I already downloaded collections of various ROMs for use in emulators along with the emulators to use them. These ROMs don't need the Internet and have no DRM in the emulators.
My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and DRM to work.
I've used the emulator "Retroarch" on the Steam Deck and had good success playing with it in offline mode. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it's been a great fit for me
Apologies, but this strikes me as a rather silly question. What I would keep in the event of a prolonged network outage would be of minimal significance.
What I'd really be concerned about would be our modern society. Purchasing food, water, fuel, clothes and other necessities would be near impossible. Supply chains would not just have problems, but literally fall apart. Money would stop moving.
If anything is "too big to fail" it would be the internet.
You're not wrong. If the internet fails for everyone (at least at the city level) then basically there's no banking.
Along with no banking there's no way to order supplies. No way to accept delivery. The very least of your problems is music or Wikipedia.
And I know you're thinking cash will help you, but its not enough. We used to have forests of paper and squadrons of clerks- that simply doesn't exist anymore.
I think that there is a lot of merit to your argument. However, I think there is also the human factor as well as a malleable technology factor. I'll speak to the second factor.
While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically infinite amounts of transactions.
We don't have squadrons of clerks but we have software that can collate transactions locally.
The internet is certainly a useful tool for quick connectivity but there are definitely ways to do things without the internet and without reverting all the way back to cash/check and paper ledgers.
My autocomplete and documentation work offline. Not being able to download new libraries would suck, but as long as you have the necessary tools installed it wouldn't be too bad.
It's not that long ago that software was distributed on CD and tutorials in printed books. The internet adds a lot of convenience and productivity, but it's hardly a requirement.
The entire open source ecosystem will be gone. Distribution on CD (or USB sticks) would be okay for delivering software, but not viable for frequently exchanging patches among a large group of developers in different parts of the world.
Most open source projects are the work of one developer with occasional outside contributions. Those can still be distributed by CD or USB stick, either directly by mail or the more traditional route of magazines having CDs with collections of software their subscribers might like. Or a modern version of people meeting up to exchange files peer-to-peer. If you want to contribute, write a patch and send it back to the developer, e.g. by snail mail.
Large open source projects would be much more difficult. Though some of them are already either largely done by one company (so people can meet in person) or very hierarchical (like Linux).
To be honest, I would expect most small open source projects to just vanish, because of the lack of discoverability. The users won't be able to test them easily, and probably won't be paying for the shipping of a tiny tool that they have not yet tried and don't know whether it's useful or not.
Large open source projects can survive, but I'd imagine it will lean much more towards being developed mainly singular organizations. Without the internet, we don't just lose contributors, but also a lot of testers. The feedback loop will probably shrink, such that the software is mainly based on the need of the organization itself, and the perhaps a selected few collaborators who are very involved.
You will be unable to communicate except through face to face meetings. There is no more POTS(plain old telephone system), the entire world routes phone calls over the internet. There's no IM, the physical mail system will at least become dramatically backlogged if not fail entirely due to infrastructure failure internally and the new increased demand.
In my country is it not just that there isn't a POTS system, there isn't even copper. You have a FTTH(fiber to the home) link or a mobile connection. To my knowledge even in the US fiber terminates at the distribution point and your cable supply is last mile only.
I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage at the scale but it will be global panic.
> I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage at the scale but it will be global panic.
A coordinated attack on key infrastructure (eg: root DNS servers) could do it. Much of the internet is held together with duct tape and bubble gum. The reason it stays alive is because there are a lot of duct tape and bubble gum specialists :)
There are still a lot of ways to communicate without the internet over large distances (eg: radio, satellite, plane, drone, etc...) and there are different considerations/requirements for them. They are still an ultimate backup to the world we have created but shopping on Amazon via ham-radio would be quite painful!
> While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically infinite amounts of transactions.
And how do we know that someone's pocket computer doesn't contain a
forged list of transactions that never happened, or is missing some
transactions that did happen?
i like that you speak towards humans not being hopeless without the internet. its true. they depend on it a lot, but can easily adapt..
i do beleive though that it would be only a temporary thing.
on a local level you can likely still enable a lot of stuff. the internet would most likely die due to a decision to disable it rather than mass equipment failure. also very unlikely, as a ton of people must disable it at the same time, knowing all full well the result of doing so...
if they do that so u can try to get a radio broadcast up with some equipment thats strapped to houses and appartment buildings eveywhere these days. see if some antennas can be enabled for telephony locally etc. get the spark going for getting a network back up. for isp equipment the same. you can enable and if needed reprogram/configure a lot of field equipment and enable local networks. perhaps depending on your locality even more (internet exchange and isp data centers are close to some people atleast).
quite sure it would be up and running again in no time locally. at some point networks would merge and an internet would form again...
all in all there's really not a lot anyone can do about it if people want to use these existing networks and equipment. unless they start cutting power to very large areas etc. etc., remove the equipment everywhere, or ourposefuly destroy it... - this line of thought is extremely unrealistic.
The problem wouldn’t be a lack of alternative means to facilitate transactions, it would be a lack of trusted counterparties to transact with.
Grocery stores and bars used to let local trusted customers pay their accumulated purchases once per week or month, or accept personal checks from them without any means of verifying whether they were covered.
Today? It’s essentially cash or credit card, and no more mechanisms for local/decentralized credit decisions whatsoever, even if a checkout clerk might personally know a customer.
Because of ubiquitous connectivity, we have greatly increased, but also centralized trust. Local trust isn’t restored quickly, especially during an emergency when tensions are high anyway.
There are digital forms of currency already but barring that, you can still manage centralized trust with distributed communication.
Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.
It’s true that these solutions don’t exist today but they are not far away with the amount of pressure we are talking about by losing the internet.
Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
I came across a pre-magnetic-strip credit card years ago… it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.
> Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.
That's something I'd definitely love to see, but it doesn't exist at the moment (in the US, at least; in Japan, there are stored-value cards in Apple Wallet that can support two-side offline transactions).
> Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
They used to, but they don't anymore. Almost all terminals and many cards won't let you do an offline transaction these days, for both credit and debit cards.
> it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.
True, but unfortunately as far as I can see, it's all been moving towards a more centralized/connection-dependent system. That's great for when everything is working as expected, but raises some concerns about resilience.
My most likely "internet down" scenario would be my local government deciding to launch a national firewall, probably under the guise of "combatting disinformation, malinformation, misinformation, and foreign interference".
For that scenario I need as many VPNs as possible, a VPS in a friendly jurisdiction, and a TOR browser.
If the "internet is down" for "good", it's hard to me to think of a scenario where it didn't bring down the rest of civilization down along with it.
In the U.K. a Thames barrier failure would (amongst a lot of London) wipe out the vast majority of switching capacity. Sure there’s slough and a few smaller IXPs but not enough for the capacity.
For sure food, water and etc are going to be the hardest to acquire. I live in Valencia which just had some massive flooding. The city of Valencia itself survived unscathed since they rerouted the river here in 1954, but the outskirts are completely devastated. The grocery stores in the city have more or less been empty across the entire city for the last week. Supplies are still getting in, but the slight increase in demand (all the people in the affected areas need to come into the city for groceries) along with panic buying make me realize in a true SHTF situation that we'd be completely screwed.
When I did this a number of years ago, and it was only around 5-6GB, or about 20GB with all the images. I also added about 4GB for windows, android, iOS, Linux, and Mac OS apps to parse/view the data. All of that fits on a 32GB flashdrive that I used to keep on my keychain but currently is in my glove compartment I think.
It sparks some amazement in me still to wrap my head around the reality of so much information in a thing the size of my pinky. Or the size of my pinky nail if you use a micro SD card. And yeah, just took a weekend of downloading and setting it up, and flashdrives/microsd cards are easily found at department stores, or even gas stations sometimes.
Even disregarded any potential doomsday utility, the amusement/amazement it's brought me was well worth the modest time/money it took. I hope more people give it a try
People talk about investing in physical gold for an economic meltdown, I think stacks of microSD cards with the full contents of Wikipedia and a Netflix archive is worth orders of magnitude more in the event of a catastrophe
At least for one of the websites in this lis, no it does not as you don't gain anything from the money that the users pay. And frankly some people will email you asking you to send them your work for free and you will happily do that.
If it does, then the author is sadly misguided and got convinced of someone that isn't true.
The people that download the book from these sites would never have bought them. Having your book downloaded by 10k people doesn't mean you've lost 10k sales, what it does mean is that you've got up to 10k people that wouldn't have bought the book anyway talking about it, effectively becoming word of mouth advertisers.
This isn't quiet as true for movies/tv series etc, because their value (entertainment time/price) is so much lower. Books on the other have usually cost $5-30 and will take 4-30 hours to read through. At that price point, very very few people will download the books to save what amounts to a single meal. Especially if you consider that so few people actually read several books per year (that's essentially $<30 per year "saved" via illegal downloads)
It could become an issue if a for-profit company could serve them legally however, I agree with that. It's hard to really talk about that, though ... It's a pure what-if/speculation after all
How many of those 10k purchases didn’t buy it because it was available for free somewhere? The point is, as you said, you don’t know.. However we do know the opposite is true, once Napster went away people started paying for Pandora. Netflix password crackdown lead to increased subscriptions.
When your desirable product isn’t available for free, people will trend towards buying it.
Your example is strange, as that was clearly a distribution problem. It's been well covered and could be observed with Netflix too, until they've reintroduced this issue.
This distribution problem doesn't really exist with books at the moment as Kindle exists.
You're mistakenly throwing books and music into the same bag.
I often download books before buying them because I otherwise have no reasonable means to judge their content. This is not much different from flipping through the pages of a book in a library before buying it. The appeal of reading from an actual physical book is not something that any digital form can replace, so the book being available in digital form won't stop me from buying a copy. I also have no interest in Kindles and DRM.
Music, on the other hand, might be a different story except for select audiophiles who prefer vinyl.
So I don't think we can generalize to "product" like you do in your argument. Details and facts actually matter.
The science shows that piracy increases the amount people pay for content not the reverse.
Corey Doctorow has the right idea. <sic> “I give my works away for free. Every time I gain another fan I gain another person who might want to own the hardback of my new book.”
If your desirable product is available for free more people find you, like you, follow you, patronize you. A lot of those people have money and are happy to give it to you to support you continuing to make good work.
For authors of scholarly journal papers at least, I don't think piracy is remotely a concern, because they do not receive any compensation from subscriptions or purchases of their papers, whereas they do benefit from the increased readership of their works.
I am an author, and I don't think I'm entitled to have my work protected for 90+ years. Also, "piracy" is inevitable so the assumption is built-in my strategy.
My personal/work files for which the physical media of origin no longer exists. Source codes, mine and of others that I care about. Compilers. Lots of books and Wikipedia.
More than downloading a bunch of information, I would also think about hoarding computers that might last a long time if taken care of... along with a durable power source that doesn't require fossil fuels. (eg: This potentially includes gasification based generators)
For the internet to "go down for an indefinite period" there would need to be some pretty big changes to our current world. The reason it "goes down" also matters a lot.
1) Political reasons (eg: whomever is in power wants to control information flow)
This will likely mean that certain kinds of information can still flow because we don't want to crash the entire economy.
In this case, I would want all of the information I could get my hands on about known history. This includes previous regimes and how they ultimately played out.
