Excess Memes and 'Reply All' Emails Are Bad For Climate, Researcher Warns (theguardian.com) 120
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: When "I can has cheezburger?" became one of the first internet memes to blow our minds, it's unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up. But research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is "dark data", meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family -- from "All your base are belong to us", through Ryan Gosling saying "Hey Girl", to Tim Walz with a piglet -- are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacenter, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacenters will account for just under 6% of the UK's total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis.
Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced. "I really started a couple of years ago, it was about trying to understand the negative environmental impact that digital data might have," he said. "And at the top of it might be quite an easy question to answer, but it turns out actually, it's a whole lot more complex. But absolutely, data does have a negative environmental impact." He discovered that 68% of data used by companies is never used again, and estimates that personal data tells the same story. [...] One funny meme isn't going to destroy the planet, of course, but the millions stored, unused, in people's camera rolls does have an impact, he explained: "The one picture isn't going to make a drastic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption." Since we're paying to store data in the cloud, cloud operators and tech companies have a financial incentive to keep people from deleting junk data, says Hodgkinson. He recommends people send fewer pointless emails and avoid the "dreaded 'reply all' button."
"One [figure] that often does the rounds is that for every standard email, that equates to about 4g of carbon. If we then think about the amount of what we mainly call 'legacy data' that we hold, so if we think about all the digital photos that we have, for instance, there will be a cumulative impact."
Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced. "I really started a couple of years ago, it was about trying to understand the negative environmental impact that digital data might have," he said. "And at the top of it might be quite an easy question to answer, but it turns out actually, it's a whole lot more complex. But absolutely, data does have a negative environmental impact." He discovered that 68% of data used by companies is never used again, and estimates that personal data tells the same story. [...] One funny meme isn't going to destroy the planet, of course, but the millions stored, unused, in people's camera rolls does have an impact, he explained: "The one picture isn't going to make a drastic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption." Since we're paying to store data in the cloud, cloud operators and tech companies have a financial incentive to keep people from deleting junk data, says Hodgkinson. He recommends people send fewer pointless emails and avoid the "dreaded 'reply all' button."
"One [figure] that often does the rounds is that for every standard email, that equates to about 4g of carbon. If we then think about the amount of what we mainly call 'legacy data' that we hold, so if we think about all the digital photos that we have, for instance, there will be a cumulative impact."
Yup. Same for porn, games, and ... (Score:5, Insightful)
You've been bad, haven't you?
Re:Yup. Same for porn, games, and ... (Score:5, Funny)
Porn? Noooo!
You can have my porn when you pry it out of my cold, dead, somewhat chaffed hands.
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Porn? Noooo!
You can have my porn when you pry it out of my cold, dead, somewhat chaffed hands.
That's not exactly how I was anticipating you ending that sentence...
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...cold, dead, somewhat chaffed hands.
Whatever floats your boat, man... but I'd prefer you keep your fetishes to yourself!
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Don't forget about atom bomb research - the only reason for the TOPS500 to exist.
Better yet, how about we go back to sending bits of dead trees via the post. I'm sure HP/Canon/Xerox would LOVE that...
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how about we go back to sending bits of dead trees via the post.
That's been a solved problem in North America for over a century.
Re:Yup. Same for porn, games, and ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Yup. Same for porn, games, and ... (Score:2)
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Writers gotta write.
Designers gotta design.
Influencers gotta influence.
AI, Cryptomining, etc....
All paid for by increasing energy use.
Solution? Burn more natural gas... of course.
The Orange Man said we have at least 100 more years to destroy the environment, last night on the Shitter interview.
Drill, baby, Drill !!
We won't be alive in 100 years, so yeah, get out there and influence.
(/s, in case anyone is wondering)
WTF (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: WTF (Score:2)
And pales in comparison to the rest of data centre power consumption.
I donâ(TM)t see how storing a few old emails in your Gmail account makes any significant different to the power requirement Googles targeted advertising machine.
Bigger impact (Score:5, Interesting)
The larger impact is that each and every one of these cute email signatures, extra formatting on 1 line documents, thumbs up emoji in chat, etc.
is a distraction and interruption for productive work time.
Switching to Teams/slack just to see a meme shared will break your concentration for 20 minutes when working on a longer task.
Companies with 5000 workers each seeing 10 of these distractions a day results in years of work lost each and every day.
