René Magritte's The Lovers, Paris 1928 (Photographed at MoMA, NYC in 2017

Unrealized ideas: Unintentional Secrecy in the Era of Openness

Tyler recently posted this quote:

“History unprocessed is opportunity unrealized”

It reminds me of an unrealized article I wasn’t able to get written and into the wild, but it’s an important thought I would like to share nonetheless.

Proposed for James Lowry’s ACARM Symposium in 2015, I wanted to discuss when government is unable to adequately fund day-to-day effort, and research and development in the archive sector, leading to inefficient and potentially ineffective processing pipelines for records of archival value accessioned from government agencies and commissions.

It was just an abstract, but maybe folks have thoughts about this? Have we moved on since the early to mid 2010’s? What modern metrics do we have available to us today to see the progress? What does the advent of the new US administration mean for issues like this? As well as increasing worldwide authoritarianism?

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Cat's Meow from the Offner Dynograph EEG

What will you bitflip today?

I want to let you into a secret: I enjoy corruption. Corrupting digital objects leads to undefined behavior (C++’s definition is fun). And flipping bits in objects can tell us something both about the fragility, and robustness of our digital files and the applications that work with them.

I had a pull-request for bitflip accepted the other day. Bitflip is by Antoine Grondin and is a simple utility for flipping bits in digital files. I wrote in my COPTR entry for it that it reminds me of shotGun by Manfred Thaller. The utility is exceptionally easy to use (and of course update and maintain written in Golang) and has some nice features for flipping individual bits or a uniform percentage of bits across a digital file.

My pull-request was a simple one updating Goreleaser and its GitHub workflow to provide binaries for Windows and FreeBSD. I only needed to use Windows for a short amount of time thankfully, but it’s an environment I believe is prevalent for a lot of digital preservationists in corporate IT environments.

Bitflip is a useful utility to improve your testing of digital preservation systems, or simply for outreach, but let’s have a quick look at it in action.

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Digital Preservation Risk analysis, Uncertainty, and Digital File Format Obsolescence (European Conference on Digital Archives (2010))

Full paper: The application of risk models to digital file format obsolescence I have seen a lot of conversation about…

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