Reposted from c/politics since it violated their rule about needing to have a link:
Now that the fascists have taken over, what books, academic studies, and pieces of knowledge should take priority in personal/private archival? I'm thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany, especially with the burning of the Institute for Sexual Science(Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) and what was lost completely in the burnings.
Some of us should consider saving stuff digitally or physically. Redundancies will help preserve stuff.
If you'd like to support archival in general, consider donating to https://archive.org/ . They regularly archive books and media that can be potentially banned. It doesn't hurt to download parts of the archive on your machine if you want to be extra sure, but keep in mind the internet archive is massive with petabytes of data.
Archive is on American soil. They got sued for lending ebooks during the pandemic and lost, so they are not a safe bet. Archive elsewhere. Anywhere else.
Why can't humanity seem to learn that storing all of our knowledge and cultural artifacts in just one place with no backup is a BAD IDEA? Don't let the library of Alexandria burn again!
Get a server in Romania for example, built up the necessary system and then either take the drives on a plane or transmit the data by internet.
The problem isn't the money, they would pay less in Eastern European countries. The problem is the time it takes to transmit the data.
It would be best to load the entire NAS farm piece by piece into a plane and fly it there.
A Charter Plane and some trucks aren't that expansive, and when you keep most of the hardware you don't need to pay for massive amounts of new hardware.
The problem is that its time consuming and that the Archive will be offline for at least half a year. For doing that.
If they wanna do it really smart they keep some smaller servers all around the world and don't do it from one country alone.
Depebding on the country, Europe has significantly worse copyright law than the US, to the extent that archiving a web page is illegal.
Fun fact:
In Germany you have to pay a special tax for anything that could be used to violate copyright. It ranges from 0.10€ for USB sticks to 90€ for faster printers to 14,000,000€ for opening up a public library - all going to a bunch of publisher organizations.
And an archive would be doing exactly that: Distributing copyrighted materials.
Moving to Europe is not necessarily a great idea depending on the country they choose. US copyright law is comparatively lenient to some European countries, who can be said to be (much more) controlled by publishers when it comes to copyright.
We will have to fight for it though. At this rate we will have to vote down chat control yearly for the next century, and Macron and Scholz are not infinitely better than the US dems either.
At least now, they see that immediate rearmament and asserting ourselves as an economic and geopolitic power is a necessity, even if our industry doesn't feel like it and never wants to change.
As @hollyberries pointed out, archive's servers are on American soil, if there's a federal ban on improper("fake") knowledge, their assets could easily be seized. No laws would have to change from today for them to do this, they'd just have to think up a somewhat reasonable excuse...
And also good to keep in mind is that digital storage is volatile. Yes it's impractical to have a few terabytes printed out, but if stored properly, it'll last longer than digital media storage.
Another thing to consider:
If things go full on crazy, like they seem likely to do, being in possession of improper knowledge could be a capital offence when the thought police come knocking.
Another thing to consider: If things go full on crazy, like they seem likely to do, being in possession of improper knowledge could be a capital offence when the thought police come knocking.
Ehhh, fuck fascists. They can't get all of us if a bunch of us do this.
It's all hypothetical for now. But with control of the house and senate, there's not a single thing actually stopping them as long as the rank and file of the GOP stay in line and push everything through. Hopefully there's enough liberal and further left inclined "Well organised militias" to fight back against anything super fashy....
Lmaoo are you serious? Nothing has happened nation wide,. Turns out people like their shitty jobs over murder.and prison. The rule of law did not evaporate.
Depends on what medium it's on. Some are far better than others, so as a generalisation I said what I said.
A majority of folk these days, when they think digital media storage, think solid state. Which is, in fact, not suited for long term storage. A piece of paper stored correctly is going to outlast a usb drive, SD card or SSD.