From Archive.org, Free Multimedia Hosting for Life

powerline22 writes "From the people who gave you the Internet Archive comes Ourmedia, a place for grassroots media to flourish. Upload anything, maybe a video, some pictures, your custom applescript, and it gets hosted for free, for life. Drupal is hosting the site, and the Internet Archive is providing hosting and bandwidth for the files."

They did this before

[Anonymous Coward]

with their caching idea (like coralcache) but 6months later they stopped it, whats to say the same wont happen here ? when people do hosting they want reliability not bandwidth

How Long?

[bleckywelcky]

How long can this really last? Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Power costs money. Admins need to eat. I think it's a good idea, but just wondering where the funds are going to come from.

In the end, lots of homemade stuff

[suso]

Cool, sounds like the perfect place to store Rooftop Warrior [suso.org] [warning, bad quality homemade ninja movie]

Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

"For life".

Think they're going to hold to that?

And I don't just mean in the case of the 90% of content which will be posted there illegally, or even the 80% of the leftover content which will be highly pornographic. What if I post an MPEG there and it gets linked on fark and winds up eating terrabytes of the site's bandwidth? How long you think it will remain there?

Ummm,

[Locdonan]

Wow, that was really diviod of info. How much space, what limits? P0rn? Copyrighted items?

Can /. use this as a mirror with no consequence?

How bout some REAL info on stuff that matters?

obl. privacy concern.

[Anonymous Coward]

all is well and good, until they get bought by someone else. what happens to the data then? what happens if they go bankrupt, and their hard drives wind up on ebay?

French Lawsuit in 3... 2...

[Bonker]

"I'm sorry. You can't run this site since it hosts material deemed illegal by our hate-speech laws."

Free speech ain't always pretty.

World's Youngest Video Blogger

[filmmaker]

The segment about the "World's Youngest Video Blogger" is amazing. The time to media was a matter of a couple weeks and she goes from her first iMovie lesson from her father to being on ABC's "People of the Year" show.

It then hit me: she's a "bigger" star online than on the television. Just watching that piece inadvertantly acts as a portent for a time when television is more or less culturally irrelevant, or more to the point, indistinguishable from "web" media.

Re:How Long?

[Xzzy]

Even so, to some extent it does need to be done.

I'm not saying everything (or even a measurable portion) that appears on the internet is worth keeping forever, but the worth of any of it is not something those in the present are qualified to judge on.

In a thousand years, provided humanity hasn't wiped itself out by then, the internet archive (and by extension, ourmedia.org) will be what archaeologists use to learn about us.

Re:How Long?

[Deagol]

archive.org has been around for quite some time, and they offer no small service. They've obviously secured funding from somewhere.

Depends on the economics.

[PxM]

The ideal hope would be that the bandwith costs involved becomes cheaper at a rate equal to or greater than the bandwith usage. That is, the net cost remains constant or less than the influx of money from public and private sources. Given that bandwith usage by clients will rise as bandwith costs for them drop, this might be too optimistic, but economics is always a hard thing to predict when it is so technologically dependent. They could also try to get people like Google to back this project as part of their new library initative.

--
Want a free iPod? [freeipods.com]
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. [freegamingsystems.com] (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof [wired.com]

Re:Smells like a cheap ploy

[HyperChicken]

Considering (according to the Slashdot story, which doesn't mean much) Internet Archive is behind it, I would assume it's legit. That's what Archive.org does; Store stuff.

Re:obl. privacy concern.

[Max_Abernethy]

That would suck, but not for privacy reasons. When you put your stuff up there, it's for everyone to see, anyway - doesn't get any less private than that.

Repeat after me kids....

[mabu]

..THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "FREE".

Somebody pays, always. If not you directly, then you pay indirectly; if not now, then later, but you get nothing for free.

Perhaps the biggest infection within our society is this notion that you can get something for nothing, and how otherwise seemingly intelligent people turn into brain dead drooling baboons at the thought of getting a freebie.

Re:obl. privacy concern.

[Rolan]

Privacy? Who said anything about privacy? You put your stuff up on the internet, don't expect it to be private, ever.

Re:They did this before

[WebHostingGuy]

"when people do hosting they want reliability not bandwidth"

Not necessarily. Hosting like everything else is split among different needs and wants. There are some who will never pay more than $.99 per year for unlimited everything. Then there are those who will pay $100.00 per month for redundant reliable connections. To each their own.

I have no doubt the service will be around for a while and if they need cash then enter the advertisers. Ads everywhere and then the selling of your personal data. They could then move to a 1&1 promo--credit card needed for free service then charge after a year after you have long forgotten them.

If they are hosted with Server Beach the bandwidth is pretty cheap but you may or may not have problems as others have had in the past with them. But you will get the quality you pay for which in this case is $0.00.

Re:Repeat after me kids....

[nicky_d]

..THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "FREE".

That's a mantra for C21st America if ever I heard one. Of course there's such a thing as 'free'. Yeah, someone pays, but if it ain't me, then it's free. If I end up with two copies of a book and I give one away, I've paid for both but the surplus copy is entirely free to whoever I give it to. If I help a friend out with their PC, I pay with my time, but the service is free to them. Things are sometimes done in kindness, or in the service of a better world, even in this day and age. Don't let 'them' convince you otherwise.

Of course, free iPod schemes are a different matter, and I'd imagine this kind of cynical appeal to the frugally covetous is what you're talking about. But I don't equate archive.org with the architects of those kind of schemes. It IS still possible to get something good and decent for free, and that's something to be thankful for.