The Bigger Offenders. (Score:2)
The larger impact is that each and every one of these cute email signatures, extra formatting on 1 line documents, thumbs up emoji in chat, etc. is a distraction and interruption for productive work time.
Ah. Now the motivation becomes obvious.
This was nothing more than an attack on fucking email signatures as the “wasteful” shit in data centers, because the social media pimps don’t want you at all thinking their data or services is anything less than critical to national security. Cat videos and all.
Re:Bigger impact (Score:5, Informative)
The even larger impact is corporate SPAM.
Receiving between 3 and 16 (!!!) Corporate SPAM e-mails per day is stupid as fuck and kills productivity.
Some companies even infest employees' calendars with meetings about shit (almost) nobody cares about, from weekly "diversity and inclusion classes" to "All Hands" and "Quarterly Reports" at odd hours which are sent to tens of thousands of employees at once.
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The even larger impact is corporate SPAM.
45.6 percent of all e-mails worldwide were identified as spam.
-- https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Receiving between 3 and 16 (!!!) Corporate SPAM e-mails per day is stupid as fuck and kills productivity. Some companies even infest employees' calendars with meetings about shit (almost) nobody cares about, from weekly "diversity and inclusion classes" to "All Hands" and "Quarterly Reports" at odd hours which are sent to tens of thousands of employees at once.
Yeah, that too.
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"All Hands" and "Quarterly Reports" at odd hours
I didn't realize 1 PM is an odd hour.
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1 PM which timezone?
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lol, no. (Score:1, Insightful)
Keeping those little fuckers alive uses way more CO2 than a data center.
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What are you babbling about? We don't have enough of them in the developed world. Population decline is imminent. It won't be pretty.
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Does that mean having sex with the neighbors or just taking advantage of them in some way? I really can't tell.
slack free plan (Score:2)
This is what the Slack free plan is for, shitpost graveyard.
OK (Score:5, Funny)
We'll I'll go back to faxing memes at the office. Since emails are not climate friendly anymore.
The real data hoarders. (Score:5, Interesting)
Since emails are not climate friendly anymore.
I believe somewhere north of 90% of ALL email sent on this planet daily, is fucking spam. And has been for years.. Nothing about email is friendly to any environment. Paper snail mail might even be more efficient because at least with paper you’re rather forced to get rid of shit every now and then. Or you’ll be considered a “hoarder”. Naturally a digital hoarder is like a social media addict. No one wants to admit they are, but most everyone is.
Oh and speaking of data (center) hoarders, If Facebook isn’t the worlds largest online graveyard yet, it soon will be with the dead eventually exceeding the living. How many megawatts of nuclear power will we waste powering that shit for the next decade or seven? Gotta love how email is suddenly the wasteful one in the data center, as if Instagram profile data is critical to national security..
Re: The real data hoarders. (Score:2)
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do all your emails as a live stream of you typing them out, or writing long hand.
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do all your emails as a live stream of you typing them out, or writing long hand.
A live stream would at least tell the email author how many people will never read it before they waste time writing it, so there’s that benefit.
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I remember the old days when my recycle bin was about 50% junk mail and fliers instead of amazon boxes.
And yea. I doubt email is the long pole here. We can probably find a lot of things worse than email in a few minutes of though. I bet streaming HD videos is rather wasteful when compared to broadcast systems of yore.
D- Grasp of Computing (Score:2)
"The one picture isn't going to make a drastic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption."
Does he think it's like using more fuel by carrying old unneeded junk around in your car?
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I think it is a case of most phone cloud back up.
Energy is not climate (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this guy retarded? First, energy usage only affects climate if the power source is not carbon neutral. If the power source was nuclear or solar, the climate is not going to get fucked. Second, what about the effect of not getting memes, people would store non-meme stuff or do activities that are worse. Second, this researcher trying to get his PhD in douchebaggery doesn't seem to understand how data is stored.
Professor of Irony (Score:5, Funny)
Is this guy retarded?
Well he's created a story complaining about "one-use" data that most people will read once, think he's an idiot and never read again but which will now be stored in the database of countless websites around the planet and never looked at again. So he clearly isn't great as a "professor of strategy", but as a professor of irony I think he has an exceptionally bright future.
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Most interesting of the Funny modded points, though I was looking for the joke about "What criminal penalties are appropriate for email with giant lists of addresses that aren't in the BCC field?"
