So what's the end-game here? Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?
This feels religious; Oh, just upload it all to digital Heaven! I'll never "die" and people can continue to revere me and my cats forever!
Just because we can doesn't mean we should care about preserving every bit and byte. Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.
> Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.
Of all the arguments against archiving information like this, "environmental costs" has to be the least convincing one. Storify posts are just a bunch of links to tweets, and those are already intended to be archived by the Library of Congress. A static database dump of Storify content has negligible cost and is highly compressible.
If you want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, let's talk about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, or the usage of rare earth metals in non-recyclable hardware that gets replaced every year[0].
[0] This is generally non-recoverable. Even Apple, which claims to recycle their hardware, recovers very little from the process.
You never know what has historical relevance until it is history. That lesson was learned the hard way and so now if something can be preserved at low cost we'd do well to at least attempt to keep it around until history can judge it.
I clearly don't agree with this guy, but I don't see any reason to downvote/flag him into oblivion. I both upvoted and vouched this comment, not because I agree or think it's valuable, but because it doesn't deserve to be disappeared. Comment if you feel like it, or page on by if you don't. Ironically, his words will live on forever.
IIRC, this isn't a collection of all tweets, etc (though the Library of Congress is already doing that), it's a curated collection of tweets, many important enough that some journalist somewhere bothered to write an article about them.
Yeah, it's a shame! The Internet Archive does some twitter archiving -- I helped a little by finding a listing of government social media accounts -- but it's not enough.
> Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?
That seems kind of dumb, but with Moore's Law still mostly working for storage, it's also cheap -- certainly cheaper than building actual libraries. There's also currently no way to mark URLs as temporary, so we can't distinguish the permanent from the ephemeral. Finally, it's far cheaper than having everyone who wants to save URL content archive it on their own personal box (plus however many backups), which is what I do now if I really want to use something again.
Given that it was used by a lot of news websites, there's a lot of legitimate history in there, whether we see it as such or not. That's worth preserving.
Libraries "weed" books all the time, and most of them are pulped. Which is about like burning them, only the carbon doesn't end up in the atmosphere. So this is probably not the best comparison.
This is a totally wrong analogy. Books were burnt for religios/political reasons. Storify is giving up because of lack of financial instreams for the owners.
Tons of valuable books and records have been burnt because someone thought they weren't valuable or didn't have the money to house them. It's true, it's more likely they were just thrown on a trash heap and left to rot, but trash incineration is a thing.
There's tons of people making more within the Microsoft/Oracle/SAP/Apple/etc ecosystems than employees of those companies, too. This is different insofar as the market was not intentionally created, but it's hard to blame him for "exploiting" the circumstances.
I use "exploiting" in a more technical sense here. An exploit is using a bug in the game for personal gain, in an always-on multiplayer game with an economy affecting all players, the permanent effects of an exploit can be much worse. That's not what's happening here, because no bugs are necessarily being exploited (though maybe at one point they were; a buggy drop rate resulting in excessively high yields for farmers, for example) but the farmers tend to get lumped in with the exploiters in the developer's mind because the exploit/fraud departments of customer service work pretty closely together.
Gold farming has generally been considered a fraud of sorts, because it can seriously damage the in-game economy or the player perception of the economy, and many gold farmers perform actual fraud (creating accounts with fake or stolen CC numbers).
The fact that we even have these problems is both amazing and wonderful.
The fact that there are cartels within computer games hiring low cost foreign workers to manipulate a virtual experience for real monetary gain, and there are investigative units trying to track them down is fucking awesome.
I was an original beta player for UO and we had a fantastic run exploiting bugs and high speed Internet connections from the Intel game lab we ran, with multiple accounts to dominate and reach wealth and fame.
It was my golden years of gaming actually. Now I may play an hour or two of skyrim a week if I am lucky.
Back then I was making nearly nearly 70k to play UO from a sick lab 12+hours a day.
"The fact that we even have these problems is both amazing and wonderful.
The fact that there are cartels within computer games hiring low cost foreign workers to manipulate a virtual experience for real monetary gain, and there are investigative units trying to track them down is fucking awesome."
From one point of view, sure. It really is a bummer to the player experience since the reality of it is that a company can and will protect itself better than it's users in aggregate will protect themselves, so you just end up with the current WoW situation of a huge stream of hacked accounts draining resources of the game company and destroying the play experience of the players. I'm not sure where any of this is wonderful, really. It isn't like the myth of the gold farmer where they hire out warehouses of employees to play the game building up "new gold" in the player economy, it's just key loggers and trojans and ten million potential victims.