2) Geo-political (some other country bans your access to their resources)
This is a harder case to enforce without complete isolation ... but theoretically possible.
In this case, technical howtos are still useful as you can probably still get modern supplies. Depending on what my country produces, I would probably want to get all information about those processes as I could. Also, if my country doesn't produce a lot of food, information on what can be grown locally would be helpful... along with ways to protect it from nature.
3) Global catastrophe (plague/virus/nuclear winter/etc...)
Maybe enough of the internet is just "lost" and the technical means to resurrect it has also disappeared.
At this point, you need to think about being completely self-sufficient. ie: Grow your own food, make your own tools, protect yourself from animals and people. It would be helpful to have some tools at the start for this. Maybe even just basic gardening tools and a greenhouse ... and whatever form of protection makes the most sense to you. Find some land that can sustain you; Leftover city supplies will likely disappear very fast.
4) All of the above, simultaneously.
It's time to just get a Bible and start praying. Maybe a bunker, too. Survival will likely be a lot of luck and a lot of cunning.
Avoiding electrolytic caps is a good start for sure. There are plenty of boards out there without them.
Running CPUs and boards at lower power settings can also help. Thermal cycling is the enemy of longevity. Being able to control CPU frequency will be helpful.
Many power supplies have electrolytic caps in them as well. If you can stick to a standard that’s easy to find then there is a good chance you can just salvage an existing power supply that has managed to survive.
Some cheaper examples to consider would be raspberrypi boards with usb-c power. Don’t run them at full speed to reduce long-term thermal effects. About a decade ago I would have suggested Intel Atom based systems for similar reasons.
Server hardware is often made to a better spec for longevity. I miss old sparc hardware; I feel like those machines could last forever.
Today, arm based systems are probably a good bet since you can find lots of software for them and they run cooler than (say) x86 variants of similar caliber.
Storage is the next Achilles heel to consider. Cheap flash will die sooner rather than later. I’m not up on the best tech in this space anymore though so somebody else might chime in here.
Finally, displays can be pretty fragile. Phone displays actually come to mind as a decently ruggedized technology. Bigger displays are probably more prone to damage long-term so, small and durable is probably valuable here.
I’ll probably catch flak for this but… a smartphone is actually a pretty decent computer that can last a very long time. If you can run arbitrary software on it and keep it in one place instead of in your pocket, it could be a good get. The issue I know of here is the battery; if it gets too weak then some phones may not be able to power up completely even with a power supply attached.
If that's all you read, then I'd expect that you will find turmoil and create more. I'd read about the things humanity actually wants to do and benefits from.
I don't read How to write horrible code and what to do when that's your codebase. I do have to know the latter a bit, but no more than necessary.
Having recently had a week long internet outage I can say quite confidently, nothing really.
The things that caused me massive anxiety during that outage was things that are real time.
No communication, since all my communication is through VOIP services of some sort, even mobile calls might be down depending on how you define internet.
And no banking at all, my bank doesn't even have physical branches and most banks in my country have gone that way, even going to a physical branch for one of the larger incumbent banks they just put you on a call with their call center, they cannot help you locally. The tellers and just fancy ATMs and they charge you a premium to use them instead of the ATM outside. If you thing that wont be an issue, well the internet is down, that local branch is useless.
There's still many cash based business so that's less of an issue for me but we will definitely have pandemic level panic again. I mean during the pandemic people bought all the toilet paper here, not the food but the toilet paper...
Online media will be the least of your problems and large swaths of that information is available and backed up at libraries around the world. Likewise if only the network is down the servers still exist so the data didn't go away.
Also if Y2K taught us anything is that we will solve the problem relatively quickly and even if what we currently know as the internet fails a different form of the internet will be back up soon enough.
Agree. If we could time-travel back to 1985 then fine, I would miss very little about the modern internet.
If the internet were to just suddenly "go down" globally it would of course be a disaster and result in much unrest, panic, supply chain breakdowns, and general collapse of society. It it so interwoven into everything we depend on.
the real horror would be if it were to happen in 20 years or so, if it were to happen in the near future we still have people around who remember how things were done before computers.
society would end. some bumpy roads, sure, but we did very well before the internet and we’d do fine without it. we would just rebuild.
it’s just not as instrumental as some people make it out to be. nice? absofuckinlutely. necessary? nopes.
It’s weird that we are in the minority (I guess I’m not shocked since this is HN). Very little on the Internet is useful for survival in an Internet down scenario. And if the Internet is gone, we must have far bigger problems. Libraries are going to be far more useful, and books don’t require electricity. I grew up in a place with lots of power outages and the main thing you are worried about is having hot water for a bath or a being able to cook a meal.
Tangential thought but we should probably work hard to preserve libraries in the future. Real ones, with books. They are really unmatched when it comes to longevity and safeguarding information in a way that computers cannot replicate.
> There are those CDs made out of rock, but they have never veen proven to pass the test of time.
You're saying that something that has existed for less than 50 years doesn't count because we haven't been able to actually test it for more than 50 years, even though we understand the physics behind it and can theoretically predict how long it will last...
While I think common digital media outlasting analog forms in terms of integrity over long periods of time is unrealistic I do have 40 year old CDs from 1984 that are still bit perfect as of just a couple years ago (verified against online checksum databases for the same releases), so it'll be interesting seeing how long they last.
Pressed CDs are pretty good in terms of durability, but how are you gonna get one produced in a single day? (Per the prompt, the Internet disappears tomorrow, not in a couple of weeks.)
There was a period of time where pressed CDs were manufactured poorly, with the aluminum layer inside exposed to the outside, resulting in corrosion over time and loss of readability on those CDs.
Overall, though, properly-made CDs, handled carefully, have been excellent at storing data long-term.