On the deeper part of your joke, I remember an article in "CACM" or "Computer" many years ago about the persistence of worthless data. The essence was that the marginal cost of keeping data is quite low, whereas the cost of evaluating the data to make a positive decision that it will never have value (so it's safe
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Second, what about the effect of not getting memes, people would store non-meme stuff or do activities that are worse.
Fucking seriously? If you’re going to make that argument, then you might as well argue that porn surfing is a necessary component of the work day, along with taking meme breaks. Otherwise employees might find something “worse” to store.
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> If the power source was nuclear or solar, the climate is not going to get fucked.
It's very hard (although easier for solar as you can put that on the datacentre roof) to ensure your energy is "carbon neutral". Typically what happens is the base load is provided by nuclear, the wind and solar sources work when the wind blows and the sun shines, and at all other times and during other weathers you burn GAS, in the UK at least. You bring up the CCGT plants as solar and wind drop.
Other countries just bur
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First, energy usage only affects climate if the power source is not carbon neutral.
Which is true today.
Easy! Just stop using social media (Score:2)
Re: Easy! Just stop using social media (Score:2)
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Now everytime a conservative political meme goes viral on social media weâ(TM)ll have to hear MSNBC tell us how itâ(TM)s ruining the environment, and justifies censoring.
It really is sad just how predictable this is. All but guaranteed to come out of a talking bobblehead within the next 30 days.
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I see your point, but this isnt social media.
This is a forum.
Even Reddit barely meets the definition of social media.
Oh, fuck off! (Score:2)
This researcher has got it all wrong (Score:2)
When my useless junk stored in the cloud wastes energy, it's not my junk, but the cloud that is to blame. The cloud is bad for the environment.
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Also, I suspect that my local disk drive uses the same amount of energy whether it has in use only 1GB for financial data, or if it has 1GB of finance plus 9GB of cat pictures.
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> drive weight will technically change an infinitesimal amount based on storage used
Nope. Magnetism has no weight mate.
Ah, what about electrons trapped in the SSD gates?
Nope. You are MOVING electrons, not adding them. They are always there. You just moved them into the gate. Nothing is added or removed.
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Sincerely,
JD Vance
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plus 9GB of cat pictures.
Is that what you call your porn collection? Not very large, my friend.
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plus 9GB of cat pictures.
Is that what you call your porn collection? Not very large, my friend.
I'm an old guy; it's ascii cat porn so there are many pix.
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Talking about AA, I was elated when I found out mplayer had an AA (or even better, CACA) filter to play videos in ASCII. Now I can watch videos while I administer systems at the bash prompt!
Blame Shifting (Score:5, Insightful)
This reads a lot like:
I doubt I have personally generated enough digital data in my nearly half a century on this planet to accumulate the same energy footprint as a minute of ChatGPT aggregate runtime, let alone when spidering and training is amortized over the lifetime of the models.
Yes, data centers consume huge amounts of power. No, it's not your image macros to blame. They're just not profitable enough to qualify for an indulgence.
The Guilty. (Score:2)
This reads a lot like:
(As if it wasn’t obvious enough.)
telemetry (Score:1)
100x that power is being used to log your every event, your every click, even how long your cursor hovered or scrolling hesitated, the 80kb jpg of a funny cat ain't shit
100x being a joke compared to the LLM hype
which i'm not sure even compares to imaginary number crunching for crypto, moving in anywhere there's slightly cheaper power and churning away
clowns once again missing the forest for the trees, chasing peasants for recycling and water and pollution while industrial players will pick e/waste if repurp
NNTP Nostalgia (Score:3)
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Intellectually dishonest and evil (Score:2)
if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption
No, it really doesn't. "Quite a big" means something, and what it means isn't true. It's misdirection, derailing, blame shifting or whatever you want to call it, but it's not science. Fuck that guy.
Researcher of what? (Score:2)
at a business school.
Yes, that's a person I can trust on the subject of power consumption of data storage and climate control.
I can believe that 68% of data at companies are never used again. But do you know how many emails and memes you can fit into the data occupied by the Borderlands movie?
People use too much email (Score:2)
because MS-Teams is fucked up.
Re: (Score:3)
Teams really is amazingly terrible. Once or twice a week I have to relog because it just stops sending messages, and there is absolutely no sign it's not working except that messages aren't exchanged. When you do this, of course, it flushes any messages which didn't reach the server. Opening whiteboard tabs takes like a goddamn minute... with barely anything even on them. Sometimes it stops sending images, while the text is still working.
