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Project Timestamper cryptographically timestamps Common Crawl’s 339 billion snapshots

projecttimestamper.org Editor score 6/10

Project Timestamper says it has cryptographically timestamped Common Crawl’s 339 billion web snapshots, spanning 18 years and more than 10 petabytes. Provenance for large web archives matters to engineers working with data at scale.

What: Project Timestamper cryptographically timestamped Common Crawl’s collection of 339 billion web-page snapshots.
How: Common Crawl’s precomputed hashes were grouped in blocks; Project Timestamper timestamped block hashes through OpenTimestamps and committed captures to Bitcoin.
Why it matters: Compact attestations let engineers verify an individual snapshot’s byte-level existence and detect later alteration in a dataset exceeding 10 petabytes.

Common Crawl block hashes are timestamped and anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain. Sketched from the article's own text.

Read on projecttimestamper.org → Hacker News · 5 comments

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