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revision 1.12 by hemppah, Mon Oct 27 13:46:56 2003 UTC revision 1.13 by benja, Mon Oct 27 13:55:45 2003 UTC
# Line 17  Introduction Line 17  Introduction
17    
18  .. Standing on the shoulders of giants: Example of Web links rotting away  .. Standing on the shoulders of giants: Example of Web links rotting away
19    
20  .. History of location-dependence: `TBL ref`_ (like in HT'03 paper)  In 1997, NASA launched the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft
21    on a mission to Saturn. Before the launch, the mission
22    was widely criticized for its use of radioisotope
23    thermoelectric generators (RTGs), using plutonium
24    to generate electricity. Activists claim that
25    the launch of such devices poses a threat to
26    billions of human lives [#]_. To facilitate the debate,
27    SpaceViews, a publication of the National Space Society,
28    published a list of links to web pages of both
29    Cassini opponents and supporters [#]_.
30    
31    .. [#] ``http://www.seds.org/spaceviews/cassini/rtg.html``
32    
33    .. [#] ``http://www.seds.org/spaceviews/cassini/rtgpages.html``.
34       All links dereferenced on October 27th, 2003.
35    
36    Of the 83 links provided by SpaceViews, 29 continue to work in 2003.
37    Only six years after the launch, two thirds of the debate
38    have fallen off the Web. "If I have seen further it is by standing
39    on the shoulders of giants;" but how can we do that today,
40    if the shoulders keep rotting away?
41    
42    .. Links shouldn't break when documents move or
43       publishers lose interest
44    
45    There are two reasons for broken links: Either the original
46    publisher has moved the target document to a new address,
47    or they have stopped publishing it, usually because keeping
48    up a Web page requires some amount of maintenance and they
49    have lost interest.
50    
51    We don't propose that every byte of information ever published
52    on the Web should have to be kept around forever. However,
53    we do believe that as long as someone does keep a copy,
54    data should remain accessible, and links should continue
55    to work.
56    
57  .. Location-independent, semantic-free, *self-verifying*  .. Location-independent, semantic-free, *self-verifying*
58     identifiers (ref SFR paper [balakrishnan03semanticfree]_,     identifiers (ref SFR paper [balakrishnan03semanticfree]_,
59     [walfish03dns]_); example: hash-based (ref     [walfish03dns]_); example: hash-based (ref
60     ``hash`` URN namespace Internet-Draft; ref Freenet & others)     ``hash`` URN namespace Internet-Draft; ref Freenet & others)
61    
62    
63    
64    .. History of location-dependence: `TBL ref`_ (like in HT'03 paper)
65    
66  .. Proposal: A location-independent Web (closest thing is Freenet (ref))  .. Proposal: A location-independent Web (closest thing is Freenet (ref))
67    
68  .. Benefits of hash-based addressing:  .. Benefits of hash-based addressing:

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