Ethan Gates @The_BFOOL@digipres.club

Happy World Digital Preservation Day, digipres club!!!

also notable: if I'm reading this correctly, there was literally no objection placed to the expanded exemption for non-video game software. if you are a GLAM admin, manager, or counsel who is still scared of this, you are fighting with no one

(my apologies to all my video game preservation colleagues, who have a much tougher fight of this despite the game/software distinction also being totally unclear)

sure, the limitation that "[DRM-circumvented] works be accessible to only one user at a time and for a limited time" makes no goddamn sense when you're talking about software-dependent digital objects and collections. who cares? in many cases, how is someone even going to know you circumvented the DRM? who's going to know that you offered the same copy of Windows XP to two different patrons simultaneously? just do it!

we're often talking about some of the biggest and richest companies in the world (Microsoft! Apple! Oracle! Adobe!) who already have their hands completely full (and largely fail) to prevent basic-ass piracy of their latest and greatest in-market products. they do not give a shit if you use a found Win98 license from WinWorld, and if they did, they would go after the places actually hosting and distributing that info first

I mean, already the worst thing that could possibly happen if you provided access to legacy software with broken DRM was a takedown notice. then you take it down! *if* that even happens! which it never will!

My take on the new, expanded DMCA exemption for software preservation is that, while still kind of nonsensical and written by someone without a clear understanding of the issues, the removal of the "on-premises" language means that the vagueness now works entirely in practitioners' and researchers' favor and I hope GLAM admins and counsel allow us to interpret it as such

and just for the folks on Mastodon: it's a textbook, so I realize the pricing is hefty, especially for the ebook version - so just hit me up if you'd be interested in a scan of my chapter or any other (reasonable) section of the book you'd be interested in. esp if it's for students/teaching purposes

much thanks to Dr. Patricia Franks, who both personally invited me to write this and was a wonderful editor to work with, helping me give both a concise definition of terms but also (I think) give a pretty clean summary and illustration of emulation's possibilities in archiving

I've been really enjoying perusing the whole thing, check it out (or maybe encourage your library/program to pick up a copy) if you can!

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538137345/The-Handbook-of-Archival-Practice

It's been a tough month, such that I haven't had a chance to properly hype: I've been published!!!

The Handbook of Archival Practice is a new and really neat encyclopedic snapshot of current activities around preserving both analog and digital materials. There's a great balance of traditional and emerging concerns, and I was kindly invited to contribute the entry on "Emulation"!

specifically working in Vue here, I think, but really any guidance on terminology or tools here to help me figure out what to search is helpful

Doc-minded colleagues: does anyone know of good + accessible tools or libraries for creating help-text overlays or guided actions on a web site?

Like, something that can be integrated into a front-end client that enables a "tutorial" mode with scripted actions and text you can advance through to explain the interface

FYI, all good here - thanks if anyone checked!

Does anyone possibly have a digital copy of the paperback TOTEM (Trustworthy Online Technical Environment Metadata Database) guide? The database itself (http://www.keep-totem.co.uk/) has unfortunately turned out...not trustworthy.

Our department owns a physical copy that is trapped and inaccessible at the moment, so we can come up with some kind of one-on-one Controlled Digital Lending agreement...

https://www.amazon.com/Trustworthy-Technical-Environment-Metadata-Database/dp/3830064187

we have a large number of MS-DOS programs running in EaaSI (QEMU) that seem to install properly but crash + reboot DOS when run, and I think I need to learn about DOS memory management, and I really don't want to

Software Preservation Network will be hosting a "show and tell"-style discussion with two amazing practitioners (@VickyRampin and @elenarchivist ) next week!

Our software heritage is more than Doom, Clippy, and the Space Jam web site. Please join in for a fun discussion of some other software stories and the work SPN members do.

Details and registration here:
https://groups.google.com/g/software-preservation-network/c/TPyuyod3cY4

Last night we put on some Lifetime movie (it's been a rough couple weeks) that featured a hacker breaking into Vivica A. Fox's computer and they appeared to use htop to open a PDF, delightful

for the fediverse, @bitsgalore referred me on the birdsite to his scripts for creating/burning discs of various types, which should easily be adapted to make samples!

once I have a corpus that I'm happy with, I'll see if I can post it publicly so that other folks can just nab the images

https://github.com/KBNLresearch/cdtestcorpus

#digipres friends: is there a demo/sample corpus out there of CD-ROM disk images that demonstrates the behavior and proper imaging of the various Book/disc types?

e.g.
- mixed-mode
- multi-session
- hybrid filesystem

as far as I can tell, the pre-built VMs are just a single-partition, BIOS install (i386-pc directory is present at (root)/boot/grub/, but no modules inside...)

plus, the whole deal with EaaS environments is that any changes made by the user can be discarded, so I'm quite certain I wouldn't have saved the environment this way after making any intentional change/choice/update

Has anyone ever witnessed a problem with BitCurator seemingly spontaneously wiping its own grub install? Perhaps on system reboot?

Context: a while back I imported and (successfully) used one of the pre-built BitCurator 2.0.16 VMs in Emulation-as-a-Service. I've returned to that environment and I now only get the "grub rescue>" prompt, and it seems like the core "normal" grub module is just...gone?