text:
All Our Yesterdays
A presentation on digital preservation from the Build conference in Belfast in November 2011.
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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Thank you. Thank you very much for the introduction, Jesse. It's kind of surreal to have Jesse Thorn introducing me. I'm a great fan of Sound of Young America, Maximum Fun. And I'm absolutely thrilled that he has a Huffduffer account. That's fantastic.
So yes, my talk may be slightly different from some of the stuff we've been talking about today, although it touches on some of what Wilson was talking about, but I don't have any Star Wars references. I don't think there's any references to Apple, and there isn't a single Marshall McLuhan quote in the whole thing. But I'm sorry; this'll be a little different.
What I want to talk about, as Jesse was saying, I want to talk about time. Time and the web. And we are quite preoccupied with time on the web, but a lot of time what we're preoccupied with is this whole idea of the real-time web. That's what's exciting, particularly right now. Josh was talking about—and I totally agree with him—this fundamental change in web design, and a lot of it's to do with these real-time interactions on mobile devices.
But there's another kind of time. There's the longer time. Robin Sloan put this really, really well. He described these two types of time as flow and stock, and he said:
Flow is the feed. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It's what people discover via search. It's what spreads slowly but surely. Flow is ascendant these days, but we neglect stock at our own peril
And also, I don't think these two are mutually exclusive. I don't think we need to either be thinking about the flow—the real-time web—or the stock, the long archived web. The one can become the other. There's a wonderful blog post my by friend Matt Ogle, and he said:
We've all been so distracted by the now that we've hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake that all those updates can contribute over time to a beautiful narrative, if they survive.
So I think in our industry, a lot of the time we're not used to thinking of long term challenges, long term design challenges. Generally out there in the world, there are not that many examples of really long term design challenges. We've heard reference to architecture earlier, but not really long term. There are a few examples.
This is the Global Seed Bank in Svalbard in Norway, and the idea here is to archive a specimen, at least one specimen, of every plant that exists, a seed from every plant that exists, thinking long-term, that we have essentially a back-up. This is Dropbox for our planet. Very long term thinking. Obviously we want to have more than one Global Seed Bank. You never know where the asteroid's going to hit, right? But as a design challenge, it really would get you thinking in the long term about the building, about the system of archiving here. This has got to last for generations.
There are other examples of very long term thinking. Nuclear waste storage; that's a good example. You've got places like Yucca Mountain in Nevada. There's Carlsbad in New Mexico, they bury the waste 2,150 feet under the ground, and it's got to stay there for tens of thousands of years, and that's got a real long half-life. How do you warn people to keep away? You've buried it as deep as you can, but how do you warn people to keep away? You can't rely on letters. You can't rely on signage. You can't rely on any particular language that happens to be in the ascendant today that will even exist, any method of writing. You can't rely on iconography: it's quite culturally specific.
So there was a think-tank of designers came together—there's this Futures Panel—to discuss how they could design an environment to tell people to keep away. One school of thought was that you don't design anything. Just by putting anything there, you are essentially attracting attention in the same way that the pyramids are going to get robbed because, hey, look, they're great big pyramids. But they were brainstorming together and they figured out, what was the message they were trying to get across?
They couldn't use letters; they couldn't use iconography, but this is the message they wanted to convey:
This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it. Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honour. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
It's quite a lot of information that they had to try and pack in without using iconography, without using letters. What they eventually settled on was menacing earthworks and forbidding blocks and sort of thorn like blocks in the earth that should be instinctually repulsive to people. It's a good example of long-term thinking. Of course there's no knowing whether it's going to work or not unless we come back in a few thousand years.
There's a whole group dedicated to long-term thinking. Who's heard of The Long Now Foundation? Excellent. Any members of The Long Now Foundation? Okay. Just me.
So for those who don't know, The Long Now Foundation was formed back in 1996 by a whole bunch of people, including Stuart Brand who was mentioned earlier. Stuart Brand just shows up everywhere throughout the history of the twentieth century. We heard about the Whole Earth Catalog earlier that he did, and he had this whole campaign to have the Apollo ship turn its camera back and turn a picture of the whole earth because nobody had actually seen a picture of the whole earth. You know the Mother of all Demos with Doug Engelbart showing the mouse and windows and icons for the first time? You know who's behind the camera? Stuart Brand. He's everywhere.
Anyway, so he wanted to get together this group of people to think about long term stuff. One of the other people was Brian Eno. Brian Eno at the time was living in New York where he found people were thinking very short term. He would ask people, 'What are you doing right now?', and they would tell him what they were doing that day. Maybe in the last few hours. Possibly that weekend, but that's the level of time they're thinking; very fast-paced. So this was to encourage long-term thinking.
And they took this name The Long Now Foundation, it's kind of a riff on a fictional organisation in a Robert Heinlein book, it was called The Long Range Foundation. This Long Range Foundation would be given lots of money that it had to plough into stuff that could never be profitable; it was only for long term good. So they'd plough it into things like space exploration and stuff, and of course these things turned out to be enormously profitable, because long-term thinking is a good thing to do.
One of the projects of the Long Now Foundation that's a great example of long-term thinking is the Clock of the Long Now. They're designing a clock that's got to tell the time for ten thousand years. You can see a prototype of it in the Science Museum in London. So Brian Eno was doing the chimes, you know, it'll chime every year, ten years or something. If you go to the website of the Clock of the Long Now, it's really fascinating. They've got a set of design principles; they're some of the best design principles I've seen. So it's really making you think about long term thinking.
They also decided that if this was just a thought experiment about long-term thinking, about potentially building a clock, that that would kind of defeat the purpose, so they are actually building this clock, and it's a scale free sort of thing, so it's going to work on a very large scale, and they've got a mountain in …I think it's in Nevada, in a very geologically stable place, because that's an important factor to consider for a ten thousand year clock, and they've stated carving the steps in. Obviously it's going to be a long-term project.
But even that isn't the longest design challenge that I could think of. If you want a really, really long-term design challenge, you've got this. It's the Voyager golden record, or the Pioneer plaque that came before it.
So Voyager was launched in 1977, it's currently the furthest man-made thing from our planet, and it contains this golden record. On the off-chance that another civilisation were to discover the golden record, the idea is that they would be able to decode the information on it. This is the flip-side of the actual record, which is kind of the primer to explain how to use it.
And here you've got to think, you can't rely on anything. I mean, measurements of time, we use the second, the minute, the hour. How can you have a universal measurement of time? That's why we actually have what's here is supposed to illustrate the hyperfine state of a hydrogen atom, and that's going to be the universal measurement of time.
They've also put a map…this was controversial. Carl Sagan got into some trouble for this. This is a map of pulsars in our galaxy, and there would only be one spot in the galaxy that would exactly that distance from all those pulsars and that would be here on planet Earth.
So a lot of thought gone into trying to explain how to decode this, and basically how to build a record player to play what's on the other side, which is some images and also audio; Beethoven, Chuck Berry; greetings from planet Earth essentially.
Of course, this isn't really for other civilisations. This is for us. This isn't about it being decoded by other civilisations. It's about if you had to decide, what would you put on this record that's got to last for, essentially, all time. And that's actually a thought experiment I'd like you to try. What would you put on this Golden Record; think about it. Could be images and audio, but you've got limited space.
Now what's interesting about the Voyager record—like I said, it was 1977 that the Voyager probes were launched—was that they chose to go with an analogue technology. Because by the late seventies, we did have digital technologies, but still it was a lot simpler to try and encode, "here's how to build a record player," than to try and encode, "Okay, step 1, here's how to build a computer," that it would actually be more complex. So because this was a long-term design challenge, they fell down on the side of analogue. And we don't work in the analogue space generally. We work in an environment that's very much digital. I mean, there's an analogue component to it, which is the internet itself. The internet is the physical network of computers. Technically that's analogue; those are real solid, hardware things, but where we work is the web, and the web isn't analogue. It is very much digital.
I guess we have to kind of define what the web is, because everyone kind of has a different idea of what the web is. For some people, it's a publishing platform; for other people it's an e-commerce platform; it's everything at once. Kevin Kelly called the internet a copying machine, and I guess the web is an extension of that, and that can lead into difficulties. On a technical level I guess what the web is, is you've got resources—usually in HTML but not always—resources, probably in HTML that have a URL, a URI, they're addressable, and they're delivered over HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol. So technically that's the web. HTML + URLs + HTTP.
