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

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301–310 of 335 posts

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

#301
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 not a real solution at the moment. It's hard to use it, the default daemon is so agressive Hetzner nearly blocked my server due to it's scanning, and your site needs to be relative-url based to be put on IPFS.

On the other hand, nobody is talking about the problem of domains: yes, linkrot is a thing, but many are due to dead domains and dead blogging/content silos.

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

#303
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://millionshort.com/

Awesome, filtered top 10^6, removed sites with ads and e-commerce, typed in "enigma machine" and got some great gems: http://ciphermachines.com/index.html http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk/howitworks.html

http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk is 3rd result in google search for "enigma machine" though

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

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBone lost its reason to exist when the internet backbone turned out to be much easier to upgrade than the edges. There's not much need to implement a complicated proxy system to save bandwidth on the backbone when almost everybody is constrained by their last mile link. For years I thought TV stations might connect to the MBone to do simulcasts for people on the Internet once broadband became widespread, but the wor…

My internship, in 2006, involved working on an IPTV prototype for Philips. I remember working on a multicast server and the set-top-box client -- the server had a DVB-T card, and rebroadcast all the BBC channels over the LAN. Since the stream was always there, changing channel was extremely fast. DVB broadcasts information packets regularly, containing the TV schedule and so on. These were also forwarded over IP, and…

The problem with using multicast for content delivery is more down to the subscriber end and how ISPs manage their networks. I worked on a (recent) project that uses multicast in the broadcast context at the mezzanine level. When you've got full control of the network, end to end, it works a lot better.

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

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone curious, you can help fix dead reference links on Wikipedia in just a few seconds. If you find a page that has a dead link (or several), click the "View History" tab at the top, then click "Fix Dead Links" to run the InternetArchiveBot on the page. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot

Genuine question. Why isn't this done automatically? Astronomical (even suspicious) amounts of continuous outgoing bandwidth?

Just speculating but possibly the difficulty of finding a truly dead link. Often they just redirect to a registry asking if you want to buy the domain.

but redirects are also present in legitimate pages

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

#306
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different. For one, it was largely un-monetised. There were no banner ads, no ad trackers, no giant shopping sites, no market-driven content design. But many ISPs offered free web space, and HTML 1.0 was so simple almost anyone could hack together a basic site with a plain vanilla text editor. So people did. For fun. Lots and lots of them. It looked…

> It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different. What? It's not at all impossible. Get a server, put whatever you want on it. No one is going to force you to monetize or market anything, or use a Node.js backend with AWS and React, or whatever the kids are doing these days. Basic HTML in a plain text editor still works just fine.

> What? It's not at all impossible. Get a server, put whatever you want on it.

Not in Germany. There is a set of laws called "Impressumspflicht" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht) which forces you to add a mandatory imprint on your website. If you do something wrong or forget to include some mandatory information (what is mandatory also depends on the kind of website), you can easily get sued (and this has often happened). In other words: It is not easy for a layperson to set up a website in a way that will not easily become a risk of becoming sued.

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

#307
post #70

I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

I just miss that it was mainly text and could be used in a terminal without missing much. More content density, better S/N ratio.

Recently I came across the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day website[1], it's old-school HTML, started in 1995 and still updated today.

All the HTML takes 2-4 kB on average, but you might not get much use from the site in a terminal :)

[1]: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

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

#308
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I figure you're doing the same as someone that cuts an article that they are mentioned in out of a newspaper and frames it on their wall. I've seen plenty of restaurants and businesses do it.

Except that's a physical product that was purchased.

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

#309

I've had a similar problem. In updating my portfolio site recently, I noticed a vast majority of links were dead. Not just live projects published maybe 3 years or more ago (I expect those to die). But also links to articles and mentions from barely one year ago, or links to award sites, and the like. With a site listing projects going back ~15 years, one can imagine how bad things were. I had to end up creating a li…

For portfolios, you should really also look into https://webrecorder.io/ It's _not_ a video recording service. It saves and can replay all network requests during a session (including authenticated requests). It's open source, you can self host, I'm not affiliated even though I'm very happy that it exists

That's impressive. I'll take a look, thanks for the tip.

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

#310
post #276
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't miss flash intos though. Or frames. Good thing they were usually optional.

Not so sure about frame, they solved 90% of the problems that SPA's are used to solve today, they could have been improved rather than replaced.

Frames have been improved into iframe and then deprecated in HTML 5.

Frames were a nightmare. You can't link to a page in frames, you can't bookmark it either. Frames break the back button. Come in via search engine? You're only in the main frame, your navigation frame is missing. Want to print? Lol, good luck with that. You always ended up (either intentionally or unintentionally) with a browsing session within someone else's unrelated frameset.

I also heard they were bad for screen readers.

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