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I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

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Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#241

Post by ringaroundthetx »

jedberg wrote: post #105
Asooka wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that illegal, since you don't own the copyright? Or are you not distributing it and keeping it for archive purposes?

It's on my website, which is a blatant copyright violation. So far the NYT hasn't asked me to take it down. It could potentially be considered fair use, since I'm not making a profit and I provide commentary.

> It could potentially be considered fair use, since I'm not making a profit and I provide commentary.

Although people through that term around willy nilly, in our current framework that means being sued for a minimum of $100,000 per supposed violation, and making your fair use defense in front of a judge.

Youtubers have reported spending $50,000 just to begin talking with lawyers and preparing briefs.

Maybe our ISPs can start offering us insurance.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#242

Post by nogridbag »

bloaf wrote: post #196
hawski wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage. I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or d…

https://millionshort.com/

Looks like the site's having some issues right now. Using some of the search criteria redirects me to https://millionshort.com/500

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#243

Post by ric2b »

Jtsummers wrote: post #47
amelius wrote: post #20

Solution: https://ipfs.io > The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days. Remember GeoCities? The web doesn't anymore. It's not good enough for the primary medium of our era to be so fragile. > IPFS provides historic versioning (like git) and makes it simple to set up resilient networks for mirroring of data.

IPFS is good and useful, but it only retains what people choose to retain. If geocities.com/aoeu isn't popular, then IPFS won't store it unless someone bothered to pin it. And as soon as they stop, it'll disappear. You need a dedicated host (like archive.org) to retain it, or volunteers willing to coordinate and commit their resources. Otherwise it's just more resilient (a good thing), but not permanent.

If literally no one in the world bothers to keep a piece of content, not even archive organizations, what do you suppose could possibly work?

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#244

Post by bloaf »

nogridbag wrote: post #242
bloaf wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://millionshort.com/

Looks like the site's having some issues right now. Using some of the search criteria redirects me to https://millionshort.com/500

Several search engines have had issues today, I haven't heard anything about a root cause though.

http://downdetector.com/status/bing

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#245

Post by ric2b »

Jtsummers wrote: post #47
amelius wrote: post #20

Solution: https://ipfs.io > The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days. Remember GeoCities? The web doesn't anymore. It's not good enough for the primary medium of our era to be so fragile. > IPFS provides historic versioning (like git) and makes it simple to set up resilient networks for mirroring of data.

IPFS is good and useful, but it only retains what people choose to retain. If geocities.com/aoeu isn't popular, then IPFS won't store it unless someone bothered to pin it. And as soon as they stop, it'll disappear. You need a dedicated host (like archive.org) to retain it, or volunteers willing to coordinate and commit their resources. Otherwise it's just more resilient (a good thing), but not permanent.

> Otherwise it's just more resilient (a good thing), but not permanent.

It's not "just" more resilient, It's also much more elegant and convenient: with the current web you need to go find some archive version of the dead link you found, while with IPFS the link can simply work, even after the creator stops hosting it.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#246

Post by Torwald »

wcummings wrote: post #238
kyledrake wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the old webrings had a CGI backend that would collect the addresses and then you would click "next" and it would take you to the next site. But yeah you could just make a vanilla one. You could also just make one outside of the context of Neocities. But if the next site went down or didn't link to the next site correctly, you couldn't proceed. That was always my problem with webrings. They depended on each site…

That's interesting the ones I remember were literally rings of static links, coordinated by the webmasters, presumably over email. I see what you mean now.

those were not webrings. those were "just" link exchanges.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#248

Post by Apocryphon »

kyledrake wrote: post #233
wcummings wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But aren't web rings just composed of vanilla hyperlinks? Why does that need to be added as a feature? What's stopping people from making them now?

IIRC the old webrings had a CGI backend that would collect the addresses and then you would click "next" and it would take you to the next site. But yeah you could just make a vanilla one. You could also just make one outside of the context of Neocities. But if the next site went down or didn't link to the next site correctly, you couldn't proceed. That was always my problem with webrings. They depended on each site…

It may have been lousy UX, but I suppose it also provided a social convention of not breaking the chain. Weakest links and all that. Relevant to the OP about linkrot!

Maybe a modern equivalent would redirect downed sites to the IPFS archive.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#250

Post by voltagex_ »

ChrisSD wrote: post #135
dullgiulio wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"WWW.MICROSOFT.COM is running Microsoft's Windows NT Server 3.5 and EMWAC's HTTPS" EMWAC supported TLS 1.2 already back then. Amazing!

Ha, well it is a recreation and obviously not the original. They didn't have the original code so they had to work out how it was made. There's a readme which explains the process: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/readme.html

I get infinite redirects to profile.microsoft.com for that link if I load it in a browser with live.com cookies. Kinda sad, really.
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