But while this is nice enough I guess for storing individual musical albums long-term, it's not practical for storing truly large volumes of arbitrary data. CD-Rs and CD-RWs have not had the same durability demonstrated at all (quite the opposite in fact). DVDs are better at almost 4GB per disc, but here again only the factory ones are actually durable, and 4GB isn't going to store much these days, perhaps one movie with high lossy compression.
While my comment wasn't about the feasibility of pressed CDs for a mass blackout event but just an example of long-term integrity of existing digital media, it's unfortunate that a forum (MyCE) dedicated to tracking integrity of user-writable optical discs unexpectedly closed a couple years ago due to the webmaster pulling the plug.
It had users who carefully performed benchmarks on media for more than a decade to see which types and makes held up best over time, along with best practices. Few have the interest or patience for such things so it's unfortunate to just have such info vanish.
I will add though that what's missing from the discussion is Blu-Ray, which allows up to 128GB per disc. (I only vaguely recall reading some critique of BD DL discs so can't say how it might compare long term though, apart from the greater cost at such capacities.)
Somehow it seems ironic that a forum dedicated to understanding the long-term viability of data storage, an important topic lately because of the unreliability of
3rd-party providers (like cloud companies), itself became a victim of the unreliability of its own webmaster.
128GB BD-R discs do exist, but at $219 on Amazon for 25 discs, that's about $0.07/GB. It would be MUCH cheaper to just buy a stack of refurbished enterprise-class HDDs and store your data on those, in triplicate, with a filesystem that has error correction (like ZFS). Personally, I would bet on HDDs used this way still being readable and not having bit-rot after 50 years over 4-layer BD-R discs.
Wouldn't it be more like $0.07/GB for BDXL? If one got particularly lucky with HDD failure rates perhaps they'd survive running that long in RAID but one would expect some replacements over such a long period.
Some other things to consider are at high capacities all HDDs use helium now, which slowly leaks (WD/HGST have a SMART stat about the level*) and the cost of running drives/associated computers/maintenance over a long span vs the up front cost of passive writable media (edit: for some reason I assumed this was what was meant but they could be left cold which would likely increase survival odds and be cheaper).
* And there isn't much long term data about it that I could find, though some have reported between 1-5 years the SMART stat either remaining at max or dropping a few digits. Even Backblaze outside of their first article a year into using them hasn't seemingly continued reporting on the stat that I've noticed. I get the sense though that other types of failures are expected sooner than leaks.
Whoops, thanks for pointing out the math error; I've fixed it.
>If one got particularly lucky with HDD failure rates perhaps they'd survive running that long in RAID but one would expect some replacements over such a long period.
I don't think so: I'm not talking about keeping these drives spinning for 50 years, but rather in cold storage, just as we'd do with the BDXL discs.
>Some other things to consider are at high capacities all HDDs use helium now, which slowly leaks (WD/HGST have a SMART stat about the level*) and the cost of running drives/associated computers/maintenance over a long span vs the up front cost of passive writable media.
Helium leakage is an issue I didn't think of, and I don't know how sitting in cold storage for 50 years would affect this. But again, the costs of running drives/maintenance/etc. should be zero, because I'm comparing apples to apples. No one would seriously propose a massive array of BDXL drives with BDXL discs continuously available, so likewise I'm proposing just keeping 10+TB HDDs in cold storage.
As for ubiquitous access, store a reading device or instructions on how to build one along with the data. If you're unable to do that, then I doubt you would be able to keep a massive library of books around for very long either.
There's also no financial incentive to build technologies like this. If the world actually got together and tried to build long-term digital storage then I'm sure we could come up with something even better.
AFAIK a library doesn't really require maintenance, unless there are extreme weather conditions, the books will survive for a long time on their own. It's only the ancient books that require a controlled environment, because they already lasted for centuries and we're trying to have them last for even more due to their historical value. So you would be able to keep libraries around for long in many (most?) scenarios. Instead, the devices you need to read those storage media require high-tech factories to be manufactured. Just having the instructions to build one will not suffice.
How long? I don't think a library would last more than 100,000 years given natural disasters and plate tectonics etc. All you need to do is make a reading device that can last for a similar amount of time. And if the device itself wouldn't last that long then you could provide as much long-lasting equipment or material as possible to help build it.
The scenario you're describing is incredibly specific. It requires a post-apocalyptic world where humans have survived, but have somehow completely lost all ability to access past knowledge. Civilization must be advanced enough to access and read a library that has been shielded from the elements for millennia, but not advanced enough to build microscopes or lasers, even when given precise instructions on how to do so. It must be far enough into the future that any possible small high-tech reading device we could create is unlikely to have survived, but not so far into the future that a very large library structure is likely to have collapsed.
> I don't think a library would last more than 100,000 years given natural disasters and plate tectonics etc.
100000 years is a very long time. And in that time, you have good chances of reeboting civilization and reconstructing our current industrial world.
> All you need to do is make a reading device that can last for a similar amount of time
Easier said than done, and why would you need to do it, if libraries already solve the problem?
BTW I think we're considering two different scenarios. Libraries are excellent at solving the scenario given here, i.e. the internet collapses tomorrow.
An interesting technology, but also not exactly something I could get at my local Best Buy today.
M-DISC, assuming it's writable using consumer Blu-Ray writers, is promising though – Blu-Ray drives can probably still considered ubiquitous enough in a pinch.
> DNA storage
DNA is in fact extremely unstable unless it's part of living organisms that constantly error-correct and replicate it, and even then you have random mutations.
Information has outlived entire civilizations because of books. The key is the technology needed to decode and read it, which is just humans themselves. Either people still exist who can read and speak the language or closely related languages, and if not, we can hope to find something like a Rosetta stone or use statistical analysis that relies up on the commonality of all human languages.
