Someone just saved ALL the CDC's public data before it could disappear! 🦅
What's the Deal?
Some mystery hero downloaded everything from the CDC's website (that's 98 GIGABYTES of health info!) and uploaded it to the Internet Archive on Jan 28th. Think of it like making a backup copy of your phone before it breaks!
Why Should You Care?
This is YOUR health data - stuff about vaccines, diseases, and public health that your tax dollars paid for! 🏥
Once this info is gone from CDC's website, it could be really hard for your doctor to get important updates
Researchers need this to keep studying ways to keep Americans healthy 💪
What's Next?
Smart folks at places like Harvard are making sure this data stays safe by keeping copies. It's like having multiple backups of your family photos - can't be too careful!
Remember folks: Knowledge is power, and someone just made sure we didn't lose a whole bunch of it! 🎯
#SaveTheData #PublicHealth #AmericanRight2Know
Source: Internet Archive upload by anonymous user on Jan 28, 2025
Post by Ed Summers (@edsu@social.coop) - Feb 3, 2025
The Internet Archive is, and I really want to emphasize this, Fucking Huge. If you want to help archive it, every upload has an associated torrent you can download and help seed. Torrenting itself isn't illegal, only torrenting illegal stuff like copyrighted movies. You can buy a relatively cheap refurbished HDD of whatever size you want, set up qBittorrent, and torrent the uploads that you want to make sure are available even if the Internet Archive has to take them down or has a critical data loss failure.
Thank you so much for the advice! I want to preserve important documents like the bill of rights and the constitution, as well as sexual education material, especially stuff pertaining to women and reproductive health. Also banned books. Things the facists are trying to purge and things that are important to me.
sry i dont know what that is but once i have all the data ill post a link here. im hosting in france and i am also outside the us so i will not take down the data at tronald dumps request tyvm.
Agreed, I think the biggest issue though is just scale. It’s over 100 petabytes of data. Not outside the realm of big cloud providers to mirror, but they don’t really give a shit. It would require some sort of significant distributed software solution for the community to work with. Not impossible, but as far as I know, nobody’s taken up the mantle yet as I think it would need custom software just to begin the solution of how to distribute it as a sharded set of community mirrors, different people just mirroring individual pieces.
HexOS has a plan for shared encrypted data. With the simplicity of installation and management it could take off mainstream as personal NAS are gaining popularity, but its still in early development.
Would be best if there were several mirrors in several countries. It's unfortunately too large to realistically host via crowd sourcing. The best you could do is something ala Storj where fragments are redundantly distributed across various hosts.
Same, especially before the inevitable attacks on the Internet Archive to come. Who knows what nonsense will be in the works to try and get this removed, or the whole project shut down in the coming years.
Some of the publicly available data is disappearing under the new administration. Most notably information about COVID, long COVID, vaccines, and bird flu is disappearing. Presumably, this data dump contains the missing data.