@rexi@mastodon.social
Life's too short and the world too small for silly fights. Thuggish science vermin within who believes bullets have no right to privacy. Pretender at the end of a long trail of lucky hunches. Physics buffery as world-weariness refuge. Fish on a bike. ⮌
I had a bad feeling in my gut about this back when W. signed it into law in the paranoid wake of 9/11
How it got turned around to be a tool of an : no mystery.
The original compartmentalized nature of many smaller agencies also gave it a different kind of strength, it turns out.
Those inherent checks and balances are now more than absent, they are turned on their head.
Last week trump announced plans to "review" 8 Smithsonian museums. Today he doubled down, very explicit about the intent to revise history to reflect the ethno-nationalist fantasy of US history.
You can do something about that! We are backing up the digital archives of those museums on sciop: https://sciop.net/tags/smithsonian
You can take direct action to preserve the historical artifacts the right wants to destroy:
1) you can download a copy and seed it, every seeder counts. Subscribe to the smithsonian RSS feed to auto-download torrents as they are scraped.
2) we have also written a crawler connected to sciop that distributes the scraping work, and automatically creates and uploads a validated torrent that piggybacks off the s3 bucket as a webseed source while it lasts (instructions in reply).
The data from the 8 threatened museums is on the order of ~10 TB, and we have split it up by jpg/tif so people without much spare storage can join in on the jpg's at least. The full contents of the public smithsonian bucket is ~700TB, so if we want to have a full independent copy we'll need lots more seeders.
All this code is being written flat out, on the run, as it's needed by volunteers with exactly zero resources, so it's not polished or well documented, and if you're interested in helping damp the flames of the book burning by contributing to any of the code or docs, we'd love to have you.
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