arXiv subjects

H. M. Gladney

Publications and source records attributed to H. M. Gladney.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2004

Principles for Digital Preservation

The immense investments in creating and disseminating digitally represented information have not been accompanied by commensurate effort to ensure the longevity of information of permanent interest. Asserted difficulties with long-term digital preservation prove to be largely underestimation of what technology can provide. We show how to clarify prominent misunderstandings and sketch a 'Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO)' method that solves all the published technical challenges.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2004

Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Objects: Durable Encoding for When It's Too Late to Ask

How can an author store digital information so that it will be reliably useful, even years later when he is no longer available to answer questions? Methods that might work are not good enough; what is preserved today should be reliably useful whenever someone wants it. Prior proposals fail because they confound saved data with irrelevant details of today's information technology--details that are difficult to define, extract, and save completely and accurately. We use a virtual machine to represent and eventually to render any data whatsoever. We focus on a case of intermediate difficulty--an executable procedure--and identify a variant for every other data type. This solution might be more elaborate than needed to render some text, image, audio, or video data. Simple data can be preserved as representations using well-known standards. We sketch practical methods for files ranging from simple structures to those containing computer programs, treating simple cases here and deferring complex cases for future work. Enough of the complete solution is known to enable practical aggressive preservation programs today.

cs.DL↗

arXiv1999

Safe Deals Between Strangers

E-business, information serving, and ubiquitous computing will create heavy request traffic from strangers or even incognitos. Such requests must be managed automatically. Two ways of doing this are well known: giving every incognito consumer the same treatment, and rendering service in return for money. However, different behavior will be often wanted, e.g., for a university library with different access policies for undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, alumni, citizens of the same state, and everyone else. For a data or process server contacted by client machines on behalf of users not previously known, we show how to provide reliable automatic access administration conforming to service agreements. Implementations scale well from very small collections of consumers and producers to immense client/server networks. Servers can deliver information, effect state changes, and control external equipment. Consumer privacy is easily addressed by the same protocol. We support consumer privacy, but allow servers to deny their resources to incognitos. A protocol variant even protects against statistical attacks by consortia of service organizations. One e-commerce application would put the consumer's tokens on a smart card whose readers are in vending kiosks. In e-business we can simplify supply chain administration. Our method can also be used in sensitive networks without introducing new security loopholes.

cs.CR↗