But the definition of the web that I really like comes from David Weinberger, when he calls it 'small pieces loosely joined'. It's ephemeral but it gets to the heart of what the web really is. Small pieces loosely joined.
And when it comes to the stuff we put out there on the web, there's this common perception that it's written in stone. That once something is on the web, that's it. It's going to stay on the web. It's one of these truisms, like the internet never forgets. Google never forgets. We nod our heads and go, yeah it's true, just like Eskimos have fifty words for snow and people at the time of Columbus thought that the earth was flat, right? These things sound intuitive. They're all utterly false. They're all completely untrue, but they make logical intuitive sense to us, and that's the danger.
Because it seems to make intuitive sense to us to believe that the internet never forgets, then we neglect what we put there. And, you know, Josh was talking earlier about how his kids are going to have a record of their whole life because right now, there's pictures being taken, they're being put on the web. I really hope that's true. I really do, but I don't think it will necessarily be true unless you take active steps to make it so.
So when people put stuff on the web and they assume the internet never forgets, I don't believe that. Citation needed, right? Where's the data to support this, because if you look at the data, if you look at something that was put online ten years ago, the chances are it's not still online today. Why do we think that's going to change?
There's whole books written about this Viktor Mayer-Schönberger wrote one called Delete which is about the power of forgetting, how we've got to be careful because the internet never forgets, so we've really got to be careful to delete stuff. But no, actually, you don't have to worry about it. The default state of stuff on the web is to die, to be deleted. It is castles in the sand, what we're putting up there, and for us to believe that it's carved in stone is very dangerous, if we have that expectation that—oh, it'll be around forever, it's on the web.
Tim Berners-Lee, in 1999 he wrote, 'Cool URIs don't change', the idea that you've actually got to work on keeping something at a resource. What I really like about that—the document about this (just Google 'Cool URIs don't change', you'll find this document on the W3C site by Tim Berners-Lee)—was he was actually thinking quite long term, because he used that word "cool", he has a little footnote to explain that, historical note:
At the end of the twentieth century when this was written, cool was an epithet of approval, particularly among young, indicating trendiness, quality or appropriateness.
I like that. I like that sort of long-term thinking.
So as much as I'd like to believe that the internet never forgets, the data would suggest otherwise. With each passing year, the chance of a URL staying alive decreases dramatically. So I put my money where my mouth is.
One of the other projects by The Long Now Foundation is a site of long bets. You can find it at longbets.org. What you can do is you can submit a prediction. You pay money to submit this stuff. It's not like you can just predict something. Now you put your money where your mouth is. I think it was fifty dollars for the original prediction, and then if someone takes it up with you, you decide on an amount, over 200 dollars I believe, and nominate a charity that will win all that money if you win, and the other person nominates a charity that will win if they win.
My prediction was that the URL for this prediction would not be available in eleven years.
So longbets.org, there's a site that you'd think should be taking good care of their URLs, and that is the URL, that's the one, www.longbets.org/601. I have until 22 February 2022. I made this prediction back in February, I just liked the alliteration of the date, that's why I chose that particular date, that's eleven years from the original date of prediction.
Interestingly, even since I made that prediction, the site has been undergoing some changes. It think they've been switching over to Django or something, and after www now actually will re-direct you to longbets.org/601, but I'm ok with a 301 redirect. I will acknowledge that that is allowed.
But if anyone wants to take me up on this bet and put their money where their mouth is, you're free to do so at that URL, you have to sign up for longbets. I would love to be proved wrong. I really hope that I'm going to lose this bet, and that in eleven years, that URL will still be available. Or the content will be available at a redirect. But the data does not support that hope.
This is a diagram that was put together quite a few years ago now. This was in 2006 at the height of the whole web 2.0 craze. We're all using the network effects and making lots of rounded cornered logos, candy coloured stuff. I think the purpose of pulling together all these logos was to demonstrate, "wow, aren't we all using the same colour palettes, aren't we being kind of unimaginative with our designs, with all this friendly-trendy design, web 2.0 stuff."
But not too long after this, Meg Pickard in the UK revisited it. Actually I'm not sure how long after the original one this was, but she just noted down all of the companies that had been bought out by a larger company in the meantime, and there were quite a few.
She also noted all the companies that were gone. All the ones that had just disappeared from the web. And remember, these are the web 2.0 sites they're asking you to upload your data, upload your information, your content, your dreams, your hopes, your photos, your images, your videos.
Josh mentioned the stats for Facebook, for Twitter, for Tumblr. What was it, 125 million photos a day, more? I mean it's wonderful that people are publishing on the web, but you are entrusting your hopes, your dreams, to a third party. I think that could be dangerous, as we've seen. Nobody's too big to fail on the web. Friendster was really big one time, and it's hard to imagine a world without Facebook, but it could easily happen.
Connor O'Brien wrote an article called Linkrot and he summed it up nicely when he said:
If your only photo album is on Facebook, ask yourself, since when did a gratis web service ever demonstrate giving a flying fuck about holding onto the past?
Case in point.
There was a time when it was inconceivable to imagine the web without Geocities. Oh but Geocities, it was so ugly, right? We're not going to miss that. We want to preserve the good stuff, not that ugly, ugly, under construction stuff on Geocities, right? Wrong.
I think it was such a crime. I really mean that. A crime Yahoo committed in shutting down Geocities.
Phil Gyford summed it up nicely. The reason why this will be so sorely missed—and apart from the fact of the size of the thing—there was so much, so many hopes and dreams on Geocities. He summed it up at the time when it was yanked off the web by Yahoo. He said:
Geocities is an awful, ugly, decrepit mess, and this is why it will be sorely missed. Geocities shows what normal, non-designer people will create if given the tools available around the turn of the Millennium. As companies like Yahoo! switch off swathes of our on-line universe, little fragments of our collective history disappear. They might be ugly and neglected fragments of our history, but they still got us where we are today.
Literally destroying our history. Ugly and neglected fragments of our history, but that's our history. Yahoo destroyed it.
And also the apologists, whenever something like this happens—because the BBC have been talking about pulling some of their stuff off the web as well—and there are two different arguments that are mutually incompatible about why this stuff might need to get pulled off the web:
- Well, nobody's visiting it, so nobody's going to miss it so we might as well pull it off the web.
- That the bandwidth costs of keeping this stuff up and all these people visiting it…
So …which is it? Either slap some ads on it and make use of that traffic, or if there's not many people looking at it, what's the harm keeping it up?
Anyway, the person who summed it up best I think is Jason Scott. He got together the Archive Team. They managed to safe a fair proportion of Geocities. Not the URLs obviously, and believe me there's a whole bunch of links on Wikipedia suddenly went dead the day that Geocities died, but he put it nicely, he gave us the historical perspective. He said:
When history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say. Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the internet, built a hugged fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.
And I'm not just talking about the big things like this. And let's face it; it's only a matter of time before MySpace goes the way of Geocities. And you might think, "well yeah, who's going to miss MySpace?" Think about the amount of creativity that's poured in. Maybe not by us professional designers. By the ordinary, everyday people. That's history.
I've been bitten by this. Anybody remember the site Pownce? A few, a few. It was a lovely site. I really liked Pownce. And I poured a lot of myself into it. It was really beautifully designed. Daniel Burka was the designer at Pownce. A really well put together site, and it's gone now. In this case it wasn't wilful destruction, but Pownce got bought up by a larger company. Pownce was basically just two or three people, they did a fantastic job, and they were bought up by Six Apart, you know, the people who do Movable Type. And Six Apart shut down Pownce after they bought it up. But it's okay, everyone who did have a Pownce account, you can have a free Vox account, right? And I think it was six months later, Vox was shut down. Taking seven million URLs off the web.
At this stage I'd kind of learned my lesson, but I also have had services go down. I used to use Magnolia for my bookmarking. That was a different case again; that was technical error that everything just got wiped out. I did manage to recover my bookmarks. So you know, they're on Delicious, they're perfectly safe, right?
After the whole sun-setting slide debacle, I decide alright, this is it. I can't keep entrusting stuff to these third party services, no matter how big they seem, too big to fail. I cannot rely on them for anything I really value. Well what's the solution?