Any digital storage device is simply giving you a bit stream. Being able to read the bits at all might rely upon technology that no longer exists. You need to know the layout of the medium, where to start reading, how to perform any built-in error correcting, what constitutes data versus metadata. Once you read the bits, you still need to do all of that again, but this time at the level of the filesystem. Then you need to do it a third time at the level of the file format. Then you get, at best, something like a consecutive sequence of unicode code points. Now you still need to know unicode.
We have no idea if these sorts of technologies will be remembered in 3,000 years, but given the history, there's a very good chance people will still be able to read Sanskrit and Latin, and the way the human eyeball accepts and decodes light waves will not change.
I think looking at history is a terrible way to make predictions about the future. The world will never again be anything close to what it was in the past.
There are many, many libraries that have sections that have an almost military-level protection (protected atmosphere, security, and so on) I think humanity has done a good job in general on this front
Yeah, and where exactly are those libraries? Are they in safe places that won't be obliterated if a war breaks out? I don't think so; they're mostly in the most likely to be targeted locations.
If humans were serious about protecting knowledge, they'd put these libraries on Svalbard or in Antarctica, or better yet in a lava tube on the Moon.
I can't get behind these restricted whatif scenarios. If the internet were to disappear there would be ensuing outages of critical services and shortages of essential items very quickly. (In part because of the inevitable mass panic and hoarding).
If I knew the internet was going out tomorrow I wouldn't spend any time on the internet at all. I would go the grocery store, gas station, friends houses and then get as far from major cities as I could.
Thought experiments are a springboard for an area of thought, not necessarily a literal question to be answered. When someone asks you "what would you do with a billion dollars" responses like "but I don't have a billion dollars" or "nothing, I'd be investigating how I got it" completely miss the point. It's not about whether the scenario would realistically play out it's about setting the stage for certain types of thoughts without prescribing an exact question on everyone. Maybe you'll never realistically be at a train track with a fork in a road, 1 in the alternate path and 5 in the active path, with nothing more than the option to flick the switch and no other consideration to make... but it sets the stage for interesting thoughts to consider and talk about.
It can lead to much more varied and interesting discussion that direct questions, if you're willing to get over the non-literalness.
thought experiment: if the internet were to go down tomorrow for an indefinite period, what content would you most want to download and preserve?
Music that I do not already have on CD. Videos that contain useful knowledge on DIY medical procedures, DIY home repair and assorted other DIY knowledge. I archive this stuff already. That's about it really. I try to avoid any dependency on the internet or smart phones given the commercial internet did not exist for a big part of my life.
It would be just the global internet? What would want to have in our local (continent, country, city, home, etc) internet provided that I have enough resources? The balkanization of Internet is still in the menu.
Or it may be some global event disabling all computers, like a cosmic EMP?
There are several “easy” things to download and have usable somehow. Wikipedia used to have available as download copy of the database. Google still have takeout for all my things that it have stored. A lot of the public code in GitHub or other public repositories are easy to download.
I mean, it's not a practical answer to your question, but I'd love a backup of YouTube. I think it's probably got most of humanity's knowledge in there somewhere, in all kinds of forms for all kinds of levels.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadIf you would like to begin preparing for your tomorrows, this is a good place to start: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/
Open Street Maps - definitely detailed North America + planet for good measure
deepseek-coder-v2 236b - Great coding assistant
llama 3.1 70b - Much more practical to run
My Google Photos since I have lots of good memorries on there.
My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and DRM to work.
All OSM data and openaddresses data.
What I'd really be concerned about would be our modern society. Purchasing food, water, fuel, clothes and other necessities would be near impossible. Supply chains would not just have problems, but literally fall apart. Money would stop moving.
If anything is "too big to fail" it would be the internet.
Along with no banking there's no way to order supplies. No way to accept delivery. The very least of your problems is music or Wikipedia.
And I know you're thinking cash will help you, but its not enough. We used to have forests of paper and squadrons of clerks- that simply doesn't exist anymore.
While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically infinite amounts of transactions.
We don't have squadrons of clerks but we have software that can collate transactions locally.
The internet is certainly a useful tool for quick connectivity but there are definitely ways to do things without the internet and without reverting all the way back to cash/check and paper ledgers.
It's not that long ago that software was distributed on CD and tutorials in printed books. The internet adds a lot of convenience and productivity, but it's hardly a requirement.
Large open source projects would be much more difficult. Though some of them are already either largely done by one company (so people can meet in person) or very hierarchical (like Linux).
Large open source projects can survive, but I'd imagine it will lean much more towards being developed mainly singular organizations. Without the internet, we don't just lose contributors, but also a lot of testers. The feedback loop will probably shrink, such that the software is mainly based on the need of the organization itself, and the perhaps a selected few collaborators who are very involved.
You will be unable to communicate except through face to face meetings. There is no more POTS(plain old telephone system), the entire world routes phone calls over the internet. There's no IM, the physical mail system will at least become dramatically backlogged if not fail entirely due to infrastructure failure internally and the new increased demand.
In my country is it not just that there isn't a POTS system, there isn't even copper. You have a FTTH(fiber to the home) link or a mobile connection. To my knowledge even in the US fiber terminates at the distribution point and your cable supply is last mile only.
I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage at the scale but it will be global panic.
A coordinated attack on key infrastructure (eg: root DNS servers) could do it. Much of the internet is held together with duct tape and bubble gum. The reason it stays alive is because there are a lot of duct tape and bubble gum specialists :)
There are still a lot of ways to communicate without the internet over large distances (eg: radio, satellite, plane, drone, etc...) and there are different considerations/requirements for them. They are still an ultimate backup to the world we have created but shopping on Amazon via ham-radio would be quite painful!
