Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Online bits are forever

Author:David McCusker
Posted:9/13/2000; 10:33:37 AM
Topic:Discuss by email?
Msg #:21301 (In response to 21299)
Prev/Next:21300 / 21302

Gerald Oskoboiny: but you should realize that one you post something in a public forum, you should expect it to be available somewhere online forever.

Yes, no one disputes that. It's just like when someone hears words, they can take the memory with them always even if no hard record exists. Further, a speaker can request no recordings be made, and yet an audience member might surreptitiously do so anyway.

It's a mistake to assume hard records equate with reality. Even if they are unmodified and unhacked, they are at best sampled slices of reality. There really isn't anyway to assure the degree of comfort one might wish to have in absolute knowledge.

As a practitioner in the field of storing digital bits persistently, I have no interest in encouraging users to trust records any more than necessary for a shallow and easy going approximation of the truth. It's not possible to assure absolute correctness, and approaching it by degrees can only have the effect of making users trust too credulously when this is not warranted.

In other words, it's a public disservice to teach users our actual technological model can support an untamperable history of recorded facts. Trust is more complex and blurry than such simple assurances, and users need to learn about how much they should trust and when.

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