List Archival

[Karl]

On 10/24/21, Stefan Claas <spam.trap.mailing.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Karl,
>
> On Sun, Oct 24, 2021 at 2:46 PM Karl <gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> - archives scattered on a couple websites appear unhashed, unsigned
>> and vulnerable to loss of the host
>
> I must admit I do not understand what advantage a hashed or signed
> *new* archive has, created from an old archive, which might be later
> no longer available, for comparison.

I'm also having trouble following you ... if it's hashed and signed
with sufficient trust, isn't the comparison unneeded?  Meanwhile, if
it isn't, what is to prevent future mutations of the content of the
old archive?

> Another way to create new archives may be worth exploring, is
> IPFS (https://ipfs.io) in combination with a Bitcoin-based blockchain
> timestamping service (opentimestamps.org), which both are available
> for free.

IPFS deduplicates content which seems like it might be great for
ongoing mailing list archival.

> It would simply mean, that whoever creates an archive hashes the
> contained files, uses the hashsum file with the timestamping service
> and then uploads the archive, hashfile, and timestamp to IPFS.

This sounds like such a wonderful idea.  What do you think of using
the existing torrents until somebody pins content to ipfs?