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The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

lil.law.harvard.edu

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Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#111

Post by subroutine »

gwbas1c wrote: post #90
Houshalter wrote: post #37

Gwern has a good summary of the research in this: https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs >In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic li…

I don't create web pages often, but whenever I link to something, I always generate a backup PDF.

Check out http://archive.is

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#112

Post by mkingston »

rxlim wrote: post #109

I wonder how he got everything to fit as more and more space was sold and if it was a manual process? It must have been like playing Tetris on expert mode.

The problem is, I think, the 2d knapsack problem. In case it's of interest: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/1478/algorithms-for-t...

Edit: looks like the million dollar homepage is probably a bit more complicated than 2d knapsack, somewhat like tetris.

Another edit: looks like the only non-rectangular space sold on the million dollar homepage was the last space (as specified in the top linked article). So perhaps 2d knapsack is appropriate. It's late here.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#113

Post by subroutine »

concede_pluto wrote: post #106
gscott wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as if I drive down a street ten years later... I can't expect the street to be a time-capsule to mt memories.

Old buildings stand until they decay or we run out of space nearby and demolish them. HTML doesn't decay and we can't run out of URLs; web pages only disappear because our hosting infrastructure needlessly demands ongoing payment from (only!) the author. I say "needlessly" because the actual cost of storage, CPU, and networks are dropping so quickly that hosting a page forever should asymptotically approach a fixed c…

For MillionDollarHomepage.com 90% of these links are clickbait banner ads for scams; the underlying link is often controlled by a middle-man, redirecting to a site of the buyer’s choosing.

So, on the other hand, if someone isn't willing to sponsor the cheap cost of hosting a site, maybe that site and its content isn't worth preserving?

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#114

Post by ozaark »

brosky117 wrote: post #4

I just heard about the "Million Dollar Homepage" for the first time last week. Would this idea (or one like it) work today? Making a million dollars for something so bizarre, fun, and straightforward sounds amazing. Can anyone reference other attempts at similar ideas?

A more recent example that received media attention was the Big Word Project. You could buy any word at $1 per letter.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#115

Post by Figs »

zargon wrote: post #96
Animats wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an automatic system on Wikipedia now which attempts to rescue dead links by finding the page in the Internet Archive and updating the Wikipedia page accordingly.

It should also do the reverse -- find links in wikipedia that aren't in archive.org and initiate an archival task.

A few years ago, there was a bot automatically submitting all links to archive.is and adding the archive links to Wikipedia. It got blocked and the site banned for spam. There was another discussion about it last year, and the consensus was to remove the site from the spam list so that links would be allowed again. (Not sure if that actually happened or not though.)

If you're curious, take a look at the discussions at the following links:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.is_RFC

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.is_RFC_2

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.is_RFC_3

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.is_RFC_4

I'm also not sure what the current status of automatically archiving links is though, but as you can see, the idea has been attempted before.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#116

Post by Retr0spectrum »

zargon wrote: post #96
Animats wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an automatic system on Wikipedia now which attempts to rescue dead links by finding the page in the Internet Archive and updating the Wikipedia page accordingly.

It should also do the reverse -- find links in wikipedia that aren't in archive.org and initiate an archival task.

I'm pretty sure that's whats happening now too.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#117

Post by aphextron »

concede_pluto wrote: post #106
gscott wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as if I drive down a street ten years later... I can't expect the street to be a time-capsule to mt memories.

Old buildings stand until they decay or we run out of space nearby and demolish them. HTML doesn't decay and we can't run out of URLs; web pages only disappear because our hosting infrastructure needlessly demands ongoing payment from (only!) the author. I say "needlessly" because the actual cost of storage, CPU, and networks are dropping so quickly that hosting a page forever should asymptotically approach a fixed c…

This really bothers me about the state of webhosting. Trying to host your own stuff always feels so ephemeral because of monthly payment schemes and the need for maintenance. But the alternative of ad supported services like Facebook are fundamentally anti-user and evil by nature.

Im really wishing for one of the big cloud providers to offer a one time payment guarenteed for life "digital locker". A single e2e encrypted service to store my digital assets. Essentially an online scrapbook that you could add to and journal your whole life in without any prying eyes or advertisement.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#118

Post by Houshalter »

chillingeffect wrote: post #95
amygdyl wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about personal caches? I know that few people likely keep locally saved Web pages in near line accessibility. But if you only build the tool, I would happily mount the nearly 5 terabytes of ULTRASCSI drives I've got in storage, which were largely Squid cache snapshots, from my office WAN proxy box.

Yes does anything like this exist? I would love to remember all of my surfing. I currently bookmark nearly 100% of my visited links.

wget is probably the tool you are looking for. You need to do a bit of work to get the options right. Ones to consider are --input-file=file, --level=1, --convert-links, --page-requisites, --follow-ftp, --span-hosts, and --adjust-extension. You can just export your bookmarks or history or whatever as a file full of links and use that as input to wget, and it will retrieve all of them.

There are some other handy tools like youtube-dl, which let you archive not just youtube videos, but many different types of media content. Including soundcloud and bandcamp.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#119

Post by ajosh »

rxlim wrote: post #109

I wonder how he got everything to fit as more and more space was sold and if it was a manual process? It must have been like playing Tetris on expert mode.

The way it worked was that as you bought, you could select the region that you wanted. You would be charged based on the number of pixels in the region.

I actually have seen the server that it was on. The hosting company provided free hosting to it for several years (at least 8 IIRC). I think that at some point the server died and Alex Tew decided to move elsewhere.

At one point, he had the million dollar pixel lotto which was the same idea except at two dollars per pixel and one person who clicked on one of the pixels would get half the money that came in.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#120

Post by zargon »

Figs wrote: post #115
zargon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should also do the reverse -- find links in wikipedia that aren't in archive.org and initiate an archival task.

A few years ago, there was a bot automatically submitting all links to archive.is and adding the archive links to Wikipedia. It got blocked and the site banned for spam. There was another discussion about it last year, and the consensus was to remove the site from the spam list so that links would be allowed again. (Not sure if that actually happened or not though.) If you're curious, take a look at the discussions a…

Those RFCs seem to have nothing to do with my suggestion.

In Wikipedia's usual frustrating manner, it's unclear to me what was even going on to trigger those RFCs or why people thought it was a problem. For some reason they were upset with links to archive.is. But why? Was archive.is replacing working links with archive links, or something?

Edit: From what I can tell, the archive.is bot was doing the same thing the archive.org bot Animats mentioned was doing. It's just archive.is didn't follow Wikipedia's policies and procedures.

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