And how do we know that someone's pocket computer doesn't contain a forged list of transactions that never happened, or is missing some transactions that did happen?
i do beleive though that it would be only a temporary thing.
on a local level you can likely still enable a lot of stuff. the internet would most likely die due to a decision to disable it rather than mass equipment failure. also very unlikely, as a ton of people must disable it at the same time, knowing all full well the result of doing so...
if they do that so u can try to get a radio broadcast up with some equipment thats strapped to houses and appartment buildings eveywhere these days. see if some antennas can be enabled for telephony locally etc. get the spark going for getting a network back up. for isp equipment the same. you can enable and if needed reprogram/configure a lot of field equipment and enable local networks. perhaps depending on your locality even more (internet exchange and isp data centers are close to some people atleast).
quite sure it would be up and running again in no time locally. at some point networks would merge and an internet would form again...
all in all there's really not a lot anyone can do about it if people want to use these existing networks and equipment. unless they start cutting power to very large areas etc. etc., remove the equipment everywhere, or ourposefuly destroy it... - this line of thought is extremely unrealistic.
Grocery stores and bars used to let local trusted customers pay their accumulated purchases once per week or month, or accept personal checks from them without any means of verifying whether they were covered.
Today? It’s essentially cash or credit card, and no more mechanisms for local/decentralized credit decisions whatsoever, even if a checkout clerk might personally know a customer.
Because of ubiquitous connectivity, we have greatly increased, but also centralized trust. Local trust isn’t restored quickly, especially during an emergency when tensions are high anyway.
1. ATM machines may stop working.
2. Your local bank branch may have issues knowing how much money you have on your account, making it hard to manually give you cash.
Both can be great issues, but can be worked around with a bit of time to prepare. Do you see other issues?
> but can be worked around with a bit of time to prepare
The prompt was "the Internet goes away tomorrow", and I highly doubt that we'd be able to resurrect branch-based "offline" banking in a single day.
Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.
It’s true that these solutions don’t exist today but they are not far away with the amount of pressure we are talking about by losing the internet.
Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
I came across a pre-magnetic-strip credit card years ago… it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.
That's something I'd definitely love to see, but it doesn't exist at the moment (in the US, at least; in Japan, there are stored-value cards in Apple Wallet that can support two-side offline transactions).
> Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
They used to, but they don't anymore. Almost all terminals and many cards won't let you do an offline transaction these days, for both credit and debit cards.
> it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.
True, but unfortunately as far as I can see, it's all been moving towards a more centralized/connection-dependent system. That's great for when everything is working as expected, but raises some concerns about resilience.
> it's all been moving towards a more centralized/connection-dependent system. That's great [...] but raises some concerns about resilience.
Agreed. I hope that someone in these giant fintech institutions has considered that. It wouldn't surprise me if it's "not seen as a priority" though.
My most likely "internet down" scenario would be my local government deciding to launch a national firewall, probably under the guise of "combatting disinformation, malinformation, misinformation, and foreign interference".
For that scenario I need as many VPNs as possible, a VPS in a friendly jurisdiction, and a TOR browser.
If the "internet is down" for "good", it's hard to me to think of a scenario where it didn't bring down the rest of civilization down along with it.
It's the equivalent of "if your house was burning down what would you grab?"
It sparks some amazement in me still to wrap my head around the reality of so much information in a thing the size of my pinky. Or the size of my pinky nail if you use a micro SD card. And yeah, just took a weekend of downloading and setting it up, and flashdrives/microsd cards are easily found at department stores, or even gas stations sometimes.
Even disregarded any potential doomsday utility, the amusement/amazement it's brought me was well worth the modest time/money it took. I hope more people give it a try
If they don't, digital storage is utterly worthless.
The perspective on this changes if you stop being a consumer, and start being an author.
The people that download the book from these sites would never have bought them. Having your book downloaded by 10k people doesn't mean you've lost 10k sales, what it does mean is that you've got up to 10k people that wouldn't have bought the book anyway talking about it, effectively becoming word of mouth advertisers.
This isn't quiet as true for movies/tv series etc, because their value (entertainment time/price) is so much lower. Books on the other have usually cost $5-30 and will take 4-30 hours to read through. At that price point, very very few people will download the books to save what amounts to a single meal. Especially if you consider that so few people actually read several books per year (that's essentially $<30 per year "saved" via illegal downloads)
It could become an issue if a for-profit company could serve them legally however, I agree with that. It's hard to really talk about that, though ... It's a pure what-if/speculation after all
How many of those 10k purchases didn’t buy it because it was available for free somewhere? The point is, as you said, you don’t know.. However we do know the opposite is true, once Napster went away people started paying for Pandora. Netflix password crackdown lead to increased subscriptions.
When your desirable product isn’t available for free, people will trend towards buying it.
This distribution problem doesn't really exist with books at the moment as Kindle exists.
I often download books before buying them because I otherwise have no reasonable means to judge their content. This is not much different from flipping through the pages of a book in a library before buying it. The appeal of reading from an actual physical book is not something that any digital form can replace, so the book being available in digital form won't stop me from buying a copy. I also have no interest in Kindles and DRM.
Music, on the other hand, might be a different story except for select audiophiles who prefer vinyl.
So I don't think we can generalize to "product" like you do in your argument. Details and facts actually matter.
Corey Doctorow has the right idea. <sic> “I give my works away for free. Every time I gain another fan I gain another person who might want to own the hardback of my new book.”
If your desirable product is available for free more people find you, like you, follow you, patronize you. A lot of those people have money and are happy to give it to you to support you continuing to make good work.
What is the algebraic empty solution to "all" again? I can't remember if you are right.
Source: I'm an author.
