As I read Zak Killian's Expect HDD, SSD shortages as AI rewrites the rules of storage hierarchy — multiple companies announce price hikes, too I realized I had forgotten to write this year's version of my annual post on the Library of Congress' Desihning Storage Architectures meeting, which was back in March. So below the fold I discuss a few of the DSA talks, Killian's more recent post, and yet another development in DNA storage. The TL;DR is that the long-predicted death of hard disks is continuing to fail to materialize, and so is the equally long-predicted death of tape.
I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.
Thursday, September 18, 2025
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
Luke 15:7
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I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.In the throes of 2008's Global Financial Crisis Satoshi Nakamoto published Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. It inspired a large group of enthusiastic advocates who asserted that Bitcoin would possess the following attributes:
Luke 15:7
- It would be decentralized.
- It would be trustless.
- It would be censorship resistant.
- It would be securely encrypted.
- Users would be anonymous.
- Users could transact without intermediaries.
- Users could transact cheaply.
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
2025 Optical Media Durability Update
Seven years ago I posted Optical Media Durability and discovered:
It is time once again for the mind-numbing process of feeding 45 disks through the readers to verify their checksums, and yet again this year every single MD5 was successfully verified. Below the fold, the details.
Surprisingly, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 14 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 12 years old. Your mileage may vary.Here are the subsequent annual updates:
It is time once again for the mind-numbing process of feeding 45 disks through the readers to verify their checksums, and yet again this year every single MD5 was successfully verified. Below the fold, the details.
Thursday, August 14, 2025
The Drugs Are Taking Hold
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cyclonebill CC-BY-SA |
- Their price rises.
- The addict needs bigger doses for the same effect.
- Their deleterious effects kick in.
Thursday, July 24, 2025
Meta: Slow Blogging Ahead
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Wikipedia's description of the image is:
Titivillus, a demon said to introduce errors into the work of scribes, besets a scribe at his desk (14th century illustration)
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
The Selling Of AI
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Not AI, just a favorite |
- The irresistible pitch to CEOs is that they can "do more with less", or in other words they can lay off all these troublesome employees without impacting their products and sales.
- Marketing people value plausibility over correctness, which is precisely what LLMs are built to deliver. So the idea that a simple prompt will instantly generate reams of plausible collateral is similarly irresistible.
why Sam Altman et al are so desperate to run the "drug-dealer's algorithm" (the first one's free) and get the world hooked on this drug so they can supply a world of addicts.You can see how this works for the two targets. Once a CEO has addicted his company to AI by laying off most of the staff, there is no way he is going to go cold turkey by hiring them back even if the AI fails to meet his expectations. And once he has laid off most of the marketing department, the remaining marketeer must still generate the reams of collateral even if it lacks a certain something.
Below the fold I look into this example of the process Cory Doctrow called enshittification.
Thursday, July 10, 2025
The Festschrift For Cliff Lynch
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The final CNI membership meeting of Cliff’s tenure, held April 7–8, 2025, in Milwaukee, was to include a surprise presentation of the Festschrift’s table of contents. Though Cliff’s health prevented him from attending in person, he participated virtually and heard readings of excerpts from each contribution. Clifford Lynch passed away shortly after, on April 10, 2025. Authors completed their essays before his passing, and the original text remains unchanged.Below the fold is a bried snippet of each of the invited contributions and some comments.
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
Tesla's Robotaxi Revolution!
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The mythical CyberCab |
How to tell if someone's bullshitting: watch for them to give a deadline that they repeatedly push back.This was apropos of Donald Trump's approach to tariffs and Ukraine, but below the fold I apply the criterion to Elon Musk basing Tesla's future on its robotaxi service.
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
The State Of Storage
The Register is running a series on The State Of Storage. Below the fold I flag some articles worth reading.
Thursday, June 12, 2025
The Back Of The AI Envelope
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Sauce |
This is what the VCs behind OpenAI and Anthropic are doing, and what Google, Microsoft and Oracle are trying to emulate. Is it going to work? Below the fold I report on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, which I did without using A1.
Thursday, May 29, 2025
The $740B Prize
Forty-two months ago I wrote The $65B Prize citing Divesh Aggarwal et al's 2019 paper Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them. They noted that:
the elliptic curve signature scheme used by Bitcoin is much more at risk, and could be completely broken by a quantum computer as early as 2027, by the most optimistic estimates.It is time to re-visit the "optimistic estimates", so follow me below the fold.
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
The Dawn Of Nvidia's Technology


But as regards the technical aspects of this early history it appears that neither author really understood the reasons for the two kinds of innovation we made; the imaging model and the I/O architecture. Witt writes (Page 31):
The first time I asked Priem about the architecture of the NV1, he spoke uninterrupted for twenty-seven minutes.Below the fold, I try to explain what Curtis was talking about for those 27 minutes. It will take me quite a long post.
