Hacker Remix

Digital Archivists: Protecting Public Data from Erasure

202 points by rbanffy 1 day ago | 46 comments

dmillar 1 day ago

Many criminal records, petty or otherwise, are public record. When archived, expunged or dismissed infractions never truly become that. A traffic violation or other petty misdemeanor from 20 years ago, that has been expunged from official record, can show up on a background check because companies archive public data. So, there is a flip side to this.

overfeed 1 day ago

Public data is incompatible with secrecy. Expunged records still appear in newspapers archives if the local reporter on the Crimes beat captured the proceedings. IMO, "expunged" means removed from Official court records - not from the public memory, including newspapers, archived websites, police blotters and prosecutors' files.

InvOfSmallC 1 day ago

The fact that you get it out from your criminal record doesn't mean they get forgotten. Think about a paper writing about your crime. That will be public and archived forever.

badlibrarian 1 day ago

There's a lot of panic and overlap in the space; a way to coordinate these efforts would be helpful.

Internet Archive et al. made noise and promises but told volunteers to stop because they couldn't actually handle the ingest.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Archiveteam/comments/1jbgycm/us_gov...

These folks made a notable effort.

https://webrecorder.net/blog/2025-03-25-govarchive-us-and-mi...

Damogran6 1 day ago

Hypothetically: -Government leader says they're nuking data -Mad rush to back up data through other means -Government leader declares they've 'transferred the cost of maintaining data out of government, thus making for a smaller, more efficient, government'

I hate everything about this.

lukas099 2 hours ago

Kind of like switching to supporting Russia so your allies think you're no longer a reliable partner and start beefing up their own militaries.

krunck 1 day ago

There is inherent inefficiency in government accountability efforts. I'm ok with that.

riku_iki 1 day ago

In general it makes sense to shift this part to business, if data is valuable, there will be market and services. Probably problem is how fast they nuked without grace period.

tehjoker 1 day ago

im okay with data being hosted for free or cheap by the government and not being price gouged for access to public data

riku_iki 1 day ago

I think many people are very not Ok how government handles data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43237352

forgetfreeman 1 day ago

Are these same people proposing private industry would do a better job? https://privacybee.com/blog/these-are-the-largest-data-broke...

riku_iki 1 day ago

Government is also regularly being hacked

tehjoker 1 day ago

when was the last time we didn't hear about private companies getting hacked lmao they're terrible!!

nla 1 day ago

Best thing I ever heard from the head of archives at the BBC:

Once you format shift, you will always be format shifting.

Keep your originals whenever you can.

rippit 15 hours ago

As someone who spent the last 2 days figuring out how best to digitise my father's old Hi8, Digital8 and MiniDV tapes, I take umbridge with this!

Keep originals if you can, but make copies ASAP, as close to lossless as possible. Don't depend on the right hardware being around in the future.

pjc50 18 hours ago

I can see the value in this, but .. originals, and the gear to read them, do not last forever. Plus for many formats the act of reading puts wear on the physical artifacts. So if you want to actually use the information, you have to format shift it to digital in the first place. And then you're back to the same question as the rest of us, how to maintain the bits.

anitil 1 day ago

I don't understand this phrase, are you able to explain it?

bell-cot 21 hours ago

Guess: If properly stored (physically), good-quality paper documents and photographs will last for centuries. But as soon as you digitize them - you're now chained to the treadmill of maintaining/upgrading/migrating digital archiving systems. Compared to keeping the old-fashioned Archive Storage Room dry (and fire-free), that's 100X the labor and expense. Forever.

wizzard0 17 hours ago

A lot of paper archives and libraries burned just recently in LA.

bell-cot 15 hours ago

True.

But from fire-resistant storage cabinets, to concrete-lined file rooms, to underground archives, the tech to make archives ~99.5% fire-proof is more than a century old. And if you add redundant storage sites for the high-value stuff...

Vs. anything digital is far more vulnerable to digital malice.