speaking way too confidently about things that are definitely more ambiguous than you're letting on. It's important to be right, especially when you're crapping on other people's work.
I've also posted some skepticism about what they're doing, but the difference is that I'm asking questions rather than making assumptions.
They don't mention anything about hosting or streaming your data - just storing it. I assume the backend will be something similar to glacier or just slow, cold storage.
Why are you making things up at this point?
> Intentional or not, this to me is no different from a scam.
You don't get to redefine a word and then claim it fits the definition. Scam is intentional deception, which is most certainly not what's happenning here.
"I would say the companies who are at least honest about exploiting our data such as Google and Facebook are more ethical."
Luckily, those are not your only two choices - there are cloud storage providers that are simultaneously privacy minded[1], technically sophisticated[2], and honest about their business practices[3].
[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
[2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html
[3] https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html
I understand permanence is hard to achieve, but why do you claim it correlates with for-profit as opposed to nonprofit motivations?
A subjective look at the world suggests that institutions which have preserved artifacts (including digital artifacts) over a long time scale have been likelier to be non-profit than for-profit.
> This combination of "Nonprofit" and "Permanent" is an oxymoron.
"Non profit" has nothing to do with it. Thinking any service is permanent is pretty naive.
Not the original commenter but I agree that no service is permanent. That's why any service marketing themselves as such raises an eyebrow from me.
The word permanent itself is very relative. It always is. Because in the end, nothing is permanent. It just depends on your requirement of permanence.
Nope. Non profit doesn't mean they do it for free. It means that the goal of the organization is not making profit. They'll still pay their employees and they'll still charge for their service (even if they'll call it a tax-deductible donation). At least this is my understanding.
> This combination of "Nonprofit" and "Permanent" is an oxymoron.
Nonprofit mainly means that they're not a company beholden to shareholders, and that they can't be sold or acquired.
What has a profit motive to do with permanent? Why (provided it doesn't work) would it it work it if it was for profit, but not if it wasn't?
It seems you have some political beef with this being a non-profit.
in your opinion, is archive.org permanent? and less ethical than Google or Facebook?
archive.org is a different beast because it deals with publicly available data. This is why the museum endowment analogy may make more sense with archive.org. There will always be people who want to help the "greater good".
But when it comes to private data hosting, for each repository there is exactly one person who wants it to stay alive.
Lastly, archive.org never started out asking people for money promising something the impossible. These guys will hide behind the word "promise" when they want to exit scam or just give up after a couple of months after taking people's money. "Hey we only gave you a promise, we never said we will guarantee and even pay back money if we can't keep the promise", this is what they will say.
You know that the founder of the Internet Archive is on the governing board for the Permanent.org foundation right?
Lol. Read his post history today - he certainly did not know that. He has been firing from the hip left and right making shit up to trash this organization.
tell me, what does that have to do with my argument? nothing changes at all. and all you're doing is making a logical fallacy appealing to authority.