News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Internet Archive and Jason Scott are saving our weird Internet history.

Re:The Internet Archive and Jason Scott are saving our weird... by joe_the_user on Monday January 27, 2020 @06:07PM (#22164815)
It would be nice to see them save all the weird content available, or even all the weird content they quite plausibly have a legal right to save.

IE, this is as good a place as any to once again complain about ways that a significant amount of stuff enters a memory hole AFTER being put int to the internet archive (example ezboard.com but I think that's just an example[1]).

Basically, archive pulls content when a later robots.txt file says don't archive (the robots.txt file of the domain parker after the actual website closed, generally). Broadly, their approach seems like "anyone, anywhere who even implicitly claims copyright on X can knock it and anything related X off archive forever. [1]

And the last time I discussed this here, the policy itself had supposedly been updated but ezboard content in particular (the example in the link and something I'm interested in), still wasn't available.

[1] https://archive.org/post/389129/why-is-archived-content-purg...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Internet Archive and Jason Scott are saving our weird... by joe_the_user on Monday January 27, 2020 @06:34PM (#22164991)
Part of the problem is that archive.org is effectively a single target. The larger they get, the more content they house, the more devastating it would be to have them removed and the more logical this ultra-gun-shy approach to legality is.

Moreover, states and corporations are naturally going from incidentally targeting archived content to systematically targeting it - so that through a flood of incidental and purposeful copyright attacks, archived content may wind-up a very well "pruned" set indeed.

It seems like having a less "monolithic" approach to archiving may be necessary - I'm not sure what that would look like, networks of smaller archivers who try to cover everything? Tor? Freenet?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Internet Archive and Jason Scott are saving our weird... by brokensegue on Monday January 27, 2020 @07:24PM (#22165252)
My understanding is that the archived content is hidden but remains archived despite the robots file. Presumably for later historical/scientific work
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Internet Archive and Jason Scott are saving our weird... by joe_the_user on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @01:19AM (#22166911)
Sure, I hope so, but the chilling to the free availability of information remains.
[ Parent | on HN ]