Michael Nelson's Group On Archiving Twitter

The rise and fall of the Trump administration has amply illustrated the importance of Twitter in the historical record. Alas, Twitter has no economic motivation to cater to the needs of historians. As they work to optimize Twitter's user experience, the engineers are likely completely unaware of the problems they are causing the Web archives trying to preserve history. Even if they were aware, they would be unable to justify the time and effort necessary to mitigate them.

Over the last six months Michael Nelson's group at Old Dominion University have continued their excellent work to evaluate exactly how much trouble future historians will have to contend with in three new blog posts from Kritika Garg and Himarsha Jayanetti:

• Twitter Was Already Difficult To Archive, Now It's Worse!
• New Twitter UI: Replaying Archived Twitter Pages That Never Existed
• Twitter Added Labels On Its Old User Interface

Below the fold, some commentary on each of them.

Stablecoins

I have long been skeptical of Bitcoin's "price" and, despite its recent massive surge, I'm still skeptical. But it turns out I was wrong two years ago when I wrote in Blockchain: What's Not To Like?:

Permissionless blockchains require an inflow of speculative funds at an average rate greater than the current rate of mining rewards if the "price" is not to collapse. To maintain Bitcoin's price at $4K requires an inflow of $300K/hour.

I found it hard to believe that this much actual money would flow in, but since then Bitcoin's "price" hasn't dropped below $4K, so I was wrong. Caution — I am only an amateur economist, and what follows below the fold is my attempt to make sense of what is going on.

RISC vs. CISC

The architectural debate between Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) and Reduced Instruction Set Conputers (RISC) really took off in the 1980s:

In particular, two projects at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. Stanford's MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley's RISC gave its name to the entire concept and was commercialized as the SPARC.

For the last decade or more the debate has seemed frozen, with the CISC x86 architecture dominating the server and desktop markets, while the RISC ARM architecture dominated the mobile market. But two recent developments are shaking things up. Below the fold, some discussion.

737 MAX Ungrounding

My post 737 MAX: The Case Against Boeing is a year old and has accumulated 58 updates in comments. Now the aircraft is returning to service, it is time for a new post. Below the fold, Bjorn Fehrm has two interesting posts about the ungrounding.

I Rest My Case

Jeff Rothenberg's seminal 1995 Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents focused on the threat of the format in which the documents were encoded becoming obsolete, and rendering its content inaccessible. This was understandable, it was a common experience in the preceeding decades. Rothenberg described two different approaches to the problem, migrating the document's content from the doomed format to a less doomed one, and emulating the software that accessed the document in a current environment.

The Web has dominated digital content since 1995, and in the Web world formats go obsolete very slowly, if at all, because they are in effect network protocols. The example of IPv6 shows how hard it is to evolve network protocols. But now we are facing the obsolescence of a Web format that was very widey used as the long effort to kill off Adobe's Flash comes to fruition. Fortunately, Jason Scott's Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive shows that we were right all along. Below the fold, I go into the details.

Storage Media Update

My last post on storage media was After A Decade, HAMR Is Still Nearly Here back in July. Below the fold, I look at some of the developments since then.

Even More On The Ad Bubble

I've been writing for some time about the hype around online advertising. There's a lot of evidence that it is ineffective. Recently, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office concluded an investigation into Cambridge Analytica's involvement in the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum. At The Register, Shaun Nichols summarizes their conclusions in UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?:

El Reg has heard on good authority from sources in British political circles that Cambridge Analytica's advertised powers of online suggestion were rather overblown and in fact mostly useless. In the end, it was skewered by its own hype, accused of tangibly influencing the Brexit and presidential votes on behalf of political parties and campaigners using its Facebook data. Yet, no evidence, according to the ICO, could be found supporting those specific claims.

Below the fold I look at this, a recent book on the topic, and other evidence that has emerged since I wrote Contextual vs. Behavioral Advertising.