Well in the case of my links, because that's a fairly easy thing to handle, I now host my own links, my own sort of bookmarking service. But what I do is, I also ping Delicious. Every time I link to something through my own little hand-rolled CMS, from my own website, I also fire off a post to Delicious, so Delicious is still where you can find my links, but Delicious doesn't hold the canonical copy. And this is something I think you need to bear in mind if you try to go down the route of self-hosting, which I think is the way we should be going, but we still want to get the benefits of those big services. We want to get the tool benefits, we want to get the network effects, the social benefits.
So a model that works well seems to be publish on your own URL on your own website, and syndicate out to third party services. So I'm not suggesting that the solution to all of this is that you've got to hold onto your own stuff, hold onto your data at your own URL, your own little island, but no, that you publish in your own place and allow many copies to be circulated around the web. And some people are doing this. It's something that Steven Pemberton's been talking about. Tantek Çelik is doing it for his tweets. He tweets from his own website. He tweets from tantek.com, there's a copy of that stored on Twitter, but the canonical copy is on his own site.
And the problem is that this is still too geeky, right? I can do this maybe, and again only for the simple cases like links. What am I going to do about my pictures? That's a lot harder. Video, really hard. The tools for self-hosting are still way too hard and way too geeky. But that's an area of challenge for us, I think. I think it's a design challenge.
Also, this idea that yes, I will let the third party services have my data but I want to hold onto the original copy. Well it turns out some of the third party services are not so keen on that. Just last night, I don't do it very often, but I logged into Facebook, and I never publish anything original on Facebook. I allow Facebook to get, you know, my pictures from Flickr. I allow Facebook to get my blog posts posted to my wall in Facebook, but when I logged in last night, I was greeted with this message:
You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available, although you'll still be able to write individual notes. The best way to share content from your website is to post links on your wall.
Talk about not meeting you half-way.
And there's another problem with self-hosting. So do you have your own URL, your own place on the web and that's where you post a canonical copy. You don't actually have your own URL. You don't buy a URL or domain name. You rent it. And it's certainly not long-term thinking if you think about the length of time you rent domain names for. A year, two years maybe? Five years, ten years? That's not that long when you're talking about your family's memories.
It's really interesting. If you look at the domain name system. Everything else that's good about the web is decentralised. And there's this one point of centralisation that's with ICANN. Now I'm not suggesting that ICANN should go and I'm not proposing an alternative. I'm just pointing it out, that one of the great things about the web as a network, as a platform, is that it doesn't have centralisation. It has large hubs, but it doesn't have centralisation, and this is one example where you do have centralisation. Maybe we should go back to just using IP numbers, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how important domain names are. With the rise of Google maybe you just need to search for stuff.
So even assuming we can store stuff on our domain and we have taken steps to make sure that domain lasts a long time, there's still the question of the formats. The formats that you're storing stuff today, how do you know that that format will be readable in the future?
A case in point, and this is more about the medium than the format. This is the Domesday Book. Commissioned by William the Conqueror after 1066. Essentially, a census of the UK, and it still exists today in the British Library in London. The format is an older version of English, but recognisably English. The medium is vellum, and it's surprisingly durable.
Well, coming up to the 1000th anniversary of the Domesday Book, the BBC commissioned The Domesday Project to create a digital version of the Domesday Book, and the medium in this case was the laserdisc. It was actually a customised special form of the laserdisc, so it was even more niche. What they were trying to do was fantastic, to get this into schools and allow people access to information, but the problem of formats and media really raised its head.
Another long-term format is stone. Stone lasts a long time. Depends on the stone, but here's an example of a long-lasting medium, but a format that didn't last that long. One of the formats on the Rosetta Stone, which you can see in the British Museum, is Egyptian hieroglyphics. And by the time of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone—the Rosetta Stone dates back to maybe 196 BC or so: it was rediscovered in 1799 by French troops—and Egyptian hieroglyphics at this point are completely unreadable. The ability to decode that format was lost. Luckily, there were two other formats on the stone medium, and that was Ancient Greek and Demotic script and that allowed the code to be cracked. Champollion was able to crack the code of hieroglyphics because there was a longer lasting format, two redundant longer lasting formats encoded along with it.
So the issue of formats is a tricky one. I want to skip ahead rather than behind and read to you from a work of science fiction. This is from Glasshouse by Charles Stross. It's set a couple of hundred years from now in a post-singularity society, and someone is looking back at our time and describing it to people:
For reasons of commercial advantage, some of their largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quantities of useful material in them, so that when new architectures replace old, the data became inaccessible. This partially affected our records of personal and household activities during the latter half of the Dark Age. Early on, for example, we have a lot of film data captured by amateurs and home enthusiasts. They used a thing called a cine camera, which captured images on a photo chemical medium. You could actually decode it with your eyeball. But a third of the way into the Dark Age, they switched to using magnetic storage tape which degrades rapidly, then to digital storage, which was even worse, because for no obvious reason, they encrypted everything. The same sort of thing happened to their audio recordings and to text. Ironically, we know a lot more about the culture around the beginning of the Dark Age around old-style year 1950 than about the end of the Dark Age around 2040.
So when you're thinking about the formats, a couple of little guidelines. First of all, text is good. In terms of longevity. Plain text is obviously the simplest kind, and then we get progressively more complex after that. HTML kind of strikes a nice balance but it's basically a text format. It's good for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's human readable. We can decode the actual source of a text file with our eyeballs, and that's useful. Also, it accepts lossiness. If you were to lose chunks of the text file, you could still make sense of the rest of it, or at least the words that were left, the atomic units.
If you contrast that to binary formats, images and video, more complex things, it gets a lot harder. When we look at the source code of an image or a video, it's very hard to decode, and once you lose part of that file, it may not be recoverable. You may not be able to get any idea of what the rest was, so these binary formats make a lot of sense to machines, but less sense to humans.
So it'll be interesting to know which of the formats we're using today are likely to last longer. You think about it, every time you put something online, what format is it in? If it's an image, what image format? Is it jpeg, png? Video, what video format?
And there is an ongoing experiment to figure out sort of the longevity of some formats. There's a group called PLANETS, Preservation and Longterm Access to Network Services, and the Open Planets Foundation started a project on 18 May 2010 to put a number of formats and a number of media into a vault, essentially, in Swiss Fort Knox. I don't mean something like Fort Knox in Switzerland. This place is called Swiss Fort Knox, and this is it. This is real. This is for data storage and back-ups. It's awesome. It's like a James Bond villain layer. You can land your helicopter there. This is where I want to store my stuff!
So this is near Galen in Switzerland, and I think there's a twenty year experiment to keep this stuff in there. So here's what they're storing. They've got the following media:
- Paper,
- microfilm,
- floppy disc,
- audio tape,
- USB and
- BluRay.
And then the formats stored on each one of those are:
- .mov,
- .jpeg,
- .pdf,
- Java and
I know which one I would bet on in twenty years' time, and that would be the HTML. Obviously I'm a bit of a fanboy for HTML as you may have guessed. But it's not a by-product of HTML that is going to last a long time. That's actually a design decision of HTML that it's going to last a long time.
I'm going to show my age. Anybody remember a website by Owen Briggs called The Noodle Incident? All right, a few. He was awesome. Here's a blog post from 2001, where he's talking about the importance of standards and more specifically HTML. Essentially about validating your HTML and not using proprietary stuff. He said:
The code has to expand its capabilities as we do, yet never in a way that blocks out earlier documents. Everything we put down now will continue to be readable as long as it was recorded using mark-up valid at its time. This is an attempt to make a code that can go decades and centuries, getting broader in scope without ever shutting out its early versions.
That's a beautiful summation of the design principles behind HTML that's currently being carried on with HTML5. We get very caught up with the shininess of the new stuff, but a lot of it is about backwards compatibility. Ian Hickson, the editor of the HTML spec has said this right up-front. In 2007 he said:
I decided for the sake of future generations we should document exactly how to process today's documents so that when they look back they can still re-implement HTML browsers and get our data back.
Mark Pilgrim, before he decided to take every single thing he ever put on the internet offline, two years ago wrote:
I am supremely confident that the HTML I'm writing today will still be readable ten years from now.