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Here There Are Blueberries
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about the reaction to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The murder was denounced as a hate crime and brought attention to the lack of hate crime laws in various states, including Wyoming.The new play, Here There Are Blueberries, is on tour after a 2022 premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse and a 2024 run at the New York Theatre Workshop. Vinson Cunningham reviewed the New York production in The Chilling Truth Pictured in “Here There Are Blueberries”:
An example of verbatim theatre, the play draws on hundreds of interviews conducted by the theatre company with inhabitants of the town, company members' own journal entries, and published news reports.
There’s something awful about a lost picture. Maybe it’s because of a disparity between your original hope and the result: you made the photograph because you intended to keep it, and now that intention—artistic, memorial, historical—is fugitive, on the run toward ends other than your own. The picture, gone forever, possibly revived by strange eyes, will never again mean quite what you thought it would.The play dramatizes the process archivists at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum went through to investigate an album of photographs taken at Auschwitz. Photographs from Auschwitz are extremely rare because the Nazis didn't want evidence of what happened there to survive.
Below the fold I discuss the play and some of the thoughts it provoked that are relevant to digital preservation.
Thursday, May 8, 2025
The Risks Of HODL-ing
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Lamborghini Urus Alexander Migl, CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Who Is Mining Bitcoin?
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BTC "price" |
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Going Out With A Bang
In 1.5C Here We Come I criticized people like Eric Schmidt who said that:
In January for a Daily Mail article, Miriam Kuepper interviewed Salomé Balthus a "high-end escort and author from Berlin" who works the World Economic Forum. Balthus reported attitudes that clarify why "3C Here We Come" is more likely. The article's full title is:
the artificial intelligence boom was too powerful, and had too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.
Schmidt, somewhat fatalistically, said that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway,”
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Salomé Balthus Uwe Hauth, CC BY-SA 4.0 |
What the global elite reveal to Davos sex workers: High-class escort spills the beans on what happens behind closed doors - and how wealthy 'know the world is doomed, so may as well go out with a bang'Below the fold I look into a wide range of evidence that Balthus' clients were telling her the truth.
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Cliff Lynch RIP
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Cliff impacted a wide range of areas. The best overview is Mike Ashenfelder's 2013 profile of Cliff Lynch in the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation Pioneer series, which starts:
Clifford Lynch is widely regarded as an oracle in the culture of networked information. Lynch monitors the global information ecosystem for cultural trends and technological developments. He ponders their variables, interdependencies and influencing factors. He confers with colleagues and draws conclusions. Then he reports his observations through lectures, conference presentations and writings. People who know about Lynch pay close attention to what he has to say.Below the fold are some additional personal notes on Cliff's contributions.
Lynch is a soft-spoken man whose work, for more than thirty years, has had an impact — directly or indirectly — on the computer, information and library science communities.
Thursday, April 10, 2025
Cliff Lynch's festschrift
Vicky and I were invited to contribute to a festschrift celebrating Cliff Lynch's retirement from the Coalition for Networked Information. We decided to focus on his role in the long-running controversy over how digital information was to be preserved for the long haul.
Below the fold is our contribution, before it was copy-edited for portal: Libraries and the Academy.
Below the fold is our contribution, before it was copy-edited for portal: Libraries and the Academy.
Monday, April 7, 2025
Paul Evan Peters Award Lecture
At the Spring 2025 Membership Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, Vicky and I received the Paul Evan Peters Award.
You can tell this is an extraordinary honor from the list of previous awardees, and the fact that it is the first time it has been awarded in successive years. Part of the award is the opportunity to make an extended presentation to open the meeting. Our talk was entitled Lessons From LOCKSS, and the abstract was:
Below the fold is the text with links to the sources, information that appeared on slides but was not spoken, and much additional information in footnotes.
You can tell this is an extraordinary honor from the list of previous awardees, and the fact that it is the first time it has been awarded in successive years. Part of the award is the opportunity to make an extended presentation to open the meeting. Our talk was entitled Lessons From LOCKSS, and the abstract was:
Vicky and David will look back over their two decades with the LOCKSS Program. Vicky will focus on the Program's initial goals and how they evolved as the landscape of academic communication changed. David will focus on the Program's technology, how it evolved, and how this history reveals a set of seductive, persistent but impractical ideas.CNI has posted the video of the entire opening plenary to YouTube. Don Waters' generous introduction starts at 14:28 and Vicky starts talking at 20:00.
Below the fold is the text with links to the sources, information that appeared on slides but was not spoken, and much additional information in footnotes.
