Permafrost: Difference between revisions

Thomas recently saw something online that he'd like to revisit, but the popular media/user content site it was on is having an outage right now.

As part of a trip Susanna is taking, she's currently en route to her next destination via public transportation.  Her connection is variably spotty, weak, or non-existent, and she knows things will be no different in the first hours after her immediate arrival.  Rather than lose it to idleness, she'd like to spend her time working on a project.  She doesn't know the APIs by heart, though, and she normally uses the documentation on a popular, developer-oriented web site.

Aki sees the makings of an excited discussion are about to unfold online, but he has to step out soon.  He decides to let it brew so that he can read a fuller discussion later, rather than just the few comments that he can right now.  When he returns, large parts of the discussion have been deleted.  He sees that one of Thomas's comments is still alive, though, and he knows that Susanna had managed to read much of the discussion before it was removed, because she had just been talking to him about it on his way up.

Sarah is trying to recall the specifics of something she'd read a few weeks ago, but she can't remember enough of the details to find the page in her browser history.  She can, however, remember specific words and phrases that appeared on the page.  She tries searching for it, but the search engine's algorithms aren't helping.  She's not sure if it's because her query is too general, and so it's being pushed out of the results by pages she's never even visited and doesn't care about right now, or if maybe it hasn't even been indexed at all.

It's the norm for ISPs in Damien's region to impose transfer caps on users of their already poor connections.  He wants to have another look at something he first saw online a couple of days ago and that he can't seem to commit to memory.  He doesn't want to incur the costs of navigating to that page for a third or fourth time, but he didn't have the foresight to leave the browser open on that page.

Hogarth is a developer whose contributions include work on a web browser.  He's recently read a blog post from someone explaining that, after she switched several years ago away from the browser Hogarth works on, she's now switching back.  She says that she originally switched away because the other browser was faster than Hogarth's, but now it's Hogarth's browser that's the fast one.  Happy as he is, Hogarth is suspicious.  He knows there are a lot of variables that affect the perception of performance on the Web: on average, web sites are heavier today than they were half a decade ago, the blog author has probably been through a machine (and system) upgrade or two in that time, and her browsing patterns and content interests have probably changed as well.  In the interests of intellectual honesty, Hogarth would like to do some experiments to figure out if her given reasoning is well-founded or not.

Ashley just wants all the content he bookmarks (or simply accesses) to be always available to him, without being frustrated months or years from now by 404s, service shutdowns, and web spiders stretched too thin, allowing his favored content to slip through the cracks of their archiving efforts.