If only he had decided to keep the URL intact.
There's an issue, if you've been thinking about what you might put on your Voyager record and you might decide, well I'm going to store an HTML because that seems a good, durable format, on my own domain, I'm not going to trust a third party server. There's still the issue of rights.
This is a fairly recent addition to human endeavour, this whole idea …first of all there's this nonsensical idea of Intellectual Property, which has no legal meaning but is used a lot. But just licensing in general. And as I said before, the internet is a copying machine. You want to make lots of copies of stuff to make use of that, but then we restrict how you can copy stuff by imposing licensing upon it, which seems a strange thing to do. Particularly we have this issue of copyright.
We act like copyright is this immovable thing that's always been there and it's carved in stone. Copyright's always been changing. There was no copyright until 1709, the Statute of Anne, and then it was fourteen years after the creation of a work, which seemed like a decent amount of time to make your money and then put it into the public domain. We got later Acts, in the US there was, the original US Copyright Act was 1719 and it was 1909. 1976 it got increased to lifetime of the author plus fifty years, and then in 1998, it was increased to the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. This was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, also called the Mickey Mouse Prevention Act, because that would've been the year that would've been fifty years since the death of Walt Disney, and Mickey Mouse would've passed into public domain. There was a lot of lobbying to stop that happening so it became seventy years, and then after that, once it gets to seventy years since the death of Walt Disney, it'll be ninety years, a hundred years. Essentially what we have now is copyright in perpetuity.
Again, I'm going to read from Charles Stross. This is from a different work called Accelerando. The whole text of Accelerando is available online if you want to read it. This is more talking about a much nearer future to today, very near future from where we are now.
The International Convention on Performing Rights was holding a third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered emotional states associated with specific media performances. As a demonstration that they mean business, two software engineers in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse engineering movie plotlines using avatars of dead and out of copyright stars. On the opposite side of the fence the Association of Free Artists are demanding the right of performing music in public without a recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of the mafia apparatchiks' who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kubayeshev(?) responds by denying that the Mafia's a significant presence in the United States but the music business position isn't strengthened by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment industry, which has been accelerating ever since the Nasty Noughties.
The worst example of licensing and formats coming together is what's so euphemistically known as DRM, Digital Rights Management. This is where you literally encode the licensing restrictions into the format, thereby ensuring that this data cannot survive, that it will not have a long life. If you subscribe to a third party service that used some form of DRM and that third party service is gone, there's no way to access your data, so if you were a customer of Virgin Digital's music service, or MSN Music, you cannot get at any of that data. Virgin Digital shut down in 2007, MSN Music in 2008. They were all using DRM. None of that data is accessible now. And it seems like such a losing battle.
Bruce Schneier, the security expert, he put it best, he said:
Trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
Go with the flow of the web. Let your content out there. Let people make copies and they will return to you 100-fold.
There's a beautiful story about a different third party service. There's a site called …originally called Ficlets. Anybody remember Ficlets? OK, not many. It was a lovely service where you'd write a story of 100 words and then somebody else could kind of fork it and write the next 100 words, where somebody else could do it. Like GitHub for fiction, it was really lovely. And a bunch of people who were working at AOL at the time did this kind of as a side project and it was hosted by AOL, it was on AOL Services, and AOL being AOL of course decided to shut it down after a while because they're, if anything, even worse than Yahoo when it comes to shutting down this sort of stuff.
But here's the great thing. When these people set up Ficlets, one of the things you did when you were signing up was you agreed to license your stories, your content, under a Creative Commons Licence, Creative Commons Attribution Licence, so when AOL said to them, "we're shutting down the service," they said, "that's absolutely fine, we're taking all the data with us." And they could do that, and now you can go to Ficly.com and carry on publishing those stories.
So let me pause and just wrap up what I've gone through.
First thing. First thing is acknowledging the existence of the problem and questioning that the internet never forgets, because the data would seem to suggest otherwise. We all have lots of stories about people who've been bitten on the ass by it. Oh they published something on Facebook or this photo went online and then they lost their job, but check out the timeline; it's very rarely they published a photo ten years ago and that cost them their job. It's usually much shorter than that. Also, the plural of anecdote is not data. So, acknowledging the problem.
Then there's the issue of hosting. Are you going to trust your hopes and dreams, your memories to a third party service? You'd better have a pretty good reason for doing that. You can try self-hosting. The problem is that's still kind of geeky, so that's a problematic area.
Then there's the formats you decide to store your information and your memories in. I recommend standards because they last longer. Steer clear of proprietary formats. Stay close to standards, in particular I like HTML.
And then there's licensing. I think it makes sense to license liberally rather than restrictively so that multiple copies can legally be made of your hopes and dreams and data. There's this term from the Stanford Digital Preservation School where they call LOCKSS. Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. I like that.
So then it's just a matter of thinking, well what would I store for future generations? Suppose I am going to think long term and the legacy. What would you put on that Voyager record?
And we have some records from previous civilisations essentially. This is from the fresco in Pompeii. Pompeii was utterly destroyed in the year 79 AD, rediscovered in 1599, and all of this stuff was intact. There's a lot of porn! There's a lot of porn in Pompeii, and I don't think we should try to deny all sides of our nature. So you might think, "well I'm going to put the best thing I've ever done online. I'm going to edit myself, only put the good stuff online." Think about putting the failed things, the crappy things online. What Phil Gyford referred to Geocities as: "awful, ugly, decrepit mess." Keep that stuff.
There's a similar example of this idea of do we censor history if it's not high art? This was at the end of World War 2, the Russians had reached Berlin and they're at the Reichstag and they were scrawling graffiti on the walls of the Reichstag. It's pretty filthy stuff, this graffiti, it's got to be said, but it's historically really important. And after Unification, they decided would they scrub the walls when they were moving back into the Reichstag, and I think they made the right decision to keep this stuff, to keep it as a historical document.
Of course, forty years later, it was a different wall that was being torn down.
And I think it's important to remember it's not about the high art. It's often about the everyday people, and remembering what everyday people did. We've got beautiful illuminated manuscripts, they've survived hundreds of years, and there's the actual content, sure, usually the Gospels, religious material that's in there. But there's also the marginalia that the Monks themselves wrote in there. Little updates on their life, usually in in 140 characters or fewer. One wrote:
My hand is weary with writing, my sharp quill is not steady. My slender beaked pen just forth a black draught of shining dark blue.
Another one wrote:
Pleasant is the glint of the sun today upon these margins because it flickers so.
I love that. It's kind of like what Patrick Kavanagh the poet wrote about as 'wallowing in the habitual, the banal.' He had that beautiful phrase, 'wherever life pours forth ordinary plenty.' Ordinary plenty. That's what we should be preserving.
And it can be easy to just throw up our hands and say, I don't know. This seems too hard, it's too big a challenge. My friend Dan, he wrote this on Twitter, he said:
Reality? Very little on the web will be permanent. Embrace that.
I fully agree with the first statement. Very little on the web will be permanent, but I utterly reject, I rage, rage against the dying of the night that we embrace that.
My other friend Mandy Brown put it nicely when she said:
No civilisation has ever saved everything. Acknowledging that fact does not obviate the need to try and save as much as we can. The technological means to produce an archive are not beyond our skills. Sadly, right now at least, the will to do so is insufficient.
I think that's really important to remember. I don't think this is a technological problem. Maybe there's legal issues, there's cultural issues. Some technological issues around formats and storage, but ultimately it's about our will and our decision that we want to preserve this stuff.
Wilson put it really nicely earlier when he quoted John Ruskin:
When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
And I really think this is an important thing, and this isn't just something from the tippy-top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I think this is important for our race, for our culture. We don't want this to become a digital Dark Age. I think the internet is important as a real-time medium, and equally important as a storage medium. It allows us to tell each other things faster, which is hugely important for a civilisation, and if we can also reach back into time on the web, that would be magnificent.
I want to thank these people for being kind enough to share their photos under a liberal Creative Commons Licence. This is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Licence, and I want to thank you for listening. Thank you very much.
This presentation is licenced under a Creative Commons attribution licence. You are free to:
- Share
- Copy, distribute and transmit this presentation.
- Remix
- Adapt the presentation.