I hope the new teams isn't as shit as the new outlook, we are still on
The real story here . . . (Score:3)
. . . is this guy clearly organized his whole career just hoping to get himself into a meme.
Build some nuclear reactors and F off (Score:1)
Re: Build some nuclear reactors and F off (Score:3)
I don't want to live in a world (Score:3)
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> A world without memes is a world I don't want to live in.
Oh how the opposite is true.
Till today I have never seen a "meme" in my life. Well, truthfully I may have seen 5, and certainly not this example posted here.
I can’t understand why anyone would desire such mind numbing mundane stuff like that. Well, I am also against the concept of fashion as well, I don’t follow fashion. Like memes they are a waste of time.
I suppose it's not strictly true. I have seen and used memes that confer an
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Well, if you're not living in this world, that will help the environment too, because you'll be expelling less CO2!
Worse things than that (Score:2)
Think of computers mining bitcoins (or more accurately NOT mining bitcoins), or cloud software running on bloated stacks in inefficient languages (e.g. every Springboot based application), or desktop PCs running full power all night and every weekend with nobody in front of them.
I wonder if at least some of this could be curtailed by legislative changes, e.g. banning financial institutions from dealing in proof of work crypto, or motivating companies to be more energy efficient through tax (dis)incentives.
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A modern PC, like within the last 15 years or so, uses very little power when idle, laptops even less than that.
When idle my PC uses 70W, just more than a single 60W lightbulb. Not a single room in my house has an incandescent bulb anymore, hardly anyone still has one, if they do well it’s not like you can get a new one when the blow.
I grew up in a house that had 100W bulbs IN EVERY ROOM. Most rooms remained lit, we only turned the light off when we were not intending to go back into it. The landin
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70W idle is still a massive amount of power consumption for a device that may serve no purpose by running all night, or all weekend, or when someone goes on holiday. Yes there will be servers or test machines which need to run continuously, but if it's some desktop PC, it probably doesn't. It should hibernate/sleep, and go into a low power mode. Multiply by millions of computers and it is an enormous waste of power. All because the computer either a) didn't enter a very low power mode, b) was prevented from
Re: Worse things than that (Score:2)
Typical Guardian reporting, ie mindless propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
"By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacenters will account for just under 6% of the UK's total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis."
No, it does not follow. How much of that 6% is business or government essential data storage, and how much is junk data storage? Very little of it is junk. And very little of the 6% is variable. Most of the energy consumption is in having the facilities and storage available, not in the total size or amount of the storage.
So lets continue. Electricity generation is about one third of UK emissions, which are 450 million tons a year. So about 150 million tons a year. Then data storage is 6% of that, so we are now down to about 10 million tons a year. And junk data is probably less than 10% of that, so now we are down to max 1 million tons a year. That is around 0.2% of UK emissions, which themselves are only about 1% of global.
The effect of not doing "copy all" is going to be unmeasurable.
What we have is typical Guardian hysteria on the subject of climate and energy. It reminds one a bit of the demand to turn off standby appliances to save the planet, or eat less meat, or similar sillinesses.
Send as many people as many pics as you like. You will bring pleasure to their lives, and no, you will not be endangering the planet. There is no climate crisis anyway, but even if there were, depriving yourself of the pleasure of sharing photos will not make one bit of difference to it.
If there had been a Guardian reporter on the Titanic, they would have been handing out teacups and telling the passengers to bail, because every little helps. Doesn't it?
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It doesn't matter, Starmer is gonna ban memes.
Slashdot is doing its part!!! (Score:2)
At least the Slashdot polls got rid of all those senseless CmdrTaco options.
And Slashdot (see, I'm typing that out instead of just typing /.) got rid of Commander (or is it Comrade?) Taco hisself.
That should account for a lot of carbon footprint right there.
It uses almost nothing, if we forget it exists. (Score:2)
"I can has cheezburger?"
Never heard of it till now.
That’s the thing about "memes" they are so esoteric and fleeting that they only are seen by a small subset of individuals.
> sitting in a datacentre, using up energy.
No, they are not. They only use energy when someone actually goes looking for them, like I did right now and how many others are doing right now due to the /. effect and nostalgia and the "never heard of this" syndrome which had me pump electrons through my keyboard, cpu, NIC, various
Er (Score:2)
When "I can has cheezburger?" became one of the first internet memes to blow our minds, it's unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up.
