While I think it’s incorrect to assume PDFs cannot be exploited, I’m using computer viruses as a metaphor. What if a legit chemistry paper was tampered with such that the procedure creates and explosively releases a nerve agent and a cheap grad student that didn’t pay for the legal copy unknowingly follows it?
> What if a legit chemistry paper was tampered with such that the procedure creates and explosively releases a nerve agent and a cheap grad student that didn’t pay for the legal copy unknowingly follows it?
That grad student is visited by representatives from the military-industrial complex and is quickly drafted to doing that again. Imagine creating nerve agents by accident, what a breakthrough!
VirusTotal includes some very poor quality Chinese AVs that produce positives for nearly every file. PDFs are pretty damn safe to access today -- the days of exploding macro exploits are about a decade behind us.
Such a small collection. It's incredible that no governments are stepping up to preserve humanity's and their country's knowledge as a digital library.
/r/datahoarder is currently seeding 2.5 million books, if anyone is interested in starting their own library. With a little SQL work you can have the world's knowledge on a single 8TB.
This is what the Library of Congress has been doing for at least a decade...except that it also stores the originals where possible. It is the largest library in the world in terms of physical documents (over 167 million physical documents) and one of the largest in terms of digital copies.
And not just of American works, but works from all around the globe.
I propose that the barrier to a citizen advocating for their government to support the Internet Archive and its endeavors is exceedingly low (through grants and other patronage mechanisms), and the only resource necessary is the time to advocate and perhaps some postage or a mobile phone for calls.
The infrastructure exists (The Archive), it just needs more support to scale for depth (storage) and breadth (distributed web for durability).
Imagine a species having the capacity to share every bit of its knowledge, with every one of its people, and choosing not to do so.
Calling all PHP, SQL, Elastic Search, distributed computing experts, and everyone else with the drive to share knowledge. Sign up to change that, here.