Under the following conditions:
- Attribution
- You must attribute the presentation to Jeremy Keith.


text:
(Archived September 15, 1999)
New York Times, CyberTimes (registration required)
Point-and-Click Medicine: A Hazard to Your Health, August 31, 1999. An estimated 25 million Americans are turning to the Web for a range of information on medical issues, from the simple to the complex. However, the advise and information is often nothing more than fiction. The article steers you to seven reliable sites.
Following the Money, Through the Web, August 26, 1999. Donations to political campaigns were once hard to track, but now records of your gifts, no matter how small, are readily available for all to scrutinize on the Web.
Ford Loses Bid to Keep Documents Off Internet September 8, 1999. The issues of the first amendment and cyberspace rights played a prominent role in a recent federal court ruling in favor of a college student who has been posting internal corporate documents on his Web site. (see also Ford Plays Chicken with Web Site, August 25, 1999.)
Electronic Book Sales are Slow, August 29, 1999. Slow sales for the Rocket eBook and SoftBook have also meant few titles available to use in this format. Better think about a new idea for a holiday gift!
Ford Plays Chicken with Web Site, August 25, 1999. A college student and Ford Motor Co. are locked in a legal battle over the posting of internal corporate documents, which is being couched as a first amendment issue by the defendant.
Independent booksellers band together, August 20, 1999. Small bookstores across the nation are closing at alarming rates. In an effort to stem the tide, the American Booksellers Association is helping get these stores wired and selling in time for the holidays.
First person convicted of Internet piracy, August 20, 1999. A college student is punished for flagrant copyright violations under the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997.
Has Microsoft won a battle or the war?, August 20, 1999. Internet Explorer now commands a 51% share of the browser market, as Netscape has fallen hard and fast to its rivals 'superior' marketing and promotion.
Some Light Through the Portal, August 19,1999. The word 'portal' is actually used to describe a number of differently designed access points to a wide range of related resources on the Web.
Argentina Pushes Internet Digital Signature Law, August 19, 1999. Argentina is poised to become the first Latin American country to pass a "digital firm law" allowing documents signed online legal status.
More on "deep links" journalists and IPOs, August 18, 1999. This article follows-up on the controversy as reflected in the recent law suit by TicketMaster to prevent a competitor from deep linking to its site (*see TicketMaster Sues Again Over Links, August 10, 1999.)
E-Books Open Up, August 18, 1999. The proprietary approach has been dropped in favor of an open standard to insure that electronic books can be accessed through a wide variety of platforms.
Protect Your PC and Your Privacy, August 9, 1999. Reviews of five types of products that will assist you in attaining better security on the Web. Topics covered include security suites, secure e-mail, spam filters,
You Gotta Serve Somebody, August 15, 1999. A grad student at U. Mass has created the world's smallest Web server, measuring only 1/4 inch!
New York Times, CyberTimes (registration required)
Defunct Keys and Odd Commands Still Bedevil Today's PC User, August 12, 1999. We are stuck using keyboards caught in a 15 year old time warp, but our computer applications have continually outpaced their limits.
Forget a Password? Try 'Way2Many', August 5, 1999. Too many passwords for too many systems, from servers to free subscriptions to the New York Times online, have users frustrated and down right stressed out!
TicketMaster Sues Again Over Links, August 10, 1999. "Deep linking" has once again created an adversarial situation, this time between rival ticket sellers TicketMaster and Tickets.com.
Digital Stamps Get Postal Service OK, August 9, 1999. No more long lunch-time forays to the Post Office to buy stamps. Now you can do so from the comfort of your own home. Will the wonders of technology never cease!
Digital Signatures for the Palm, August 9, 1999. E-business will take a step forward in September as a new, free e-signature application becomes available for the Palm.
Study: Cybercrimes Cases Up 43 Percent, August 5, 1999. Only a small percentage of federal computer crimes are being prosecuted, despite the steep increase.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Have you noticed that there has been an absolute explosion in the number of people developing chronic illnesses, heart disease, diabetes and cancer? If you are like most Americans, you probably have quite a few family members and friends that are seriously ill right now. Sadly, most Americans have absolutely no idea why this is happening. Most of them just assume that all of this sickness is just "normal". But that is not the case at all. The truth is that we are slowly killing ourselves by what we eat, by what we drink and by what we allow to be injected into our bodies. The vast majority of people out there have never even heard about the dangers posed by aspartame, fluoride, genetically-modified food, pesticides, high fructose corn syrup, pharmaceutical drugs, cell phones and toxic vaccines. Most of them have no idea that our food is toxic, our water is toxic and our vaccines are toxic. Right now, it is estimated that approximately 70,000 chemicals are being used for commercial purposes, and as a result of our "modern lifestyles" we are literally being endlessly bombarded with toxins. This has resulted in a massive tsunami of death, disease and chronic illness in America. But very few people actually understand what is being done to all of us. The following are just a few of the ways that the "soft killing" of the American people is taking place… (Read More...)


text:
Ultra-feminine shades dominated the SEWTAers' apparel during this Australian summer, and Tatiana Golovin is no different. She pulls out a 6-1, 4-6, 6-3 win over compatriot Stephanie Cohen Aloro wearing Lacoste in solid fuschia. Sadly for France, Tati faces Aravane Rezai (another Frenchwoman) in the second round.
Not too pink: Golovin tempers the ensemble with a black sports bra and wristband. She played the Hopman Cup in the same style but different colors.
What do you think of the look? Tell us!
>> TSF's aussie open coverage continues…


text:
Breitbart: Gabby Giffords, Mark Kelly Endorse Gavin Newsom as Gun Control's 'Greatest Leader'
On Friday Gabby Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, endorsed Gavin Newsom as the "greatest leader" on gun control today.
Newsmax: Armed Deterrence Will Stop Mass Shootings
The next mass shooting or terrorist attack is always just around the corner. With that in mind, I will state some facts about the next horrible occurrence that shouldn't be surprising to anyone. These same facts are reported after every shooting event, but that repetition is somehow not recognized or acknowledged by the media, the anti-gun crowd, or politicians scrambling and vying for the spotlight.
Washington Free Beacon: Journalist Says He Plans to Carry After Being Robbed
A columnist told the Washington Free Beacon on Friday he planned to purchase a gun and obtain a Washington, D.C., gun-carry permit in the wake of being robbed.
Iowa Public Radio: Gun Rights Amendment to Iowa Constitution Clears First Hurdle
Advocates for and against gun rights spoke out at the Capitol today on a proposed amendment to the Iowa constitution. The amendment states that Iowans' rights to acquire, keep, possess, transport, carry, transfer, and use arms for all legitimate purposes shall not be infringed, and that courts should strictly scrutinize any attempt to regulate them.
Fox News: Vegas Still Thinks Gun Rights Are Fundamental to America
This week anyone who is anyone in the gun business is in Las Vegas for the Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show. More than 60,000 people are gathered from all over America and the world. Attendees are crowding inside the Sands Expo Center, right on the Vegas Strip, to make their way down more than 12.5 miles of aisles built like little city blocks, all with gun stores filling them corner to corner in this annual show.
The Daily Caller: CA Gun Maker Says Goodbye To The West Coast And Hello To Wyoming At Shot Show
Gun manufacturer Weatherby announced at Shot Show Tuesday the company planned to leave its longtime California headquarters and move to Sheridan, Wyoming in 2019. "This is a really exciting day for us. About three years ago after being in California for 75 years, we began a search amongst a number of Western states to find a new home for Weatherby," CEO Adam Weatherby told media and employees on the floor of the firearms trade show.
FPC Says ATF 'Bump Stock' Regulation Proposal is "Illegal"
"The DOJ and BATFE clearly lack the statutory authority to re-define the targeted devices as 'machineguns.'" But the gun rights group said that, if the government does re-classify so-called "bump stocks" and other devices to be "machineguns" under federal law, they would file a federal lawsuit that "would provide an excellent vehicle for the Supreme Court to re-visit and eliminate the made-up judicial construct of agency deference"—something many Supreme Court justices have signaled as an issue they may revisit soon.
