I generally agree with you, but I do not think that [4] is the solution for maintaining history. Archive.org is great, but the average user doesn't know how to get there once the base URL stops working.
We need maybe proxies as close to the origin servers as possible, to minimize the amount of traffic passing over insecure links. That seems like a political nightmare, but...
I didn't claim [4] was the solution. I claimed the problem was solvable. One example of how to improve on [4] is to build into browsers the option of automatically searching archive.org whenever you hit a 404.
Naturally, that feature already exists as a Firefox extension. Making it more visible would be awesome.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag...
That doesn't solve the discoverability problem for good, as the 404ing links will themselves be removed after a while; what we really need is a good search engine for the archives.
Of course, the whole point of this article is that centralisation of important resources is risky. Archive.org is an essential resource, and it's really far too important to be at the sole mercy of the of the Internet Archive organisation, well meaning and admirable in every way though they are.
I don't disagree. There are alternatives to archive.org [6]. There are ways to decentralize centralized services. I'm sure you can think of many more ways to do better than what is done. I mostly linked to https://archive.org because of the "https" in the URL. My point is that there are technical solutions to the technical problem of preserving history that do not require weakening the security of the whole internet.
I am in very strong agreement, and apologize for nitpicking.
> Something bad could happen to my pages in transit from a server to the user's web browser.
This already happens. Verizon injects tracking cookies into unencrypted requests [1]. Hotels inject advertising on top of the existing advertising [personal experience]. They will do it when I read your blog archive from 2001. They will inject arbitrary JavaScript that records my every keystroke and mouse movement [2]. State actors will use persistent surveillance of all unencrypted cookies to pierce firewalls and target individual engineers in charge of anything they happen to find useful [3]. They will do worse things as compute becomes cheaper and cheaper.
If your argument is that there are lots of HTTP sites that are historically important and also that are unmaintained and that will never be upgraded, okay. That is a solvable technical problem [4].
If you want to know why you have to force people to do it, it is because security is a public health issue [5]. It is the same reason you have to force people to get vaccinations.
I don't work for Google (in fact I work for a direct competitor), and I disagree with a lot of the things that they do or want to do (unsurprisingly). But having more security on the web is not one of them. We live in a very different world than we did 25-plus years ago.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2014/12/13/belgacom-hack-gchq-insid... (search for MUTANT BROTH)
[4] https://archive.org/
[5] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/security_as_a...