And it's largely true. A few of us know (from painful experience) the stories about how digital data (or data that was previously analog but is now digital) can survive for years, with no expiration date and no statute of limitations. This news comes to us via an (latter-day) internet security consultant from California who, among other lucrative jobs he's done during his IT career, once gave a famous PowerPoint presentation telling the audience all they needed to know about setting up pornographic websites.
The Register's article [warning: mild language, online porn reference] on this is cheeky and it doesn't go very far in depth, but at least it talks about the new truism of our technological age: digital information, especially information that you post in publicly available forums, and in many cases even your email and in a few cases such obscure things as your browsing history, should now be considered by everyone who uses the 'net as "uneraseable."
"We're living at the dawn of a new age, or participating at the dawn of a new information age," Klein said during a session at the Usenix Annual Technical Conference in Santa Clara, California. "Whether it's good or bad, whether it's correct or incorrect, the data is preserved forever."
There are lots of pros and cons to this basic fact of technological life. In my mind, as far as something like the blogosphere is concerned, it's a good thing: the cost of maintaining archives of old material is vanishingly small, and even more importantly, it's easy to track and highlight the changes (or gross inconsistencies) in someone's stated point of view over the course of their "career" in blogging, because in theory all of that information should live virtually forever. I view that as a good thing, because people who profess to really believe and understand the principles and positions they advance in the blogosphere *should* be held accountable for those positions in the future. I see it as a strength, unless you're a tyro who really doesn't mean what they say, and unless you want to be branded a "flip flopper" in the future, you'd better be pretty convinced of the things you believe in, or at least be able to point to a solid explanation of why you changed your mind.
Of course, the information doesn't really "live" forever unless (at least right now) steps are taken to back it up and keep it available online into perpetuity. A meteor strike to a server farm that hasn't been replicated recently will erase that data forever.
But there are at least four things that I take away from this article:
1) Treat online conversations via blogs or email as if they are going to be preserved into perpetuity, for your great-grandchildren to read.
2) Understand that anything that passes through a modern internet device generates a log file that can be traced and might be tracked if someone's interest is great enough to do so.
3) Use the internet not so much as a casual communication tool but the serious piece of technology that it is: in fact, it is vastly more "true" in the ultimate sense than anything printed on a piece of paper.
4) The only people who don't believe in #3 and work to subvert it are the same people who walk around in dark sunglasses indoors and are probably not people you should trust.
Floor open for other comments. One of the best articles at The Register in a long time.
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