Washington Post: Virginia Senate Passes Bill to Allow Guns in Places of Worship
The Republican-controlled Virginia Senate voted Tuesday to repeal an old law banning guns — as well as bowie knives, daggers and other weapons — from places of worship. Sen. A. Benton Chafin Jr. (R-Russell) said the "archaic law," thought to date to Colonial times, treads on the private-property rights of churches. He also said it threatens the safety of worshipers, noting the massacre of 26 people at a Texas church in November.
King 5 News: Gun Control Bills Heard in Washington Legislature
Hundreds of people crowded in Olympia on Monday, gathering in the Senate building for the legislative hearing on several gun safety bills.
Washington Post: Hundreds Apply to Carry Loaded, Concealed Handguns in D.C.
More than 700 people have asked the D.C. police for licenses to carry loaded concealed handguns when they dine, shop and walk the streets of the nation's capital. The loosening of the law marks a cultural shift in a city where most residents could not legally keep handguns in their homes until a landmark Supreme Court decision a decade ago.
Breitbart: Democrats Advance with State Gun Control
Democrats seized the moment for state-level gun control after the NRA retreated from the fight over new bump stock regulations.
Breitbart: Chris Christie Gives NJ Residents 90 Days to Surrender Bump Stocks in Final Act as Governor
Chris Christie (R) gave New Jersey residents 90 days to surrender bump stocks – or else – in one of his final acts as Governor of the state.
LA Times: Law Aims to Change California's Armed Prohibited Persons System
In response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut five years ago, outraged California lawmakers launched a crackdown within months of the tragedy that has seized 18,000 firearms, including assault rifles, from thousands of people convicted of felonies, subject to domestic violence restraining orders or judged by the courts to be severely mentally ill.
Government Bureaucrats Mock CA Gun Owners
These anti-gun bureaucrats have released a web of vague and complicated rules that could potentially put you under criminal liability and they're now mocking California gun owners with a countdown clock???
New York Daily News: Gun Control Advocates Push for "Extreme Risk Protection" Law
A coalition of influential gun control advocates joined forces Wednesday to call for legislation that would make it easier to keep guns away from dangerous individuals.
Coast News: California Ammunition Laws Sow Uncertainty
A slew of new regulations have gun stores and enthusiasts concerned about the availability of ammunition.
GOP Gun Control Bill Gaining Support
You really get to learn about a politician's values when they term out or decide to retire. Then, under no threat from the voters, they finally feel free to just be themselves and do what they want.
Sequim Gazette: Five Firearm Bills Go Before WA State Lawmakers
Nearly 1,000 people from law enforcement, gun rights groups, gun violence prevention groups, veterans, and Washington State residents signed in to support or oppose contested firearm bills heard on Monday Jan. 15.
Guns.com: New York Renews Drive for Gun Seizure Order Law
An array of gun control groups have allied with New York lawmakers in a push to establish Extreme Risk Protection Orders, forcing subjects to surrender their firearms.
Democrat Who Ran Gun Confiscation Program Named to Senate Judiciary Committee
Senator Kamala Harris of California has just been named to the Senate Judiciary Committee, spelling horrible news for gun owners.
Brace Yourself: "Smart" Guns Are Coming!
As you already know, so-called "smart gun" technology is technology that would personalize each and every firearm to only one individual user.
The Most Important Fight for the Second Amendment
We all know that the court battles over the Second Amendment are often some of the most important fights that we can wage as gun owners and activists. In states such as California, New York, Illinois, and Connecticut, legal challenges are often the only method of recourse for gun owners that have been hammered with laws and regulations by anti-gun Legislatures and Governors.
The Hill: Gun Control Advocates See Opportunities in States
Advocates of stricter restrictions on gun ownership believe they can notch new wins in state legislatures across the country this year, after Republicans in some states signaled they would be willing to break with the National Rifle Association (NRA) to support some new rules.
Guns.com: Delaware Lawmakers Announce 'Beau Biden' Gun Control Act
"This legislation will protect our communities by restricting access to firearms for those who are considered a danger to themselves or others," said Gov. John Carney


text:
University of Miami, January 8 and 9, 1999. The following papers comprise a subset of the talks presented at the symposium. Details about the conference and a list of all the talks presented can be found in the Foreword Message from the proceedings editors.
Table of contents (in alphabetical order).
Note: Bibliographical references to articles in this
proceedings should be written as follows:
Author's name, Title of the article, Proceedings of Nonlinear Differential Equations,University of Miami, Electron. J. Diff. Eqns., Conference 05 (2000), pp. ##-##.


text:
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Joe Duggan is an experienced landscape architect with a strong focus on landscape design (both the softscape and hardscape elements). He is a valued design colleague who brings a breadth of capabilities to each project effort.
Jim Walsh, JW Contracting-Manassas VA
I enjoy a reputation for quality pool installation. Most of my work comes from referrals based on that reputation. I am therefore very protective of my reputation as it is the source of my livelihood. Over the past few years I have been involved with J Duggan Associates, having installed some high end pools/amenities he has designed and referring clients I have who need quality design work.
Joes design sense and creativity really make spaces work, they reflect the site and always seem to fill the clients 'wish list' I have yet to see any of his clients less than completely satisfied with the results. In fact they usually end up friends for the long term.
One the construction management side, I find Joe to be a professional who works well with others. His designs work well and make sense-his graphics and construction documentation are clear and do the job. I especially like the fact that his 3d modeling insures clients understand what they are getting. The 'see' it before it is installed easing their concerns and making the installation process a much enjoyable one.
Joe's strongest asset however is that he doesn't have a 'ego' or is defensive regarding his designs. If I have a concern or know a better way to do things-he wants to hear about it, in fact he encourages such dialogue. Joe respects my expertise and does not dictate-he listens, he considers us all a team with the goal of completing another successful project.
I look forward to working with Joe in the years to come and would not hesitate referring him to my clients, something I take very seriously.
Richard Traczyk, Chairman Warren County Board of Supervisors
Joe was hired by Warren County to provide a landscape design for Route 340/522 corridor. With Joes help we were able to develop an affordable multi- phased plan to improve the aesthetics of the corridor as time and funding allowed. Several years have passed and several phases of the project are complete. As Chairman of the Warren County Board of Supervisors I have received countless compliments from residents and visitors on how the project has made the entrance to the community better, Joe understood the needs of the community and provided a cost effective approach that made the project feasible.
Pixie Ruhlmann
In 2010, my wife and I purchased a beautiful 68 acre farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The farmhouse, originally built in 1817, and then expanded in 1867, was in fairly original condition, and optimally located in the center of the property. It's most significant problem, however, was water. Rain water would shed off the nearby ridge, and pool in front of the house, and then ultimately leak through the hand dug cellar walls and cracks in the cement floor. The sump pump in the basement would run for weeks after a single heavy rain. Our little Garden of Eden was becoming a swamp.
Consequently, we looked to Joe Duggan of J. Duggan & Associates to help structurally, and permanently, solve our water problem. This was our first time working with a landscape architect. Joe recommended and coordinated the hiring of several key professionals to assist with the design of the project, namely a topographer/surveyor and an arborist. The topographer mapped the elevations around the farm house and associated ridge, and determined the various sources of the water pooling in front of the house. The arborist identified which of the seven 150 year old trees that closely ringed the house were still healthy, and which were in failing condition.
With this data, Joe created several drafts of various front patio and stone retaining wall configurations that primarily solved our water problem, but also took advantage of the fabulous views from our front porch. The project plan we ultimately settled on was both simple and elegant, and in perfect keeping with the age of the house and surrounding farm land. The stone patio and stone retaining wall were built on reinforced concrete that had a series of drains embedded within the structure that successfully discharged water away from the house. Having stated that though, the drains are cleverly concealed within the patio and surrounding grounds. The patio is perfect for entertaining while it performs its utilitarian task of keeping water out of the house.
As we were new to the area, Joe also identified a stone mason/general contractor who actually built the patio and retaining walls according to his specifications. During construction, it seemed to us that one set of stone piers looked like they were going to be too high. Joe immediately came out, sat in the front porch chairs that we were sitting in, and agreed that the offending piers could be shortened. In the end, we have been exceptionally pleased with the work and care that Joe put into this project. The front porch/stone patio/stone retaining walls are beautiful, and in keeping with the spirit of our house and farm.