Thursday, April 3, 2025
Elon Musk: Threat Or Menace? Part 6
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Below the fold I look at the flood of bad news for Tesla.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Software Supply Chain Attack

Exactly a week after the interview and a week before the article went to press, we got an example, the biggest cryptocurrency heist in history. Below the fold I discuss the details.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Bitcoin's Fee Spikes
I've written several times, for example in Fixed Supply, Variable Demand, about the mechanism that causes the cost of transacting on a blockchain like Bitcoin's to suffer massive spikes at intervals. When no-one wants to transact, fees are low. When everyone does, they are high. Below the fold I look in detail at a typical Bitcoin fee spike.
Friday, March 14, 2025
Archival Storage
I gave a talk at the Berkeley I-school's Information Access Seminar entitled Archival Storage. Below the fold is the text of the talk with links to the sources and the slides (with yellow background).
Thursday, March 6, 2025
The Oligopoly Publishers
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Thursday, February 27, 2025
Software Liability: US vs. EU
I have written before about the double-edged sword of software vendors' ability to disclaim liability for the performance of their products. Six years ago I wrote The Internet of Torts about software embedded in the physical objects of the Internet of Things. Four years ago I wrote about
Liability In The Software Supply Chain.
Last October, Tom Uren wrote The EU Throws a Hand Grenade on Software Liability:
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The EU and U.S. are taking very different approaches to the introduction of liability for software products. While the U.S. kicks the can down the road, the EU is rolling a hand grenade down it to see what happens.It is past time to catch up on this issue, so follow me below the fold.
Thursday, February 6, 2025
On Not Being Immutable
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Economist 2/1/25 |
Back in November of 2022 I added an entry to this blog's list of Impossibilities for The Compliance-Innovation Trade-off from the team at ChainArgos. It started:
tl;dr: DeFi cannot be permissionless, allow arbitrary innovation and comply with any meaningful regulations. You can only choose two of those properties. If you accept a limited form of innovation you can have two-and-a-half of them.Two years later, the "more formal work" has finally been published in a peer-reviewed Nature Publishing journal, Scientific Reports, which claims to be the 5th most cited journal in the world. Jonathan Reiter tells me that, although the publishing process took two years, it did make the result better.
Fundamental results in logic and computer science impose a trade-off on any permissionless system’s ability to both permit innovation and achieve compliance with non-trivial regulations. This result depends only on long-settled concepts and the assumption a financial system must provide a logically consistent view of payments and balances to users.
This is a semi-technical treatment, with more formal work proceeding elsewhere.
Below the fold I discuss Tradeoffs in automated financial regulation of decentralized finance due to limits on mutable turing machines by Ben Charoenwong, Robert M. Kirby & Jonathan Reiter.
Friday, January 31, 2025
Paul Evan Peters Award
Year | Awardee |
---|---|
2024 | Tony Hey |
2022 | Paul Courant |
2020 | Francine Berman |
2017 | Herbert Van de Sompel |
2014 | Donald A.B. Lindberg |
2011 | Christine L. Borgman |
2008 | Daniel E. Atkins |
2006 | Paul Ginsparg |
2004 | Brewster Kahle |
2002 | Vinton Gray Cerf |
2000 | Tim Berners-Lee |
Vicky and I are honored and astonished by this award. Honored because it is the premiere award in the field, and astonished because we left the field more than seven years ago to take up our new full-time career as grandparents. We are all the more astonished because we are not even eligible for the award; the rules clearly state that the "award will be granted to an individual".
You can tell this is an extraordinary honor from the list of previous awardees, and the fact that it is the first time it has been awarded in successive years. Vicky and I are extremely grateful to the Association of Research Libraries, CNI and EDUCAUSE, who sponsor the award.
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Original Logo |
The work that the award recognizes was not ours alone, but the result of a decades-long effort by the entire LOCKSS team. It was made possible by support from the LOCKSS community and many others, including Michael Lesk then at NSF, Donald Waters then at the Mellon Foundation, the late Karen Hunter at Elsevier, Stanford's Michael Keller and CNI's Cliff Lynch.
Thursday, January 16, 2025
A Prophet Of The Web

To give you some idea of the context in which it was written, unless you are over 70, it was more than half your life ago when in November 1989 Tim Berners-Lee's browser first accessed a page from his Web server. It was only about the same time that the first commercial, as opposed to research, Internet Service Providers started with the ARPANET being decommissioned the next year. Two years later, in December of 1991, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center put up the first US Web page. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee codified and extended the HTTP protocol he had earlier implemented. It would be another two years before Netscape became the first browser to support HTTPS. It would be two years after that before the ITEF approved HTTP/1.0 in RFC 1945. As you can see, Lynch was writing among the birth-pangs of the Web.
Although Lynch was insufficiently pessimistic, he got a lot of things exactly right. Below the fold I provide four out of many examples.
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Storage Roundup
It is time for another roundup of topics in storage that have caught my eye recently. Below the fold I discuss the possible ending of the HAMR saga and various developments in archival storage technology.
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