In a world obsessed with speed, spectacle and social media sparkle, this cheerful band of anti-influencers find delight in the everyday The post Born to be mild, celebrating banality with the Dull Men’s Club appeared first on Positive News.

Today, Thursday 6 November 2025 if I actually manage to finish and publish this today, is World Digital Preservation Day so I thought I would try and get a blog post out about some work I’ve been doing to rescue at-risk data. I’ve briefly mentioned this in my post about Library of Congress Subject Headings but not in much detail. The project is Safeguarding Research & Culture and I got involved back in March or April when Henrik reached out on social media looking for someone with library & metadata experience to contribute. I said that I wasn’t a Real Librarian but I’d love to help if I could, and now here we are. The concept is simple: download public datasets that are at risk of being lost, and replicate them as widely as possible to make them hard to destroy, though obviously there’s a lot of complexity buried in that statement. When the Trump administration first took power, there were a lot of people around the world worried about this issue and wanting to help, so while there are a number of institutions & better resourced groups doing similar things, we aim to complement them by mobilising grassroots volunteers. Downloading data isn’t always straightforward. It may be necessary to crawl an entire website, or query a poorly-documented API, or work within the constraints of rate-limiting so as not to overload an under-resourced server. That takes knowledge and skill, so part of the work is guiding and mentoring new contributors and fostering a community that can share what they learn and proactively find and try out new tools. We also need people to be able to find and access the data, and volunteers to be able to contribute their storage to the network. We distribute data via the venerable BitTorrent protocol, which is very good at defeating censorship and getting data out to as many peers as possible as quickly as possible. To make those torrents discoverable, our dev team led by the incredible Jonny have built a catalogue of dataset torrents, playfully named SciOp. That’s built on well-established linked data standards like DCAT, the Data Catalogue Vocabulary, so the metadata is standardised and interoperable, and there’s a public API and a developing commandline client to make it even easier to process and upload datasets. There are even RSS and RDF feeds of datasets by tag, size, threat status or number of seeds (copies) in the network that you can plug into your favourite BitTorrent client to automatically start downloading newly published datasets. There are even exciting plans in the works to make it federated via ActivityPub, to give us a network of catalogues instead of just a single one. We’re accidentally finding ourselves needing to push the state of the art in BitTorrent client implementations. If you’re familiar with the history of BitTorrent as a favoured tool for _ahem_ less-than-legal media sharing, it probably won’t surprise you that most current BitTorrent clients are optimised for working with single audio-visual streams of about 1 to 2½ hours in length. Our scientific & cultural data is much more diverse than that, and the most popular clients can struggle for various reasons. In many cases there are BEPs (BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals) to extend the protocol to improve things, but these are optimal features that most clients don’t implement. The collection of BEPs that make up “BitTorrent v2” is a good example: most clients don’t support v2 well, so most people don’t bother making v2-compatible torrents, but that means there’s no demand to implement v2 in the clients. We are planning to make a scientific-grade BitTorrent client as a test-bed for these and other new ideas. Myself I’m running one of a small number of “super” nodes in the swarm, with much more storage available than the average laptop or desktop, and often much better bandwidth too. That’s good, because some of our datasets run to multiple terabytes, plus to ensure new nodes can get started quickly we need to have some always-on nodes with most of the data available to others. Since BitTorrent is truly peer-to-peer, it doesn’t matter how many people have a copy of a given dataset, if none of them are online no-one else can access it. This is all very technically interesting, but communications, community, governance, policy, documentation, funding are also vitally important, and for us these are all works in progress. We need volunteers to help with all of this, but especially those less-technical aspects. If you’re interested in helping, please drop us a line at contact@safeguar.de, or join our community forum and introduce yourself and your interests. If you want to contribute but don’t feel you have the time or skills, well, to start with we’re more than happy to show you the ropes and help you get started, but as an alternative, I’m running one of those “super” nodes and you can contribute to my storage costs via GoFundMe: even a few quid helps. I currently have 3x 6TB hard drives with no space to mount them, so I’m currently in need of a drive cage to hold them and plug them into my server. Special shout-out also to our sibling project, the Data Rescue Project, who are doing amazing work on this and often send us requests for websites or complex datasets for our community to save. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but I _really_ want to actually get this post out for WDPD so I’m going to stop here and hopefully continue soon!

