The Permissionless Catch-22

Potential Attack Target

Suppose some genre of content is under attack by powerful adversaries. Lets take political satire as a thought experiment in which powerful politicians are attacking sites and Web archives hosting it by sending bogus DMCA takedowns, suing for defamation, buying up their hosting platforms, getting their flying monkeys to flood them with spam, and so on. Below the fold I discuss the problem facing the defense.

Depreciation

Source

More than three years ago, based on Paul Butler's The problem with bitcoin miners, I wrote Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. The TL;DR was that the economic life of Bitcoin mining rigs was estimated at 16 months, as Moore's law in a competitive ASIC market rapidly generated more power-efficient rigs. But the Bitcoin miners' accounts were using 5-year straight-line depreciation for their rigs, which was significantly increasing their nominal profits.

Below the fold I look at the same problem unfolding in the heart of the AI bubble.

The Drugs Are Taking Hold

cyclonebill CC-BY-SA

In The Selling Of AI I compared the market strategy behind the AI bubble to the drug-dealer's algorithm, "the first one's free". As the drugs take hold of an addict, three things happen:

• Their price rises.
• The addict needs bigger doses for the same effect.
• Their deleterious effects kick in.

As expected, this what is happening to AI. Follow me below the fold for the details.

The Selling Of AI

Not AI, just a favorite

On my recent visit to London I was struck by how many of the advertisements in the Tube were selling AI. They fell into two groups, one aimed at CEOs and the other at marketing people. This is typical, the pitch for AI is impedance-matched to these targets:

• 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.

In The Back Of The AI Envelope I explained:

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.

The Back Of The AI Envelope

Sauce

The rise of the technology industry over the last few decades has been powered by its very strong economies of scale. Once you have invested in developing and deploying a technology, the benefit of adding each additional customer greatly exceeds the additional cost of doing so. This led to the concept of "blitzscaling", that it makes sense to delay actually making a profit and devote these benefits to adding more customers. That way you follow the example of Amazon and Uber on the path to a monopoly laid out by Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. Eventually you can extract monopoly rents and make excess profits, but in the meantime blitzscale believers will pump your stock price.

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.

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:

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.

Economics Of Evil Revisited

Eight years ago I wrote Economics of Evil about the death of Google Reader and Google's habit of leaving its customers users in the lurch. In the comments to the post I started keeping track of accessions to le petit musée des projets Google abandonnés. So far I've recorded at least 33 dead products, an average of more than 4 a year. Two years ago Ron Amadeo wrote about the problem this causes in Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand:

We are 91 days into the year, and so far, Google is racking up an unprecedented body count. If we just take the official shutdown dates that have already occurred in 2019, a Google-branded product, feature, or service has died, on average, about every nine days.

Below the fold, some commentary on Amadeo's latest report from the killing fields, in which he detects a little remorse.

Archival Cloud Storage Pricing

Although there are significant technological risks to data stored for the long term, its most important vulnerability is to interruptions in the money supply. The current pandemic is likely to cause archives to suffer significant interruptions in the money supply.

In Cloud For Preservation I described how much of the motivation for using cloud services was their month-by-month pay-for-what-you-use billing, which transforms capital expenditures (CapEx) into operational expenditures (OpEx). Organizations typically find OpEx much easier to justify than CapEx because:

• The numbers they look at are smaller, even if what they add up to over time is greater.
• OpEx is less of a commitment, since it can be decreased if circumstances change.

Unfortunately, the lower the commitment the higher the risk to long-term preservation. Since it doesn't deliver immediate returns, it is likely to be first on the chopping block. Thus both reducing storage cost and increasing its predictability are important for sustainable digital preservation. Below the fold I revisit this issue.

Interesting Articles From Usenix

Unless you're a member of Usenix (why aren't you?) you'll have to wait a year to read two of three interesting preservation-related articles in the Fall 2019 issue of ;login:. Below the fold is a little taste of each of them, with links to the full papers if you don't want to wait a year:

The Risks Of Outsourcing

My Cloud for Preservation post was in some sense all about the risks of outsourcing IT infrastructure to the cloud. Below the fold I comment on two recent articles illustrating different aspects of these risks.

Cloud For Preservation

Imagine you're responsible for preserving the long-established digital collection at a large research or national library. It is currently preserved in home-grown software, or off-the-shelf software that's been extensively customized, that you are responsible for running on hardware run by your institution's IT department. You are probably not a large customer of theirs. They are probably laying down the law, saying "cloud first", especially as you are looking at a looming hardware refresh. Below the fold, I examine a set of issues that need to be clarified in the decision-making process.

