Dangerous Complacency

The topic of web archiving has been absent from this blog for a while, but recently Sawood Alam alerted me to Cliff Lynch's post from January entitled The Dangerous Complacency of “Web Archiving” Rhetoric. Lynch's thesis is that using the term "web archiving" obscures the fact that we can only collect and preserve a fraction of "the Web". The topic is one I've written about many times, at least since my Spring 2009 CNUI Plenary, so below the fold I return to it.

Vitalik Buterin vs. Reality

Time's cover story by Andrew R. Chow, The Man Behind Ethereum Is Worried About Crypto's Future, is supplemented by his I Spent 80 Minutes Inside Vitalik Buterin's Brain. Here's What I Learned. What I learned from these two pieces of hagiography was that Buterin is having a lot of difficulty dealing with the failure of Ethereum to live up to the goals he had for it. Below the fold I provide specifics.

Storage Update: Part 2

This is part 2 of my latest update on storage technology. Part 1, covering developments in DNA as a storage medium is here. This part was sparked by a paper at Usenix's File And Storage Technologies conference from Bianca Schroeder's group at U. Toronto and NetApp on the performanmce of SSDs at scale. It followed on from their 2020 FAST "Best Paper" that I discussed in Enterprise SSD Reliability, and it prompted me to review the literature of this area. The result is below the fold.

Storage Update: Part 1

It is past time for an update on storage technology. There is so much to write that I need to break it into multiple parts. Below the fold, I start with two papers reporting developments that could increase the performance of DNA data storage significantly.

Shadow Banking 2.0

Source

Prof. Hilary Allen of American University Washington College of Law has a very important 27-page essay entitled DeFi: Shadow Banking 2.0?. In it, she details a whole other set of externalities that, being beyond my limited understanding of banking and finance, I didn't discuss in my EE380 Talk. Prof. Allen summarizes her work:

TL;DR: DeFi is neither decentralized, nor very good finance, so regulators should have no qualms about clamping down on it to protect the stability of our financial system and broader economy.

Her arguments are supported by a less detailed, slightly earlier paper, DeFi risks and the decentralisation illusion by Sirio Aramonte, Wenqian Huang and Andreas Schrimpf of the Bank for International Settlements. Below the fold I comment on both of them.

It Was 40 Years Ago Today

Sun Microsystems was founded 24^th February 1982, and died 27^th January 2010. I spent 1982 on sabbatical in Amsterdam waiting for the Sun/1 we had ordered to show up. IIRC I visited their initial offices on Walsh Ave. in Santa Clara in early 1983, and joined the company in September 1985. I owe Sun, and the people who worked there, a debt of gratitude I could never repay.

In those early days Sun was an extraordinarily interesting company to work for, and throughout its 28-year history it spawned an incredible number of other startups. One of them was Nvidia, which is currently the 8^th most valuable company in the world, but there are far too many others to list.

In It Isn't About The Technology I wrote:

In the late 80s I foresaw a bleak future for Sun Microsystems. Its profits were based on two key pieces of intellectual property, the SPARC architecture and the Solaris operating system. In each case they had a competitor (Intel and Microsoft) whose strategy was to make owning that kind of IP too expensive for Sun to compete. I came up with a strategy for Sun to undergo a radical transformation into something analogous to a combination of Canonical and an App Store. I spent years promoting and prototyping this idea within Sun.

One of the reasons I have great respect for Scott McNealy is that he gave me, an engineer talking about business, a very fair hearing before rejecting the idea, saying "Its too risky to do with a Fortune 100 company". Another way of saying this is "too big to pivot to a new, more “sustainable” business model".

In the terms that Wall St. imposes on public companies, Scott was right and I was wrong. In the 8 years or so from my talk to the dot-com crash SUNW made the stockholders an incredible amount of money. But then the money stopped, in some ways for the reasons I had spotted. Being right too soon is as bad as being wrong.

Talking Their Book

My EE380 talk gained about a quarter-million page views, thanks to @markrussinovich, a shout-out from Prof. Dave Farber, and an enthusiastic review from Cory Doctorow.

Unusually for my blog, the majority of the comments weren't spam, and almost all passed moderation. Here are some hints that will help your comment survive moderation:

• Long blocks of text without paragraph breaks are completely unreadable.
• Long screeds, even with paragraph breaks, will cause readers to stop reading. This isn't fair to the comments that come after yours. Try to make your point in no more than three short paragraphs.
• It helps if you display technical knowledge. One way to do that is to show that you understand how links are made in HTML. Pasting the URL in as text shows you're ether clue impaired, or too lazy to help the reader.
• Just making a link without motivating people to click on it is rude. Quote a snippet, or at least explain why it should be clicked.

Compared to most authors posting criticism of cryptocurrencies I was very lucky. The reason I started the talk by pointing out that I wasn't "talking my book" is that the discourse around cryptocurrencies has become corrupted by HODL-ers "talking their book", and that their response to critics is often toxic.

Below the fold, I look at this problem.