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A long time ago I used one of these HDMI-CEC-to-USB/serial bridges: https://web.archive.org/web/20110219131237/http://rainshadow...

(I'd gotten a large LG monitor instead of a flatscreen tv, and it didn't talk HDMI-CEC but it had a serial-over-TRRS control interface, so I listened for messages on the bus and my media PC translated and relayed them to the monitor.)


We'll be celebrating this at the Internet Archive! As a lead-up, we're again hosting our Public Domain Film Remix Contest: https://blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2026-public-domain-day-r...

We'll be having an in-person celebration at our SF HQ later in January as well, details to come!


Does the Internet Archive provide any instruction to uploaders and users about how to go about uploading and downloading copyright-expired public domain works legally, given the geographical differences from region to region on copyright expiration? For example, does the Internet Archive host its servers in USA, and would that make the US copyright expiry law operative? Or does it have servers in Europe or Asia (more lenient copyright expiration laws) that can be intentionally uploaded to, and leaving it to users to download from their respective regional locations on their own cognizances (i.e. at their own risk)?


If you have the opportunity, I would strongly recommend visiting the vintageTEK Museum whose site this is on (it's just outside Portland) sometime. Many of the folks working there are retired from Tektronix themselves and the amount of (working!) equipment they have is astounding.


Yes! I went there on my first trip to Portland last year for work.

It was mesmerizing to look at all the beautiful equipment and meet all the cool people there. I've forgotten his name, but I spent at least one hour with an ex-Tektronix employee who started his career with tubes and ended it with writing FPGA code who told me many wonderous stories from his career. Highly recommended if you're at all into electronics!


Among the many reasons that stretch of 26 is dangerous is that the approach from Portland is essentially a freeway from Gresham through Sandy, and then turns into a rural highway until it begins the climb up to Hood. This is because of a remnant of the Mount Hood Freeway construction, which resulted in a lot of little oddities that linger in Portland to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Hood_Freeway


I'm maybe too close to the problem to evaluate well (studied foundational math) but I know that Lawvere and Schanuel's book "Conceptual Mathematics" has been fairly well-regarded as a path into category theory.


It's kinda gimmicky but I found this thing on clearance at a local hardware store and it works fairly well (gets most weeds out without me having to bend over, which is nice): https://grampasweeder.com/collections/grampas-gardenware/pro...

It doesn't get everything but I can do more work on the tough ones when so many come right out.


I had the same concerns awhile back and ending up running a slightly modified version of https://github.com/wiedehopf/mlat-client -- not quite as simple as an http push, but much simpler than a containerized feed client.


That's only MLAT though and won't feed the ADS-B data.


Do you happen to recall which version? I've picked up a couple kid's books/playsets but mine is ready for a chapter-book type version soon. FWIW my favorite reading copy is the UC Press version based on the incredible Arion version (https://www.ucpress.edu/books/moby-dick-or-the-whale/paper) but any edition based on the Northwestern-Newberry text is solid.


Sure, the kids classic version that I got is edited by Margaret Novak and published by Applesauce Press. It is actually chapter based which is nice, and it also has kid-friendly illustrations.


Lovely, thank you! Looking forward to checking it out.


Hi, I run the datacenter/infrastructure team at the Internet Archive! We would love to see you at our various events this fall but if paying for the ticket is difficult for you, please email me (in bio) and we'll get you in (if possible).


Are they distributed events all around the world of just in wherever the team is gathered (San Francisco I guess?)

By the way, thank you all the teams in IA, what you provide is such an important thing for humanity.


Thanks for helping to run my favorite library on earth.


Hey, Q., so what's the size of the internet archive?


For the purposes of ballpark, between 150-200 petabytes of unique data, probably on the lowish end of that last I checked.


it is large enough that I am wondering if the data captured by the actual physical magnetic charges has a heft, that a person could feel. obviously the hardware would fill a house or something, but at what point does the worlds data become a discernable physical reality, at least in theory


I'm betting exabyte or close maybe


Most of all, i'm curious about how you reliably and securely store or host so many archived pages. Would you mind briefly explaining such a huge undertaking? Also, total congratulations on the fantastic achievement of this. You guys are my go-to for so much information.

