Elsevier and the Streisand Effect

Nearly a year ago I wrote The Maginot Paywall about the rise of research into the peer-to-peer sharing of academic papers via mechanisms including Library Genesis, Sci-Hub and #icanhazpdf. Although these mechanisms had been in place for some time they hadn't received a lot of attention. Below the fold, a look at how and why this has recently changed.

Talk on Evolving the LOCKSS Technology at PASIG

At the PASIG meeting in Prague I gave a brief update on the ongoing evolution of the LOCKSS technology. Below the fold, an edited text of the talk with links to the sources.

Talk on Private LOCKSS Networks at PASIG

I stood in for Vicky Reich to give an overview of Private LOCKSS Networks to the PASIG meeting. Below the fold, an edited text of the talk with links to the sources.

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.

2016 FAST Conference

I've just finished attending the 2016 Usenix FAST conference. Eric Brewer of Google gave a fascinating keynote, which deserves a complete post to itself. Below the fold are notes on the papers that caught my eye, arranged by topic.

1000 long-tail publishers!

The e-journal content that is at risk of loss or cancellation comes from the "long tail" of small publishers. Somehow, the definition of "small publisher" has come to be one that publishes ten or fewer journals. This seems pretty big to me, but if we adopt this definition the LOCKSS Program just passed an important milestone. We just sent out a press release announcing that the various networks using LOCKSS technology now preserve content from over 1000 long-tail publishers. There is still a long way to go, but as the press release says:

there are tens of thousands of long tail publishers worldwide, which makes preserving the first 1,000 publishers an important first step to a larger endeavor to protect vulnerable digital content.