We all have a drawer somewhere in our house or our flat, behind the counter in the office or, not as a drawer but a shoebox, a container, let’s just call it a drawer – we all have the junk drawer. It’s the place you put stray rubber bands and the promotional laser pointer from the accountant down the street. Maybe there are ribbons or address stickers, glasses cleaner, a single cough drop, highlighters, an old USB drive or spare headphone ear cover thingies in there. There’s a good chance that there is something highly useful, like a roll of tape or new post-it notes in the junk drawer, but we still call it “the junk drawer” because useful or not, it is still a lot of junk. It is the place in our home where we put all the superfluous items. It is exactly the right place for these items to live because you know that if you are looking for something that is rarely necessary, it lives in the junk drawer. My website is a junk drawer. It is the place I put all the random digital things. Unlike a physical junk drawer, I put all the useful things in there too. A multiple decade long storage facility that holds mainly texts, but also decks and images, audio and videos. When I think about archival in the real world, I don’t think about the junk drawer. But in the digital world, the junk drawer, my website, is where it all goes. Years ago, and still today on the indie web, people used the acronym POSSE. It means Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I was never great at keeping the junk drawer that is my website organised, and I certainly haven’t published everything to my own site first. But who on Earth has an organised junk drawer? About once every five years I try to organise my drawer, but within weeks whatever scheme I’ve organised with is faded into disorder. It is simple the Tao of the junk drawer. Isn’t the wild organisation in our homes, brains and personal online portals what make life interesting? It’s wonderful to find the unexpected in my junk drawer. Fascinating to find things that I placed there long ago and forgot about. And it’s wonderful to rummage through other people’s junk drawers (the digital ones, it’d be weird if I showed up at your house and started rummaging around in your drawers). The web has these places still. The wild and free and full of random exists on the Web still. It’s nice to have a community of people who care about these places. #ReclaimOpen because you all surely have weird, wonderful and inspiring stuff in your junk drawers and that is the most interesting drawer in the house.

In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding, and navigating the intensive process was a steep learning curve for our small team to climb. Seth Larson, PSF Security Developer in Residence, serving as Principal Investigator (PI) with Loren Crary, PSF Deputy Executive Director, as co-PI, led the multi-round proposal writing process as well as the months-long vetting process. We invested our time and effort because we felt the PSF’s work is a strong fit for the program and that the benefit to the community if our proposal were accepted was considerable. We were honored when, after many months of work, our proposal was recommended for funding, particularly as only 36% of new NSF grant applicants are successful on their first attempt. We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, **but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole**. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the PSF’s values, as committed to in our mission statement: > _The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of**a diverse and international community** of Python programmers._ Given the value of the grant to the community and the PSF, we did our utmost to get clarity on the terms and to find a way to move forward in concert with our values. We consulted our NSF contacts and reviewed decisions made by other organizations in similar circumstances, particularly The Carpentries. In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community. We’re disappointed to have been put in the position where we had to make this decision, because we believe our proposed project would offer invaluable advances to the Python and greater open source community, protecting millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. The proposed project would create new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, rather than the current process of reactive-only review. These novel tools would rely on capability analysis, designed based on a dataset of known malware. Beyond just protecting PyPI users, the outputs of this work could be transferable for all open source software package registries, such as NPM and Crates.io, improving security across multiple open source ecosystems. In addition to the security benefits, the grant funds would have made a big difference to the PSF’s budget. The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14. $1.5 million over two years would have been quite a lot of money for us, and easily the largest grant we’d ever received. Ultimately, however, the value of the work and the size of the grant were not more important than practicing our values and retaining the freedom to support every part of our community. The PSF Board voted unanimously to withdraw our application. Giving up the NSF grant opportunity—along with inflation, lower sponsorship, economic pressure in the tech sector, and global/local uncertainty and conflict—means the PSF needs financial support now more than ever. We are incredibly grateful for any help you can offer. If you're already a PSF member or regular donor, you have our deep appreciation, and we urge you to share your story about why you support the PSF. Your stories make all the difference in spreading awareness about the mission and work of the PSF. How to support the PSF: * Become a Member: When you sign up as a Supporting Member of the PSF, you become a part of the PSF. You’re eligible to vote in PSF elections, using your voice to guide our future direction, and you help us sustain what we do with your annual support. * Donate: Your donation makes it possible to continue our work supporting Python and its community, year after year. * Sponsor: If your company uses Python and isn’t yet a sponsor, send them our sponsorship page or reach out to sponsors@python.org today. The PSF is ever grateful for our sponsors, past and current, and we do everything we can to make their sponsorships beneficial and rewarding.