About US research data under threat and how everyone can contribute to saving it - @lavaeolus and me were interviewed in the TU Delft paper Delta: https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/saving-academic-data-is-easier-than-you-think-and-you-can-do-it-too mostly regarding our parts in the Safeguarding Research and Culture initiative at https://safeguar.de
#TUDelft#SafeguardingResearch#SciOp

The LMU Open Science Center ( @lmu_osc) runs a hackathon to support the #SciOp#SafeguardingResearch initiative: Rescuing research data that is deleted by the Trump administration.

Bonus: @lavaeolus will give an ignition talk!

📅 Thursday, 2025-08-07, 16 – 19 (only in-person)
👉 Details and signup: https://github.com/lmu-osc/safeguar.de-hackathon

Become a data rescuer by turning your own laptop into a Research Data Rescue Node, scraping at-risk data sets, and breathing new life into your old HDD as part of a global, decentralised network.

#LMUMünchen#OpenScience#OpenData #DataRescue
CC @SafeguardingResearch @bitsUndBaeumeAuxMuc

You may have heard that globalchange.gov and all the national reports on climate change have gone down.

We got em all on #sciop, a webrip and all the PDFs extracted: https://sciop.net/datasets/globalchange-gov-webrip

Edit: context - https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-national-assessment-nasa-white-house-057cec699caef90832d8b10f21a6ffe8

Have a disused laptop or Raspi? Make it part of the swarm and take the data outside the US (or any) administration's grasp!

#scienceunderattack #bittorrent #decentralizedbackup #libraryofcongress

check this out if you want to help preserve the archive of "most local newspapers through most of US history" that had its funding pulled, even if you only have a couple dozen gigabytes to spare, you can
a) make an account on https://sciop.net/ ,
b) run a qbittorrent instance, go to preferences>web ui and click enable,

and just do this

python -m pip install sciop-scraping
sciop-cli login
sciop-cli client add
sciop-scrape chronicling-america --next

and that's all.

if you have spare storage, you can sort by seeders, ascending, and start from there. or subscribe to the rss feed and auto-download it.

this is an archive funded by the library of congress (threatened) and the national endowment for the humanities (actively being eliminated). the alternative is that an enormous amount of US history that doesn't percolate into history books is owned and operated by lexisnexis and other for-profit data brokers.

this is the first run of some tooling to lower the bar for participatory scraping - at the moment, the archive is still online, and the scraper will automatically embed a webseed URL in the created torrent. so even if you don't have space to seed, you can scrape the data, upload the torrent, and make it possible for waiting peers to become mirrors

#sciop

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