They have come a very long way since the late 1990s when I was working there as a sysadmin and the data center was a couple of racks plus a tape robot in a back room of the Presidio office with an alarmingly slanted floor. The tape robot vendor had to come out and recalibrate the tape drives more often than I might have wanted.

There is a fundamental resistance to tape technology that exists to this day as a result of all those troubles.

That's sad, but it mirrors my experience with commercial customers. Tape is so fiddly but the cost efficiency for large amounts of data and at-rest stability is so good. Tape is caught in a spiral of decreasing market share so industry has no incentive to optimize it.

Edit: Then again, I recently heard a podcast that talked about the relatively good at-rest stability of SATA hard disk drives stored outdoors. >smile<

Tape is also an extraordinarily poor option for a service like Internet Archive which intends to provide interactive, on-demand access to its holdings.

Back in the day, if you loaded a page from the web archive that wasn’t in cache, it’d tell you to come back in a couple of minutes. If it was in cache, it was reasonably speedy.

Cache in this case was the hard drives. If I recall correctly, we were using SAM-FS, which worked fairly well for the purpose even though it was slow as dirt —- we could effectively mount the tape drive on Solaris servers, and access the file system transparently.

Things have gotten better. I’m not sure if there were better affordable options in the late 1990s, though. I went from Alexa/IA to AltaVista, which solved the problem of storing web crawl data by being owned by DEC and installing dozens of refrigerator sized Alpha servers. Not an option open to Alexa/IA.

This is a common use for tape, which can via tools like HPSS have a couple petabytes of disk in front of it, and present the whole archive in a single POSIX filesystem namespace, handling data migration transparently and making sure hot data is kept on low-latency storage.

Yeah, it was like this (except not petabytes).

I presume backing-up the archive is a desirable thing. That's a place where I would see tape fitting well for them.

Perhaps? But unless tape, and the infrastructure to support it, is dramatically cheaper than disk, they might still be better served by more disk - having two or more copies of data on disk means that both of them can service load, whereas a tape backup is only passively useful as a backup.

A lot of people, me included, consider anything online not to be backup. Being disconnected and completely at-rest is a very desirable property.

    unless tape, and the infrastructure to support it, is dramatically cheaper than disk, 

This turns out to be the case, with the cost difference growing as the archive size scales. Once you hit petascale, it's not even close. However, most large-scale tape deployments also have disk involved, so it's usually not one or the other.

You might squirm at using refurbished or used media but those 3TB SAS ex-enterprise disks are often the same price or cheaper than tapes themselves (excluding tape drive costs!). Will magnetic storage last 30 years? Probably not but they don't instantly demagnetize either. Both tape and offline magnetic platters benefit from ideal storage conditions.

It's not just cost / media, though. Automated handling is a big advantage, too. At the scale where tape makes sense (north of 400TB in retention) I think the inconvenience of handling disks with similar aggregate capacity would be significant.

I guess slotting disks into a storage shelf is similar to loading a tape changer robot. I can't imagine the backplane slots on a disk array being rated at a significant lifetime number of insertions / removals.

That's exactly what it is.

You also don't want your true backups online at all - that's the whole point.

Tape is almost always used for cold storage backups that are offline in case of ransomware attacks. Using it for on demand access would be insanely slow

We had a little server room where the AC was mounted directly over the rack. I don't think we ever put an umbrella in there but it sure made everyone nervous the drain pipe would clog.

Much more recently, I worked at a medium-large SaaS company but if you listened to my coworkers you'd think we were Google (there is a point where optimism starts being delusion, and a couple of my coworkers were past it.)

Then one day I found the telemetry pages for Wikipedia. I am hoping some of those charts were per hour not per second, otherwise they are dealing with mind numbing amounts of traffic.

O'Keefe had already returned it, as I recall.

Right. It wasn't to recover the diary, it was an investigation into how they acquired it (which appears to have been clearly illegal given that you can't buy stolen goods, even if you're a journalist).

I would not say that Project Veritas acted illegally in this case, although I have absolutely no love for them and I think they have acted illegally and immorally in other cases. In the end the Justice Department did not bring charges.

You absolutely can't offer someone money to steal documents. That's clear. Even providing advice on acquiring documents is probably going to be unlawful. And if possession of the document itself is otherwise illegal (i.e., CSAM) there's no protection there.

It isn't necessarily illegal to offer money for a document, particularly if you don't have knowledge of how the document was acquired. I'm not familiar enough with this case to have a strong opinion other than knowing the DoJ elected not to bring charges.