Tom Siragusa - Winchester VA
Highly recommended! JDA was hired to provide landscape design service for a residential project. (backyard transformation plus swimming pool). Joe is very knowledgeable in landscape design; budget-conscious and flexible, and willing to work with the client. He is punctual, easy to communicate with, and has the talent for 'listening'. Successful projects begin with a successful design phase, and Joe has exceeded expectations.
Kay Gunn, Front Royal VA
We recently worked with Joe to develop a rear yard master plan to address challenges and accommodate our specific need to provide a secure space for our young son along and provide access from the driveway and detached garage. The design needed to address all of this in a limited user space due to a large slope facing the house running the length of the rear yard. Joe listened to our concerns and came up with a creative yet practical solution that worked within our budget.
Once the design was completed Joe helped us select a company from his network of contractors that was well suited to the work that needed to be done. He didn't stop there but stayed with us throughout the project, sometimes showing up unannounced to check on progress. In fact when the sod delivery was delayed and a storm approaching, Joe actually helped to lay the sod to insure we beat the rain! We are very happy with the result and the process used. We found Joe to be a good listener and responsive to our needs. I would feel confident recommending Joe as a qualified Landscape Architect to anyone considering an exterior renovation. He can help you from concept to completion.
Mike Garcia
I have worked hard to earn a reputation as a Custom Homebuilder known for my high standards and attention to detail. Part of my success has been making sure the professionals who work on my projects share those standards.
I have worked with and known Joe Duggan going on 20 years using him on a number of projects throughout that time. His quality of design, attention to detail, and ability to listen to my clients and exceed their expectations has always ensured a successful project. The high standards I set are never a problem for Joe -- my reputation is in good hands.
Justin Folds, Vice President North American Land Corporation
Thank you for the superb job you did in designing and installing the Entrance to our Tuscan Ridge Community. It looks terrific and really sets a "World Class Tone." It meant a lot to me when we had problems with the setting of the landscaping boulders and you drove up and directed the crew where to place them allowing us to meet our deadline.
Your efforts enabled us to have a successful grand opening in a down market. We wrote eight deals over the weekend for over 1 million dollars. I would gladly use your services again on any future jobs.
Niki Adhikusuma, PE Senior Engineer/Project Manager Alpha Corporation Winchester, VA
As a civil engineer and project manager I have known and worked with J Duggan for close to 15 years in both my current position and previous one. Joe has worked on a number of my projects and I have done likewise on his. I have found Joe to be a talented Landscape Architect whose expertise is always an asset.
He can think 'outside the box' yet understands the construction process and pays attention to what is responsible design-always keeping the client's wishes in mind He also believes in teamwork and values the expertise of others. In short working with Joe is a true collaboration with the end result being the better by his involvement.
Having traveled with Joe on such projects I can also attest to his easy going nature, long lines at airports or long trips in cars lets you get to know someone! I look forward to many more projects with Joe and would heartily recommend him to anyone needing a Landscape Architect!
T Barnhart
Joe took the time to get to know the site and understand how I wanted to use it. His design addressed everything including the natural site features -- especially the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains -- in short he really took advantage of the situation, using the 'borrowed' landscape to create a space that answers all my needs while affording fantastic views at the same time.
We have since been working together to implement the plan. Joe began the process by taking the time and introducing me to a past client who had a similar project done and is now a good friend of his (which should say something!). I was able to see how certain things worked both in the aesthetic sense and in the practical functions. Once all the details were set, Joe then arranged for items to be bid through his 'selective' list of contractors and craftsmen, which was a great resource being I was new to the area. We worked together throughout the bidding process, reviewing the bids and interviewing the contractors.
Once the team was selected and the construction began, Joe stopped by whenever a new phase was beginning and made it a point to be available to answer questions as they came up. I found his respect for the tradesmen and his willingness to listen and encourage dialogue to be a great asset. He is not afraid to look at things from different perspectives and has throughout the process involved myself and the tradesmen by listening to our ideas and concerns in order to insure the best decisions were made-no matter who made them.
The project is now nearing completion and I am pleased to say has gone exceptionally well. I believe Joe's method of design/construction management really works. He does what he does best and brings in others who are also the best at what they do. I would recommend Joe and his stable of tradesmen without reservation.
Allan Nicholls Construction
I have known J Duggan Associates PC for well over 10 years. I have worked with Joe myself on a number of projects and I have also referred Joe to my Clients. I have found him to be creative, professional, and timely. He is also known for being involved in our community, offering his expertise without being asked. I wouldn't hesitate to use him again or refer him to future clients.
Tony Carter, Board of Supervisors Warren County VA
I have known Joe for twenty years ever since I was on the town council and he was on the Town planning commission. I know that he pays a great amount of detail to his projects, and with the input of his clients, always designs a superb product.
I have had him design an entrance walkway to my former home. And, more recently, he designed a memorial garden for my son, who recently passed away. He understood exactly what my wife and I were looking for and he did an amazing job. He is truly a professional in his craft and I would highly recommend him for any project, large or small.
Susan Carol, APR President, Susan Carol Associates Public Relations, Inc.
Joe envisions what others cannot imagine; his designs delightfully transform outdoor spaces into hubs of many happy returns. In addition to his extraordinary professional talent, he is a 'salt of the earth' kind of guy I would highly recommend.
Tim Machado, AIA Architect/Owner Design Concepts Winchester VA
Joe and I have been collaborating on projects for over 12 years. As an Architect, I realize that a project's relationship to its site is a major factor in its success. Joe is a creative designer whose talent as a Landscape Architect can be a huge asset in making that work. More importantly however is his personal commitment to a project from design through final installation.
One of our early projects together in 2005 was a Lodge / Community Center in Canaan Valley. Joe and I worked closely on the signage, approach, entrance design, and traffic circulation to ensure a pleasant experience from arrival to departure. Since the site was covered with boulders which would have been costly to remove, Joe designed signage and entrance features by placing the boulders in groups and landscaping around them, saving the owner a significant amount of money while not compromising the design. As the date of the opening was approaching, the contractor was having difficulty locating and placing the boulders correctly. Joe dropped what he was doing to be on site. He personally instructed the proper placement of the boulders to ensure that they would complement the rustic nature of that area. The result was an attractive entrance and site that left a lasting impression on the visitors. The owner credits this success in part to Joe's efforts and provided a complimentary letter thanking him for his efforts.
More recently in 2016, Joe and I were part of a team doing consultation work for a Community Center in Prince William County. The team provided a thorough analysis of expansion / renovation options. The project was a success and as always it was an enjoyable experience working with Joe.
I look forward to working with Joe in the future and would recommend him without hesitation to anyone needing the services of a Landscape Architect.
Bill & Reneé, Purcellville VA
JDA designed our pool and outdoor living area. He exceeded our wildest dreams of creating a unique space where friends and family love to gather throughout the year. It also serves as a beautiful retreat for unwinding with a good book.
Cornerstone Construction, Front Royal VA
We at Cornerstone Construction have worked closely with J. Duggan & Associates for several clients over the past couple years. The projects we collaborated on have varied greatly in price, yet Joe Duggan has given each detailed attention. He is creative and very professional to work with and we look forward to many more years of teamwork.
Mike Damron, PE Vice President and GM National Capital Region Operations at Alpha Corporation - Al
Alpha Corporation is a national civil and structural engineering firm that works throughout the United States and beyond for both Government and Private Clients. At times our work is demanding, having to meet strict design criteria and done according to a tight time table. We take pride in having a reputation for meeting such commitments and believe our growth is based on that.
I first utilized Joe Duggan in 2010 when the need for a Landscape Architect was required for such a project. Not having worked with Landscape Architects before-I was a bit apprehensive, but pleasantly surprised with Joe's skill, professionalism and more important his ability to work as part of our team.
Joe has since worked with Alpha Corporation on a number of projects including work including a Roof Garden Design for Nimitz Library at the Annapolis Naval Academy and Numerous projects for the US Veterans Administration throughout the United States to name just a few.
His grass roots design/build experience has been a huge asset- he knows more than simple design theory and knows what it takes for a project to be built. He has a real knack for keeping things in line regarding complexity and budget issues.