Actually, I remember finding it amusing even before that, that people were using their own computers and a worldwide computer network to complain about energy usage and to advocate going back to primitive living ...
Carbon cost of a film photo? (Score:2)
Gonna meme this (Score:2)
This headline is so typical of the decline of civilization that I am going to have to make a meme of it. Bottomtext.
Re: Gonna meme this (Score:2)
I have an idea (Score:2)
No room for politeness: Fuck You. (Score:2)
We get up to 4 million tons of junkmail per year in the US. Physical junkmail. Junkmail that transitions directly from our mailboxes to our landfills. Without consequence to anybody. And when it's mentioned that it may be a shit idea? You get told to shut up and go away because that's just the way business has to be done. We don't care about the environment as a society and never have.
On top of that, we have these massive behemoth companies sucking up more resources than entire countries to create better co
Opinion (Score:2)
One would think that a person with the job title "Professor of Strategy" would understand that any scheme to save the planet needs to be founded in abundance, not scarcity. If a meme costs 4 grams of carbon, the solution isn't to send less memes, it's to make more energy that costs less carbon, driving that value down.
If we figure out how to 100-1000x our low-to-no-carbon energy supply, the entire conversation becomes moot.
What about XKCD? (Score:3)
Surely that's a more sustainable environmental choice.
https://xkcd.com/1007/ [xkcd.com]
Breathing (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure breathing, and farting, both have a larger environmental impact than Reply All.
Death by a thousand cuts. (Score:2)
Or death by a thousand memes.
You are bad for the environment (Score:2)
Many, many others first (Score:2)
Facebook is particulary bad regarding this problem (Score:2)
Facebook is particulary bad regarding this problem. With all the private groups with all their private images and videos only available to a tiny amount of people. It takes up enormous resources to benefit an infinitesimally small number of people.
It's not sustainable, but as long as Facebook keeps making money it will continue.
This is Exactly the Kind of Quality News Story (Score:2)
data is tiny now (Score:2)
You can buy 16TB+ sized drives now. Facebook revealed that its system processes 2.5 billion pieces of content and 500+ terabytes of data each day. Compressed at 10:1, that's barely over 3 of those drives a day. And there is no reason older content needs to be immediately available. I suspect FB and others have setups where data is stored on systems in sleep mode until called, thereby minimizing power usage. And FB is assuredly one of the largest data holders and collectors in the world. I bet one flight fro
this just in (Score:2)
shitposting is a significant contributor to climate change
existence (Score:2)
Your existence is bad for the climate. Please die immediately. But make sure your body is processed so that its rotting does not contribute any greenhouse gases.
HTML (Score:2)
Forbid HTML E-Mail.
And if you are serious with the environment, forbid online ads.
I might care... (Score:2)
Memes and email don't come close.
Web sites (Score:2)
Nothing wastes power more than a landing page that's 100% dynamic generation.
Static site generators for the win. Pages are accessed so much more than they're edited, there's no point really in dynamic generation, even for logged in users, there's little of the page that's dynamic. Shopping basket item counts, checkouts, ok, they need a lot of customisation, but even so, only a few tables need to be dynamic and javascript includes manage that. That takes a lot of generation work away from the backend applica
Data at Rest (Score:2)
I'm not 100% sure what power consequences data at rest on a storage device this guy is thinking about. On an SSD, once the data is stored there, there is a very small amount of power required to keep the device on, and that's it. How "full" the device is has little/no impact on power usage.
For a spinning HDD, which is what you would be using for "cold storage" like old memes and old business reports and stuff, things that are not accessed frequently, it is going to be stored on the magnetic medium, and then
Simple Solution (Score:2)
Hey, I know how to fix this!
The Government (using AI of course) will review every byte of data stored on all digital media on the planet, starting with everything in the cloud or seen in transit over the Internet. Then they will decide whether it is of true value, and delete it if not.
For safety reasons, a "Master" archive (accessible only to a certain small echelon of the Data Police) will keep a copy of everything purged. (No doubt In a series of special Bad Data Centers located underground or in volcano
Re: (Score:2)
We have always been at war with misinformation.
Re: (Score:2)
We import things from America over a 10 year period it seems.
Re: don't care about the UK (Score:2)