What Does Data "Durability" Mean

Source

In What Does 11 Nines of Durability Really Mean? David Friend writes:

No amount of nines can prevent data loss.

There is one very important and inconvenient truth about reliability: Two-thirds of all data loss has nothing to do with hardware failure.

The real culprits are a combination of human error, viruses, bugs in application software, and malicious employees or intruders. Almost everyone has accidentally erased or overwritten a file. Even if your cloud storage had one million nines of durability, it can’t protect you from human error.

Friend may be right that these are the top 5 causes of data loss, but over the timescale of preservation as opposed to storage they are far from the only ones. In Requirements for Digital Preservation Systems: A Bottom-Up Approach we listed 13 of them. Below the fold, some discussion of the meaning and usefulness of durability claims.

Chia Network

Back in March I wrote Proofs of Space, analyzing Bram Cohen's fascinating EE380 talk. I've now learned more about Chia Network, the company that is implementing a network using his methods. Below the fold I look into their prospects.

Longer talk at MSST2018

I was invited to give both a longer and a shorter talk at the 34^th International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology at Santa Clara University. Below the fold is the text with links to the sources of the longer talk, which was updated from and entitled The Medium-Term Prospects for Long-Term Storage Systems.

Lurking Malice in the Cloud

It is often claimed that the cloud is more secure than on-premises IT:

If you ask Greg Arnette if the cloud is more secure than on-premises infrastructure he’ll say “absolutely yes.” Arnette is CTO of cloud archive provider Sonian, which is hosted mostly in AWS’s cloud. The public cloud excels in two critical security areas, Arnette contends: Information resiliency and privacy.

But even if the cloud provider's infrastructure were completely secure, using the cloud does not free the user from all responsibility for security. In Lurking Malice in the Cloud: Understanding and Detecting Cloud Repository as a Malicious Service, a team from Georgia Tech, Indiana U., Bloomington and UCSB report on the alarming results of a survey of the use of cloud services to store malware components. Many of the malware stashes they found were hosted in cloud storage rented by legitimate companies, presumably the result of inadequate attention to security details by those companies. Below the fold, some details and comments.

The Future of Storage

My preparation for a workshop on the future of storage included giving a talk at Seagate and talking to the all-flash advocates. Below the fold I attempt to organize into a coherent whole the results of these discussions and content from a lot of earlier posts.

Talk at Seagate

I gave a talk at Seagate as part of a meeting to prepare myself for an upcoming workshop on The Future of Storage. It pulls together ideas from many previous posts. Below the fold, a text of the talk with links to the sources that has been edited to reflect some of what I learnt from the discussions.

The Amazon Tax

Ben Thompson at Stratechery has an insightful post entitled The Amazon Tax on the 10^th anniversary of the rollout of Amazon S3:

Until then Amazon Web Services had primarily been about providing developers with a way to tap into the Amazon retail store; S3, though, had nothing at all to do with retail,² at least not directly.

Below the fold, some comments.

Death of the "free internet"?

I've linked before to the excellent work of Izabella Kaminska at the FT's Alphaville blog. She's recently started a new series of posts she's calling Web Perestroika:

an occasional series lamenting the hypothetical eventuality of a world without a free internet* and the extraordinary implications this could have for markets and companies. A tragedy of the web commons if you will.

It is inspired both by India’s ruling to bar Facebook from subsidising internet availability with Free Basics packages (see Kadhim’s series of posts for more on that) but also Balaji Srinivasan (he of 21 Inc toaster fame), and his attempts — including a Stanford Bitcoin course — to convince the world the web should in fact be a paid-for luxury product of scarcity.

And yes, the asterisk means she does understand that The Internet is not free:

*when we say “internet” we mean it in the popular sense of the word.

She means a world without free Web content. Below the fold, some thoughts on the first two posts in the series, both from Feb 10^th.

The Cloudy Future of Disk Drives

For many years, following Dave Anderson of Seagate, I've been pointing out that the constraints of manufacturing capacity mean that the only medium available on which to store the world's bulk data is hard disk. Eric Brewer's fascinating FAST2016 keynote, entitled Spinning Disks and their Cloudy Future and Google's associated white paper, start from this premise:

The rise of portable devices and services in the Cloud has the consequence that (spinning) hard disks will be deployed primarily as part of large storage services housed in data centers. Such services are already the fastest growing market for disks and will be the majority market in the near future.

Eric's argument is that since cloud storage will shortly be the majority of the market, and that other segments are declining, the design of hard drives no longer needs to be a compromise suitable for a broad range of uses, but should be optimized for the Cloud. Below the fold, I look into some details of the optimizations and provide some supporting evidence.