Joe is well liked, and more importantly respected by our staff-in short he knows his field and is professional in getting things done. He is also not hesitant to go the extra mile, traveling on short notice or working late through the night or weekend. He makes our collaboration easy, working with all involved as needed in an easy going manner. In short he gets it done, making our projects that much better for having used him.
I would also note that J Duggan Associates PC's low overhead due to office location and staff size makes them attractive to a firm like Alpha. I believe we have always done well financially when using Joe's services.
I look forward to continued collaboration with Joe and would not hesitate to recommend him to other professionals needing a Landscape Architect.
Newlook Kitchen & Bath
I have worked hard to earn a reputation as a Custom Homebuilder known for my high standards and attention to detail. I have referred J Duggan and Associates PC to a number of my clients over the years with great results. They tell me Joe really listens and responds with great design solutions.
I will continue to refer Joe knowing that my clients will be in good hands with him.
Jeff Gable, President, Hunt Country Pools, Middleburg VA
I have been involved over the past few years with J Duggan Associates providing the installation of Pools he has designed as part of overall Master plans. I find his designs creative-yet feasible, and more important-responsible. Joe seems to understand that a successful project is not about him, but the client. His understanding of the construction process is a big asset-he knows what can be done, what costs are involved and to be short, what is the highest and best use of the clients resources (finances). Joe also knows he doesn't know it all and is quick to listen when I have a concern or ask questions when he needs to.
Don't misunderstand me-Joe knows his 'stuff' having been in the business as long as I have -30 years or more- he also knows however he can't necessarily be an expert in everything –experience has probably taught him that ! The projects Joe designs and I help to implement can be are complex, no one person is going to have all the best answers-teamwork is the answer and Joe knows this better than most. If you are looking for a Landscape Architect that has pretty much seen and done it all I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Joe. His down to earth demeanour is also a pleasure-no high and mighty type here! I look forward to working with Joe in the future and wouldn't hesitate to recommend him to anyone needing a Landscape Architect.
Patti Vanderbloemen & Laurie Krieg
We are extremely pleased with the services provided by Joe Duggan! We were still in the construction process of our new home, which was built on a large, challenging site. The builder personally recommended Joe, and he was engaged in the process early on.
We were able to convey our personal desires for the hardscape and surrounding landscape to Joe, who responded with conceptual designs with options to ultimately bring the final design into fruition. It was our desire to bring the site of our home "back to nature" by utilizing native plantings – over 160 varieties. We could not be more pleased with the outcome and thoroughly enjoy watching our property mature to a natural landscape through each season.
I would not hesitate to recommend Joe's services to anyone seeking a professional, complete landscape design.
Kay Gunn
We recently worked with Joe to develop a rear yard master plan to address challenges and accommodate our specific need to provide a secure space for our young son along and provide access from the driveway and detached garage. The design needed to address all of this in a limited user space due to a large slope facing the house running the length of the rear yard. Joe listened to our concerns and came up with a creative yet practical solution that worked within our budget.
Once the design was completed Joe helped us select a company from his network of contractors that was well suited to the work that needed to be done. He didn't stop there but stayed with us throughout the project, sometimes showing up unannounced to check on progress. In fact when the sod delivery was delayed and a storm approaching, Joe actually helped to lay the sod to insure we beat the rain! We are very happy with the result and the process used. We found Joe to be a good listener and responsive to our needs. I would feel confident recommending Joe as a qualified Landscape Architect to anyone considering an exterior renovation. He can help you from concept to completion.
When building my house, the entire back was completely bare and a rocky, slanted, ugly mess. Joe came highly recommended and for good reason. I explained the deck, the trellis, the walking path and the pool I was hoping to have. Even when they seemed unreasonable for the situation, he listened with the patience of a saint and had such a confidence in what he could do and ideas right on site that clearly showed his creativity and ability to visualize and conceptualize. The design he came up with was beyond what I could have hoped for. No one thinks of plantings around a house like Joe does, too. The man loves what he does and he puts his whole self into it. I enjoyed the entire experience of working with Joe. I cannot recommend him highly enough.
Residential Landscape Architect
As a small landscape architectural and landscape design firm, J Duggan & Associates works with homeowners on projects ranging from a simple walkway to a complete Master Plan for estates.
Working within your budget, we can design and manage installation for plantings, decks, terraces, walkways, grading, pools, water features, outdoor kitchens and lighting, using your yard's own personality and your preferences to guide our plans.
Over the years, we have developed relationships with the finest craftsmen local to the Warrenton area, like stone masons and carpenters. Using this network, we can manage your project from start to finish. Enhance your home's value while enjoying an outdoor living space designed for your lifestyle.
Contact us to see what we can do for you.
Commercial Landscape Architect
A successful commercial landscape architect brings both experience and creativity to commercial, institutional and recreational projects. Our landscape architectural designs are practical and keep your budgetary allowance in mind. But they are also creative—designed to enhance and beautify your property.
Since each site is unique, we look at each commercial project individually and offer a comprehensive analysis of your project's design.
We can work with your organization as the main consultant, or collaborate with your team on a multi-disciplinary project. As proven professionals, we have successfully completed numerous commercial landscaping projects, both nationally and as local as Warrenton.
Contact us and let's discuss your project.
Pool Design and Build in Warrenton
Adding a pool or water feature to your Warrenton property adds a whole new layer of enjoyment to your outdoor living space.
As landscape architects, J Duggan & Associates will help you envision your new space using graphics, sketches and 3D models of your design.
We'll also incorporate all of the items that need to go into the addition of your pool or water feature into your estimate, including any necessary grading, site preparation, installation and surrounding patios or retaining walls. This gives you a realistic view of both your new landscape and all costs.
Curious about what you can add to your yard? Contact us!
Professional, Complete Landscape Design
"We were able to convey our personal desires for the hardscape and surrounding landscape to Joe, who responded with conceptual designs with options to ultimately bring the final design into fruition. We could not be more pleased with the outcome and thoroughly enjoy watching our property mature to a natural landscape through each season."
Patti Vanderbloemen and Laurie Krieg. | More Reviews
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text: Security product provider Rapid7 has updated its widely used open-source Metasploit exploitation framework, expanding the software so it supports enterprise IT security staff as well as its core audience of penetration testers."Originally the framework was focused on just running exploits. Penetration testers were our core base," said Rapid7 Metasploit chief architect H.D. Moore, referring to the security professionals who are paid by organizations to break into -- and thereby document the weaknesses of -- computer systems. "But now we are seeing a huge demand from organizations that just want to put all their existing vulnerability data in one spot and validate all those vulnerabilities." Moore noted that penetration testers, or pentesters in the parlance of the security field, generally will only have to test a handful of systems in the course of their engagements, whereas an enterprise IT security staff may want to test thousands or even tens of thousands of computers. The new version of the software will help automate this process. "This release makes it easier to handle large amounts of data," he said. To this end, the new version, the first major update in more than five years, is the first that offers the ability to capture engagement information in a database, which can then be searched and analyzed with more ease. Also, all of the software's functionality can now be accessed through APIs (application programming interfaces). "So if you wanted to deploy 40 copies across your enterprise for automated penetration testing, it would be very easy to do," Moore said. The Metasploit Framework is a collection of and execution platform for known software exploits, or code that harnesses, or exploits, security vulnerabilities in software programs for unintended purposes. The framework allows users to string together multiple exploits in order to gain illicit access to a system, replicating actions that would be taken by attackers. Rapid7 acquired Metasploit from Moore in 2009, who first created the framework. In addition to wooing the enterprise IT security staff with new features, Rapid7 also kept the pentesters in mind with this release as well. The new version features 36 new exploits, 27 new post-exploitation modules -- or modules designed for system reconnaissance -- and 12 auxiliary modules, all of which have been added since the last update, version 3.7.1. The software package now hosts a total of 716 exploit modules, 361 auxiliary modules and 68 post-exploitation modules.Nine of the new exploits are aimed at SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems, and others harness vulnerabilities in the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. Among the post-exploitation modules are capabilities for obtaining passwords from Microsoft Outlook, WSFTP, CoreFTP, SmartFTP, TotalCommander, BitCoin and other applications. Rapid7 has also released updated versions of Metasploit Pro, a collection of reporting tools, and Metasploit Express, which provides entry-level vulnerability verification and penetration testing capabilities. Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com