I'm well aware of the issues that some designers have with 99designs and such. I have sent briefs to recommended local designers, but they're either unwilling to work within my budget, or ask for unworkable terms (e.g. no revisions).
Given that, I don't see how I have any other recourse. So far, the traditional designer/client relationship certainly hasn't served me well.
I have to think so -- you can patch binaries and modify commit logs all you want, but patches are still being applied in sequence, locally, when you pull. If the hashes don't match, boom.
But then, can those hashes be swapped out? We need hashes on the hashes! :-P
As part-owner of the code in question, this is what one little guy on my shoulders is saying, very loudly.
Taking the other side for a moment: Really, no code in hosted environments (which is what I presume you meant by "the cloud")? In a production environment, user data is way more important than deployed code (compromise that and you may be looking at jail time in some jurisdictions, nevermind ruinous consequences to the business' reputation)...is that encrypted before it hits the disk or something? Or, do you think that any code or data not stored on machines located on premise is tempting fate?
But far, far less likely to be the target of anyone looking to acquire an absolute ass-load of proprietary source code (and github is probably the largest concentration of it today).
(Just trying to continue to run the skeptic's argument, here. I agree with the point quite a bit.)
I'm not trying to have my cake and eat it too -- I recognize that there's a different risk profile to outsourcing hosting of any service compared with doing everything in-house. I just want to make sure I'm not veering too far off the tracks in this case.
How much would you be willing to pay? How about $3600.00? Would that be too much? Is it the per user cost of fi that is too much or just the overall cost? What if the $3600 included as many users/repos as you wanted (given your hd space) and 1 year of free upgrades.
How about $999.99 (same as Adobe Photoshop so it should only require middle management approval)? What if you got a box like the yellow google search box (it could be called that the "premium version")?
An unknown factor in all this is how many companies would be even interested in buying a github server in the first place. If it isn't that many the costs might be too low to sustain development. I am betting that for the GitHub guys it makes a ton of sense for them to sell the private small accounts on github (and only manage/fix 1 github version). and for the big guys sell them a big package.
Fundamentally, we don't want any hardware on-premise at all. What we really want is some kind of real statement from the github guys that speaks to all of the issues raised here (encryption, theft, malicious injection, auditing, the "honeypot"/juicy target problem, etc?), as I suggest to PJ below.
I'm guessing that's not going to happen, so I suppose our options are the status quo, host in a less-conspicuous location and manage our own security (as best as one can in a hosted environment), or go with the crowd and seek safety in that quasi-anonymity.
We market (and price) GitHub:FI as our enterprise product specifically because we feel small to medium size companies should be using github.com.
If your and/or your partners need some help putting your mind at ease about hosting your code with us, feel free to email me directly at pj@github.com and I'll do my best to help.
I'd much rather see a public statement on these sorts of issues. The only thing I see on the site that is even remotely relevant is a one-liner on the plans page: "We make every possible attempt to never transmit your data unencrypted."
Presumably, the amount of proprietary code you will manage will only increase over time, perhaps remarkably so. It would be somewhat reassuring if I saw something that indicated that you take this stewardship seriously, rather than tossing off "best effort" one-liners.
You're absolutely correct, we have scraps of information about our security here and there, but no formal page spelling it out. Our security page will be located at http://github.com/security, expect it up within the next day or so.
I wouldn't say we have an exceptional need for security, but we do have reservations about dropping the only thing that has any real value in our company right now into what looks like a helluva honey pot.
I'm not sure I can even properly enumerate the risks -- if I could, I'd be able to make a calculation pretty easily. Espionage seems absurd, but who am I to say that that's not a possibility?
That said, we're getting by by cutting back on our extraneous costs, which means exactly the opposite of "hire someone ourselves and keep full control".
Definitely seems overly paranoid to me. The real value that your company has is in your brains. The things you've learned about your customers can never be fully captured in source code. Especially considering there's no real potential for loss of the code, only exposure, I'd say the tradeoffs are worth it.
Your people and their knowledge have real value. The code alone has limited value to anyone else, without the associated expertise. And if it does leak, normal legal protections can mitigate the damage. (For example, the threat of a copyright or trade secret lawsuit may be enough to keep competitors from using or even looking at your code without permission, depending on who they are.) On the other hand, accidental breaches do happen (whether outsourced or self-hosted), so you should probably keep your secret keys and passwords even more protected than your source repository.
Livefyre was acquired by Adobe last year.
Whatever the route they've taken, the upshot is a helluva lot of content going poof (per usual).