Edit: And how many terabytes it all amounts to.


We all know the NSA has access to servers hosted in the U.S. How are you protecting the archive from malicious tampering? Are you using any form of immutable storage? Is it post-quantum secure?


Why would they do that? Have you previously seen a case where they "maliciously tampered" with anyone's website?


I just question the integrity and immutability of the data IA is archiving, that's all

You want to know why they'd tamper data?

https://seclab.cs.washington.edu/2017/10/30/rewriting-histor...

https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims...

NSA already paid to back-door RSA, got caught shiping pre-hacked routers, can rewrite pages mid-flight with QUANTUM, penetrate and siphon data from remote infected machines.. what else could they do?

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...


IA themselves could tamper with the data, no? It was never meant to be an official historical snapshot to be pulled up for any serious or official purposes. Although it has been used that way for high profile internet drama. It's just a matter of time (maybe during an election) before it's surreptitiously altered and referenced for nefarious purposes.


I would love to work for IA but openings are rare


If you are in Europe, consider Software Heritage (similar to IA but for source code) too:

https://www.softwareheritage.org/jobs/


Internet Archive now have a presence in Amsterdam


What events are we talking about here?



would love technical details around this feat. ex: how you even crawl to begin with, storage, etc


Free-space optical transmission is a thing, though it's environmentally quite challenging. We tested some gear from https://www.koruza.net at the Internet Archive ~10 years ago or so (I've also built some 10G point-to-point links in my garage, though I'd hardly call them reliable). It is pretty cool to see a scratch build rather than using commercial transceivers


Taara is a Google/X moonshot that was recently spun off to do the same thing.

https://www.taaraconnect.com/product


Doesn't Starlink do that already for sat2sat comms?


Not quite the same thing as doing it in an atmosphere.


There's not a huge amount of info I've seen on the specifics of Starlink's LISL setup, but there are a couple interesting bits in here: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming...

> Brashears also said Starlink’s laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long “it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth,” he said, before the connection broke.

(the presentation that's being reported on, which I don't have access to: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of... )


30k would be about 1/3rd MSL air pressure, so that's pretty thin relative to what humanity experiences. Also note it says 'connection broke', not that the connection was way way slower than it would be in a vacuum.


That's right, the beam pointing problem is far harder when everything is moving.


There's this thing called wind that can move your outdoor installations quite a bit ;)

I'd call it a wash, space is hard, but so are atmospheric interactions, weather, foliage, and all the side effects of human habitation (like someone building a house in the middle of your laser link, yes that happens.)


Deterministic space dynamics vs chaotic fluid dynamics (or worse, as the sibling comment by eqvinox illustrates).

Space is hard by many aspects, but on that part it's much easier than on earth.


Space dynamics are not that much deterministic. Gravity itself is kinda noisy (Earth isn't an ideal sphere with uniform density), there's the Moon, orbital decay (caused by drag from particles in low orbit, which is variable), solar radiation pressure (also variable), etc. Calculation of the dynamics will only give an approximate result, a prediction. They need constant measurement of the trajectories and frequent correction maneuvers (by ion engines). But yeah, I think that once the satellites accurately know each others trajectory, their movement shouldn't be a big issue for the lasers, as in the timespan of one laser connection it should be predictable with the required precision. And if both satellites would be on the same orbit, their relative movement should be ~0, so the laser beam ideally wouldn't move at all from the satellite's perspective, the angle would be constant.


Starlink sats do fly just low enough that they experience some mild atmospheric drag. Their next generation sats will fly even lower too. But it's certainly still in the range where simple computer models will be very accurate for at least a few hours out.


Bizarre take.

Atmospheric scintillation is the barrier for free space laser communications on terra-firma; this is one reason we enclose the laser light in optical fibre to avoid this problem.

In space where nobody can hear you scream, scintillation isn't a problem.


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