And, yes, it was Trump's DoJ. In this case I'm unaware of any evidence that the decision was politically motived and I still have some confidence that whistleblowers would speak out, particularly given the recent wave of resignations due to directives in Minneapolis. I think people of good will could disagree with me there for sure.

It is unambiguously illegal to pay for goods you know to be stolen. In all 50 states and federally.

Most courts would assume someone who purchased a private diary of a living person would know that it was stolen.

"particularly if you don't have knowledge of how the document was acquired."

Correct, and there's no way that the private diary of a still-living daughter of a politician was acquired by any method other than theft.

Prosecutors don't need to prove the buyer actually dispositively knew the document was stolen, only that reasonable person would have known it to be such.

Which would be obvious in this case.

"No way" is an awfully strong statement. For example, people abandon personal material in storage units which are subsequently auctioned off fairly often.

But I appreciate you iterating on this -- I understand your position and while I disagree with you on the question of what "reasonable" would be in this case, I absolutely think that if I could read minds I would find that Project Veritas staffers at the very least knew the diary was stolen.

Sorry to be a pedant, but not exactly. They raided James O'Keefe's house to seize his cell phones as part of an investigation into potential conspiracy to traffic stolen goods (the diary) across state lines. Journalists (which is a very broad term, and in this context I think O'Keefe qualifies) are certainly allowed to receive stolen or classified material, which also applies to the raid on the WaPo reporter. They are not allowed to induce others to break the law on their behalf, and that's what was at question in the Biden diary case.

I don't think the O'Keefe raid was justified and it's certainly the first step on a slippery slope. I also think the current situation is a worse violation of norms.

Perhaps I'm missing something but I'm fairly sure that if I was a billionaire and I was motivated to figure out a way to donate to Renee Good's family, I would be able to figure something out without the help of GoFundMe.

Depends on how big the chilling effect is, no? For example, if a school librarian notices that a colleague in another district loses their job or worse, gets personal threats because of a specific book, they might well remove a book from shelves before it's challenged.

That is not a rebuttal to your point -- I don't have a guess on whether or not the chilling effect is significant. I'm just noting there are follow-on effects to be considered.

My point is we all need to moderate our reactions to things based on actual scale, across the political spectrum rare events are being amplified to make people think they're prevalent disasters and it distorts too many peoples' reality.

There are much worse, much bigger problems and we need to constantly be reminding people of how big issues actually are. Book bannings are concerning but what is the size of the actual impact? I see this issue more of as an embarrassment for a handful of schools and boards who are bowing to moralizing fools, people are acting like they're afraid of an escalation to Fahrenheit 451 when we really should be mocking the book banners for their foolishness instead of being afraid of them.

This is far from the only issue suffering from a lack of sense of scale.

It goes far beyond that. The Iowa legislature has already moved to make changes to how libraries work in Iowa as a result of all of the attention these issues are getting here. They're essentially trying to condense the power to the state level instead of at the municipal level, where it belongs. It's a power grab that'll have repercussions that may very well cause the smallest of libraries here to cease existing.

And it all started with people complaining about books in the library.

I don't disagree with the underlying point, I just don't agree that the effects of this particular issue are all that minimal. Mockery only gets you so far when the moralizing fools are, say, serving as Speaker of the House.

Probably also worth asking if this problem is really independent, or if it's a facet of larger, more clearly damaging trends.

To be completely fair, Russia did decide to make an exception in this case, although it took a couple of months (during which Bushby was detained) to get there.

I am a little bit torn in this case. From our vantage point it's obvious that Bushby wasn't running an elaborate long scam to get into Russia. In the moment... I don't know, former UK special forces guy? Long history of espionage between UK and Russia? Two months seems too long; it's also not as easy as your case of a teenager in the sewer.

I saw that. Six months (if I recall) is kind of a long time…

Oh, they absolutely are. As Leavitt promised at her first briefing, it’s been opened to: "independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators."

Yes, all of them right-wing chuds.

The repository is part of https://github.com/historicalsource, which has code for a bunch of Infocom games, although at a quick glance most of them aren't open sourced. Still, very cool resource.

I've been guessing that the problems existed prior to the Marriot deal; why would they give up their front door to a competitor otherwise? But I agree that it's got to be a wildly crazy story.

There's a nuance here: a lot of times, it's people hearing "male privilege is a problem" and immediately being told that this means "you personally are at fault!" So it's very understandable that people believe that they're being told "everything is their fault because they have male privilege" when they're not.