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Devine Lu Linvega

What was it like playing Angry Birds on an iPhone 3G? We do not know; Apple is no longer distributing signed receipts for that binary. To future historians—not just of computing, but of humanity—the current period will be a dark age.

deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-d

22 comments
Visions Mind

@neauoire especially games... it's unfortunate that games might easily be the worst preserved art form. Not only due to tech compatibility issues but due to bad business practices and companies making titles forfeit on purpose to promote sales on the next instalment or something weird like that..

Sky UwU

@visionsmind @neauoire physical copies of games might last quite a while!

calutron

@neauoire my first Library of Alexandria moment was when Megaupload disappeared overnight

Devine Lu Linvega

@calutron haha, I had the same with mediafire when they expired uploads from non paying accounts, all my rare japanese electronic music, gone.

calutron

@neauoire This is why now I horde all music locally.

Mark Shane Hayden

@neauoire it does feel like the 21st century actually has been a slow slide into a dark age TBH

rezmason

@neauoire The stagnation of their mobile browser in favor of enriching the iOS ecosystem will leave an afterimage on the archived mobile web, like a film negative made out of bullshit.

"Why do all these 'web sites' in the historic record invoke the demon 'Mobile Safari' and then prompt visitors to 'open the app' instead? My co-authors and I theorize an ancient struggle between factions vying for power: the 'web' faction whose artifacts survived, and the 'apple' faction whose artifacts did not."

Tom Forsyth

@rezmason @neauoire You have to remember that back in 2022 they did not have self-contained biodomes that were air-portable. Instead what people would do is put some goats and pigs onto a trailer, turn up at a town, and stick some signs up advertising a "Mobile Safari". In this toot, I will expou

Jons Mostovojs

@neauoire this article is kinda alarmist trash though. Link rot exists with or without drm. Link rot is a huge problem in our generation. I backup websites I would rather have access to with `wget -mk`, so does archive.org.

Re: rest — historians don't know *a lot* of things as it stands about other eras, the climate collapse era will be well-studied, there's plenty of data getting preserved.


@neauoire I can offer no meaningful commentary on digital decay, but.. please, dearest internet writers, understand that whenever you use the term "Dark Ages", or claim that we have a "lack of written records" for said "Dark Ages", a historian somewhere has a fatal aneurysm.

florian

@neauoire can we acknowledge that hopefully future historians will have more interesting questions to ponder?

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