Category Archives: News

The tape obsolescence problem

An ABC News Australia article calls attention to the problem of archives on magnetic tape. Author James Elton clearly knows something about digital preservation issues, as the article goes beyond the usual generalities and hand-wringing.

Tapes, on the other hand, can only be read by format-specific machines.

And dozens of formats of magnetic tape were created through the last century — one-inch, two-inch, various versions of Betamax.

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Aside

JHOVE 1.22 is now available from OPF.

When ebooks die

Microsoft’s eBook Store is closing. According to the announcement, “starting July 2019 your ebooks will no longer be available to read, but you’ll get a full refund for all book purchases.” This shows a basic truth about DRM book purchases: you don’t actually own your copy. You can use it only as long as the provider supports it. It was honest of Microsoft to refund all “purchases,” but digital oblivion eventually awaits all DRM-protected materials.

Andy Ihnatko once told me that DRM is safe because “Amazon will be around forever.” It won’t. The fact that a company as big and stable as Microsoft is abandoning support for its DRM-protected products reminds us that all such products exist only as long as the provider has sufficient motivation and ability. It’s questionable whether Amazon’s protected ebooks from today will be readable in 2050, let alone “forever.”
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JHOVE 1.22 Release Candidate 2

JHOVE 1.22 Release Candidate 2 is available today (April 2).

An issue which was noted but isn’t fixed in this release is the handling of the command line parameters. I don’t think that code has changed significantly since I worked on it. It’s so old that it was already there when I took over the project in 2005, so don’t blame me. :) Hopefully version 1.23 will have revamped command line handling using a modern code library.

JHOVE online hack week

Open Preservation Foundation has scheduled an online hack week for JHOVE. The focus for this one will be on development. Another hack week is planned for September, focusing on documentation. JHOVE just keeps going and going, and this is a chance for volunteer Java developers to reduce its issue list.
JHOVE logo

Path traversal bugs in archive formats

Malware has shown up which takes advantage of a path traversal bug in the WinRAR archiving utility. The bug, which reportedly existed for 19 years, is fixed in the latest version. The problem stems from an old, buggy DLL which WinRAR used. It allowed the expansion of an archive with a file that would be extracted to an absolute path rather than the destination folder. In this case, the path was the system startup folder. The next time the computer was rebooted, it would run the malware file.
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What part of “No Flash” doesn’t Microsoft understand?

If you disable Flash on Microsoft Edge, Microsoft ignores your setting — but only for Facebook’s domains. It sounds too conspiratorial to be true, but a number of generally reliable websites confirm it.

Bleeping Computer: “Microsoft’s Edge web browser comes with a hidden whitelist file designed to allow Facebook to circumvent the built-in click-to-play security policy to autorun Flash content without having to ask for user consent.”

ZDNet: “Microsoft’s Edge browser contains a secret whitelist that lets Facebook run Adobe Flash code behind users’ backs. The whitelist allows Facebook Flash content to bypass Edge security features such as the click-to-play policy that normally prevents websites from running Flash code without user approval beforehand.”
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FUIF: Yet another image format?

A tweet led me to a pair of articles about a new file format called FUIF. That stands for “Free Universal Image Format.” Jon Sneyers describes it in a series of articles which so far include a Part 1 and Part 2.

It’s “responsive by design”; a single image file can be truncated at various offsets to produce different resolutions. Sneyers says FUIF meets JPEG’s criteria for a new format that provides “efficient coding of images with text and graphics” and “very low file size image coding.”
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Introductory JHOVE workshop, January 25, 2019

JHOVE is still alive and active! The Open Preservation Foundation is holding a workshop on “Getting Started with JHOVE” on January 25, 2019 in the Hague, Netherlands. The announcement says, “This workshop is aimed at beginners, or anyone who is new to JHOVE.”

OPF members get priority for registration.

The digital preservation song challenge!

Should there be songs about digital preservation? This is just a special case of the question, “Should there be songs about X?” For nearly all X, the answer is “Yes, and there probably are!” (Even — perhaps especially — if there shouldn’t be, there are.)

Someone in the Australiasian preservation community asked if AusPreserves needed a theme song. The first responses were existing popular songs, but then people started getting more creative. This led to the Digital Preservation Song Challenge!

One response was the Beyonce parody, “All the Corrupt Files” (“Put a checksum on it”). I think it’s the first song ever to mention JHOVE!

Naturally, I already have my own song on digital preservation, called Files that Last. I wrote it to promote my book of the same title, but it stands (or falls) by itself.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth singing about, and that certainly applies to digital preservation!
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