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Tech Podcast: Digital genome goes underground

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Question: Fifty or one hundred years from now, how are you going to access and look at all those poorly focused, badly composed digital pictures of your friends and loved ones? Will the JPEG format even still exist? Archivists and technologists alike are already thinking about the issue of digital preservation, increasingly important as more and more of our daily lives are stored in digital form. The EU-funded Planets Project has a unique solution. They’ve created a time capsule with a snapshot of our current “digital genome.” Inside are five digital objects common today (JPEG, QuickTime Movie, PDF, HTML website, and a Java program), and the instructions on how to, if necessary, recreate the hardware and software necessary to access and understand these files. To show the world they’re serious about saving our bits and getting a handle on their preservation, the Planets team locked the time capsule away in the Swiss Fort Knox. “It’s like in a James Bond film,” says team leader Adam Farquhar.

And that’s not the only great story we’ve got this week. Also, Google gets in hot water over collecting private data from open wi-fi networks in Europe (and Australia…and the United States…). It all started with this blog post from Google on May 14. On the podcast, we’ll hear about why European countries are especially sensitive to this sort of thing.

Meanwhile, social networking giant Facebook is weathering a storm over its privacy controls, or lack thereof. But the story we have on the show is about the storm of controversy surrounding the site in Pakistan. Pakistani officials have shut down Facebook, and YouTube, in a battle over a Facebook page inviting people to draw their own cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammed. We’ll hear from Pakistan, and get analysis from Georgetown’s Evgeny Morozov.

Also in this episode: an homage to John Shepherd-Barron, the Scot widely created with creating the automated teller machine, or ATM. And a musically transfixing homage to Pac-Man, who recently celebrated his 30th birthday in real style…at least in Swindon in the UK. Here’s more on that research into the amount of time wasted globally playing Google’s Pac-Man doodle. Scary. Not that anyone associated with this podcast played it. No, of course not…

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(Photos courtesy of Planets)