For the internet to "go down for an indefinite period" there would need to be some pretty big changes to our current world. The reason it "goes down" also matters a lot.
1) Political reasons (eg: whomever is in power wants to control information flow)
This will likely mean that certain kinds of information can still flow because we don't want to crash the entire economy.
In this case, I would want all of the information I could get my hands on about known history. This includes previous regimes and how they ultimately played out.
2) Geo-political (some other country bans your access to their resources)
This is a harder case to enforce without complete isolation ... but theoretically possible.
In this case, technical howtos are still useful as you can probably still get modern supplies. Depending on what my country produces, I would probably want to get all information about those processes as I could. Also, if my country doesn't produce a lot of food, information on what can be grown locally would be helpful... along with ways to protect it from nature.
3) Global catastrophe (plague/virus/nuclear winter/etc...)
Maybe enough of the internet is just "lost" and the technical means to resurrect it has also disappeared.
At this point, you need to think about being completely self-sufficient. ie: Grow your own food, make your own tools, protect yourself from animals and people. It would be helpful to have some tools at the start for this. Maybe even just basic gardening tools and a greenhouse ... and whatever form of protection makes the most sense to you. Find some land that can sustain you; Leftover city supplies will likely disappear very fast.
4) All of the above, simultaneously.
It's time to just get a Bible and start praying. Maybe a bunker, too. Survival will likely be a lot of luck and a lot of cunning.
Any examples? Do all computers have capacitors that will die within a certain number of years?
Running CPUs and boards at lower power settings can also help. Thermal cycling is the enemy of longevity. Being able to control CPU frequency will be helpful.
Many power supplies have electrolytic caps in them as well. If you can stick to a standard that’s easy to find then there is a good chance you can just salvage an existing power supply that has managed to survive.
Some cheaper examples to consider would be raspberrypi boards with usb-c power. Don’t run them at full speed to reduce long-term thermal effects. About a decade ago I would have suggested Intel Atom based systems for similar reasons.
Server hardware is often made to a better spec for longevity. I miss old sparc hardware; I feel like those machines could last forever.
Today, arm based systems are probably a good bet since you can find lots of software for them and they run cooler than (say) x86 variants of similar caliber.
Storage is the next Achilles heel to consider. Cheap flash will die sooner rather than later. I’m not up on the best tech in this space anymore though so somebody else might chime in here.
Finally, displays can be pretty fragile. Phone displays actually come to mind as a decently ruggedized technology. Bigger displays are probably more prone to damage long-term so, small and durable is probably valuable here.
I’ll probably catch flak for this but… a smartphone is actually a pretty decent computer that can last a very long time. If you can run arbitrary software on it and keep it in one place instead of in your pocket, it could be a good get. The issue I know of here is the battery; if it gets too weak then some phones may not be able to power up completely even with a power supply attached.
I don't read How to write horrible code and what to do when that's your codebase. I do have to know the latter a bit, but no more than necessary.
But, people have been trying to predict the end of the world since antiquity so there's that
Having recently had a week long internet outage I can say quite confidently, nothing really.
The things that caused me massive anxiety during that outage was things that are real time.
No communication, since all my communication is through VOIP services of some sort, even mobile calls might be down depending on how you define internet.
And no banking at all, my bank doesn't even have physical branches and most banks in my country have gone that way, even going to a physical branch for one of the larger incumbent banks they just put you on a call with their call center, they cannot help you locally. The tellers and just fancy ATMs and they charge you a premium to use them instead of the ATM outside. If you thing that wont be an issue, well the internet is down, that local branch is useless.
There's still many cash based business so that's less of an issue for me but we will definitely have pandemic level panic again. I mean during the pandemic people bought all the toilet paper here, not the food but the toilet paper...
Online media will be the least of your problems and large swaths of that information is available and backed up at libraries around the world. Likewise if only the network is down the servers still exist so the data didn't go away.
Also if Y2K taught us anything is that we will solve the problem relatively quickly and even if what we currently know as the internet fails a different form of the internet will be back up soon enough.
If the internet were to just suddenly "go down" globally it would of course be a disaster and result in much unrest, panic, supply chain breakdowns, and general collapse of society. It it so interwoven into everything we depend on.
society would end. some bumpy roads, sure, but we did very well before the internet and we’d do fine without it. we would just rebuild.
it’s just not as instrumental as some people make it out to be. nice? absofuckinlutely. necessary? nopes.
Tangential thought but we should probably work hard to preserve libraries in the future. Real ones, with books. They are really unmatched when it comes to longevity and safeguarding information in a way that computers cannot replicate.
How so? There are long-term digital storage technologies that would long outlast any book and are many orders of magnitude denser.
If it's digital storage, you have to have electricity, a compatible device, an understanding of the storage, and software that can read it.
And, increasingly, DRM servers that will allow you to read it.
Nothing has been verified to work beyond 50 years, and those with data errors and failure rates.
There are those CDs made out of rock, but they have never veen proven to pass the test of time.
You're saying that something that has existed for less than 50 years doesn't count because we haven't been able to actually test it for more than 50 years, even though we understand the physics behind it and can theoretically predict how long it will last...
And a quick google reveals a lot of people are very worried about counterfeit disks too.
Overall, though, properly-made CDs, handled carefully, have been excellent at storing data long-term.
But while this is nice enough I guess for storing individual musical albums long-term, it's not practical for storing truly large volumes of arbitrary data. CD-Rs and CD-RWs have not had the same durability demonstrated at all (quite the opposite in fact). DVDs are better at almost 4GB per disc, but here again only the factory ones are actually durable, and 4GB isn't going to store much these days, perhaps one movie with high lossy compression.
It had users who carefully performed benchmarks on media for more than a decade to see which types and makes held up best over time, along with best practices. Few have the interest or patience for such things so it's unfortunate to just have such info vanish.
