Log files that describe the history of the internet are disappearing. A new project hopes to save themLog files that describe the history of the internet are disappearing. A new project hopes to save them

The Internet History Initiative wants future historians to have a chance to understand how human progress and technical progress align

APRICOT 2026 For almost 30 years, the PingER project at the USA’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used ping thousands of time each day to measure the time a packet of data required to make a round trip between two nodes on the internet.

But in 2024, the last person working on the project retired and SLAC shut it down without a plan to preserve or share the data it collected.

Happily, the tight network research community knew of PingER’s demise. Enter Jim Cowie, a computer scientist, academic, and entrepreneur.

In the latter capacity, Cowie founded a company called Renesys that between 2000 and 2014 gathered and sold intelligence about internet infrastructure – think of it as a precursor to Cloudflare’s Radar service.

A company called Dyn acquired Renesys in 2014, before itself being acquired by Oracle. During the back-office crunch that followed the two acquisitions, much of the data Renesys had collected over the years was lost.

“As time passes, information likes to disappear. If you do not invest, its default is to die,” Cowie told The Register.

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