good friend of mine is starting a research project, looking into what i will call "digital transience" ... she is using a slightly different term and would prefer i not use it for the time being. the idea is fairly obvious ... the danger of digital content vanishing for any of a number of reasons: dropping support for proprietary data formats, physical media (5 1/4" floppy drives, Zip drives(?)) vanishing, link rot, entire site rot, and so on. so she's interested in a couple things. first, just *general* contributors to the unexpected loss of what might be important corporate digital data. but also, real-life examples of things like this -- the one that leaps to mind is the recent microsoft debacle involving ebooks protected by DRM: https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-ebook-apocalypse-drm/ i think that, of the two topics above, she's more interested in actual examples of significant loss of digital data, not through any sort of malice, but by accident or unforeseen developments in hardware or data formats that suddenly cause a catastrophic loss of information. i've already started a list, but i'm open to as many examples as i can collect. thoughts? rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ======================================================================== To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org