I will add though that what's missing from the discussion is Blu-Ray, which allows up to 128GB per disc. (I only vaguely recall reading some critique of BD DL discs so can't say how it might compare long term though, apart from the greater cost at such capacities.)
128GB BD-R discs do exist, but at $219 on Amazon for 25 discs, that's about $0.07/GB. It would be MUCH cheaper to just buy a stack of refurbished enterprise-class HDDs and store your data on those, in triplicate, with a filesystem that has error correction (like ZFS). Personally, I would bet on HDDs used this way still being readable and not having bit-rot after 50 years over 4-layer BD-R discs.
Some other things to consider are at high capacities all HDDs use helium now, which slowly leaks (WD/HGST have a SMART stat about the level*) and the cost of running drives/associated computers/maintenance over a long span vs the up front cost of passive writable media (edit: for some reason I assumed this was what was meant but they could be left cold which would likely increase survival odds and be cheaper).
* And there isn't much long term data about it that I could find, though some have reported between 1-5 years the SMART stat either remaining at max or dropping a few digits. Even Backblaze outside of their first article a year into using them hasn't seemingly continued reporting on the stat that I've noticed. I get the sense though that other types of failures are expected sooner than leaks.
Whoops, thanks for pointing out the math error; I've fixed it.
>If one got particularly lucky with HDD failure rates perhaps they'd survive running that long in RAID but one would expect some replacements over such a long period.
I don't think so: I'm not talking about keeping these drives spinning for 50 years, but rather in cold storage, just as we'd do with the BDXL discs.
>Some other things to consider are at high capacities all HDDs use helium now, which slowly leaks (WD/HGST have a SMART stat about the level*) and the cost of running drives/associated computers/maintenance over a long span vs the up front cost of passive writable media.
Helium leakage is an issue I didn't think of, and I don't know how sitting in cold storage for 50 years would affect this. But again, the costs of running drives/maintenance/etc. should be zero, because I'm comparing apples to apples. No one would seriously propose a massive array of BDXL drives with BDXL discs continuously available, so likewise I'm proposing just keeping 10+TB HDDs in cold storage.
Ubiquitous access to reader devices is also a factor, and I can’t actually think of anything that fits that bill.
As for ubiquitous access, store a reading device or instructions on how to build one along with the data. If you're unable to do that, then I doubt you would be able to keep a massive library of books around for very long either.
There's also no financial incentive to build technologies like this. If the world actually got together and tried to build long-term digital storage then I'm sure we could come up with something even better.
The scenario you're describing is incredibly specific. It requires a post-apocalyptic world where humans have survived, but have somehow completely lost all ability to access past knowledge. Civilization must be advanced enough to access and read a library that has been shielded from the elements for millennia, but not advanced enough to build microscopes or lasers, even when given precise instructions on how to do so. It must be far enough into the future that any possible small high-tech reading device we could create is unlikely to have survived, but not so far into the future that a very large library structure is likely to have collapsed.
100000 years is a very long time. And in that time, you have good chances of reeboting civilization and reconstructing our current industrial world.
> All you need to do is make a reading device that can last for a similar amount of time
Easier said than done, and why would you need to do it, if libraries already solve the problem?
BTW I think we're considering two different scenarios. Libraries are excellent at solving the scenario given here, i.e. the internet collapses tomorrow.
An interesting technology, but also not exactly something I could get at my local Best Buy today.
M-DISC, assuming it's writable using consumer Blu-Ray writers, is promising though – Blu-Ray drives can probably still considered ubiquitous enough in a pinch.
> DNA storage
DNA is in fact extremely unstable unless it's part of living organisms that constantly error-correct and replicate it, and even then you have random mutations.
Any digital storage device is simply giving you a bit stream. Being able to read the bits at all might rely upon technology that no longer exists. You need to know the layout of the medium, where to start reading, how to perform any built-in error correcting, what constitutes data versus metadata. Once you read the bits, you still need to do all of that again, but this time at the level of the filesystem. Then you need to do it a third time at the level of the file format. Then you get, at best, something like a consecutive sequence of unicode code points. Now you still need to know unicode.
We have no idea if these sorts of technologies will be remembered in 3,000 years, but given the history, there's a very good chance people will still be able to read Sanskrit and Latin, and the way the human eyeball accepts and decodes light waves will not change.
If the humans of the future are all blind, I think we can forget about worrying about preserving civilization.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
If humans were serious about protecting knowledge, they'd put these libraries on Svalbard or in Antarctica, or better yet in a lava tube on the Moon.
If I knew the internet was going out tomorrow I wouldn't spend any time on the internet at all. I would go the grocery store, gas station, friends houses and then get as far from major cities as I could.
It can lead to much more varied and interesting discussion that direct questions, if you're willing to get over the non-literalness.
Like asking: "If you could meet one celebrity in person which Kardashian would it be?"
Surveillance. That's the main purpose, isn't it ? /s
Nothing at all.
Music that I do not already have on CD. Videos that contain useful knowledge on DIY medical procedures, DIY home repair and assorted other DIY knowledge. I archive this stuff already. That's about it really. I try to avoid any dependency on the internet or smart phones given the commercial internet did not exist for a big part of my life.
They are important, and slowly being lost to time and produced less and less …
It would be just the global internet? What would want to have in our local (continent, country, city, home, etc) internet provided that I have enough resources? The balkanization of Internet is still in the menu.
Or it may be some global event disabling all computers, like a cosmic EMP?
There are several “easy” things to download and have usable somehow. Wikipedia used to have available as download copy of the database. Google still have takeout for all my things that it have stored. A lot of the public code in GitHub or other public repositories are easy to download.