Sciop is as easy to run as a bittorrent client. The idea will be to have it serve as a companion to a client, where we are going to implement a minor mutation of the FEP for mobile identity so you can mirror an identity from your personal client companion to any other instance that chooses to mirror yours. So this isn't like "come help our website" this is "get the fun parts of this website ready for when it's time to talk to other websites"

#sciop

if anyone is bored or wants to contribute to gray archive tech, i've done all the hard parts around this, but here is a set of things you could do to make "practical repack mutability for torrents" happen: https://codeberg.org/Safeguarding/-/projects/19508

so we have an indexer and a cli tool that can interact with clients. if we added one link table that allowed people to declare relationships between torrents - like e.g. if one replaces another, or is an updated version of, successor to, and so on, then one could plug in the pieces so the cli periodically checks for updated versions of torrents and swaps them out in the local client.

this could be your name in the credits: "what if bittorrent trackers weren't just static repositories of torrent files and generic peer connection machines but could facilitate socio-technological resolutions to basic problems in the protocol."

#bittorrent #sciop

I just closed da loop on the first example of the distributed, bittorrent backed, "archiveteam-warrior except anyone can do it and not necessarily have uploading to archive org being the only means of sharing". .. thing. And it's pretty good. In a couple months we've slowly spread our octopus tentacles over the whole bittorrent/scraping stack and it's cool to start seeing the pieces connect.

We have a basic problem: someone recognizes a dataset will disappear, then we would have to have a whole convoluted forum process where we post what we're taking, blah blah heroism, volunteerism, solving hard problems on the fly, love this group. Except that sometimes only half the data would show up, or it would end up with one person needing to seed 20TB from their home connection. So uneven labor distribution

Anyway once we get the frontend and docs writ we'll have a sketch of an idea: what if not just distributing the data, we also distributed the scraping. making it possible for deduplicated, distributed crawl tasks that feed automatically back into feeds of torrents. Once we convince arvindn to make webtorrent enabled by default, we've got some cool news with the replayweb.page folks to share. Along with being able to share the work and mutually validating snapshots of the web, that's your distributed wayback machine.

Then it's time to start the federation part where it gets really interesting - making AP groups that can mutually coordinate archival work and publish it in private, overlapping torrent bubbles

Edit: here is the thing in code form, docs are the cherry on top: https://codeberg.org/Safeguarding/-/projects/18027

#sciop#Bittorrent#BittorrentIsStillHappening#ProtocolEvolutionEvenIfItsALittleCrusty#SeriouslyTheresSoMuchOpenSpaceInBittorrent

The outright wrecking of the scientific infrastructure in the US under the current administration chilled me to my bone. Kept me doomscrolling. But I finally found a way to do something positive, in a small way: I dedicated some storage space and a bit of my internet connection to a decentralized backup of deleted research data.
I am happy to report that @SafeguardingResearch 's torrent swarm now has ca 14 TB storage and a Gbit connection more.
#sciop #safeguardingresearch #academicchatter

𝒹𝑜𝓃𝓀𝓈

(we have more of them)

#Sciop#WorldPremiere#MusicVideo#LiveEvent#AttendanceInTheBillions#UncountableAttendance#AQuantityOfDocsThatShamesTheHeavens#IfIcarusHadActuallyMadeItToSpaceInsteadOfMeltingThosePunkAssWingsItWouldBeLikeTheseDocs#ActuallyMostlyStillUnfinished#NotThatBigOfAChange#DontClickAnyOtherLinks#IfYouCantTakeMeAtMyPartiallyDocumentedYouDontDeserveMeAtMyFullyDocumented