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Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

selectedintelligence.com

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Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#231
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like saying "when I do something crazy in public I want to be able to make everyone forget about it later on". That's not how things are supposed to work. Says who?

How would you go about erasing actual memories?

In real life, things done when a person is young are often forgotten with time, and the way the brain works is that time lessens the importance of a memory, so even if it's not completely forgotten, the memory is fuzzy and considered inconsequential.

On the internet, everything is as fresh as this morning, forever. No longer do we have "do you remember when so-and-so used to say that stupid stuff, boy have they changed!" Now it's "look, here's a link to so-and-so staying stupid stuff, now we know what they really think!"

The idea that once something is in the public it should remain there firmly embedded, forever, makes sense on the surface, but definitely seems to break down when examined closely, in my opinion.

Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#232
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would credibility mean in a world where lies, mistakes, and fits of emotion could be erased completely?

When you write a piece, if you want to delete it so that no one else can read it, it should be your right. Unless of course you're a journalist and you have a duty to integrity or something like that, but I'm talking about people like you and me who might decide one day that they do not like what they wrote anymore.

> When you write a piece, if you want to delete it so that no one else can read it, it should be your right.

Right up until you publish it in a public journal or newspaper, at which point you have no right to demand that every other reader destroy their copy.

Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#233
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with your comment, not sure why you're being downvoted. A blog is the same thing as a facebook account, would you like it if you couldn't delete your pictures on facebook?

A blog is not like a Facebook post. It's more like writing an essay, publishing it in a book, and then asking libraries to burn their copy of the book.

That seems like an arbitrary distinction, especially since Facebook can be used as a personal blog via its posting feature.

Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#234

Over the last year I've come to trust effectively nothing on the internet. I've had so many Spotify playlists I was following disappear, whole artists, websites, articles, etc. I'm slowly moving to offline-first versions of all the information I care about. Edit: This change too also lends to the 'slow web' (or just slow $whatever) movement, which I'm a fan of.

One of the first things I do with any article that I've enjoyed is download an HTML copy and create a PDF. Too many times I've bookmarked something only to come back a year later and it's gone.

I started using Firefox for Android partly because of its excellent Save page as PDF feature.

Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to save tracks by recording them through the "analog hole", using the following commandline in Linux: parec | sox -t raw -r 44100 -Lb 16 -c 2 -e signed-integer - -t wav raw.wav It still requires a lot of manual work, such as cutting the tracks, and making sure there are no "skips" (which somehow can happen). Skips could theoretically be removed using a consensus algorithm (using multiple recordings). I just wi…

I'm not familiar with the 'parec' command. Are you able to filter out other audio streams (e.g. Slack alerts or accidentally opening a page with an auto-play video)? I was under the impression that one of the big advantages of Pulse Audio was its ability to separate multiple streams. Interestingly enough, I had similar scripts about 15 years ago pre-Napster. The earliest mp3 sharing sites tended to push full-albums i…

In theory PulseAudio should be able to separate the streams, or at least turn off audio for selected applications. However, this was never really a problem anyway because I usually ran the command at night :)

Yes, audio processing in the early days was fun, though it's easier now because of better tools and especially bigger harddrives and faster CPUs :)

Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#236
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If no one can read an a book what good is it? Plenty of good. As a writer myself, sometimes just having these thoughts put out into form is a very gratifying process. When the inspiration hits you, nothing feels worse than not being able to express these thoughts and feelings in a way that feels appropriate. Likewise, sometimes people write dumb things in a fit of passion. They write something that is a blemish on…

I agree with the sentiment, but I'm not sure what can be done about it. Anyone can archive things privately. If you take away public archives, this means that only obsessive lunatics and the wealthy will be able to wield archived material as an instrument of power. Our culture definitely needs to evolve a little and become more forgiving of youthful ignorance. That's really the only long-term solution. Perhaps this i…

I think you're right, that ultimately society needs to mature and realize that everyone did something stupid in their past and at some point has thought/said/done stupid things. We should hold people accountable when they refuse to change, but right now we're missing the rehabilitation aspect of all this and just focusing on the punishment.

Again, I really don't have an answer. I would err on the side of caution and say IA should continue to back stuff up and it's wrong to set up the time-bombs that also affect IA. But I do feel we need a way to accommodate some privacy still without silencing people outright for just plain dumb opinions and ideas.

Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#237
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple solution: don't publish things you don't want people to read. This is no different to burning books that the authors no longer support the views in.

That's actually pretty different. If you purchase a book, you pay for a copy with the expectation of both parties that you own that copy. Putting someone else's work on a different website and serving it to others would be similar to printing copies of someone else's books. If the author changes his views, it wouldn't be acceptable for someone else to print new copies of the book. Making a copy of a website for your…

>If the author changes his views, it wouldn't be acceptable for someone else to print new copies of the book.

That depends entirely on the publishing contract's rights reversion stipulations. An author deciding that they do not want their book to continue being printed, purely because they have changed their views, will often find that they have very little legal right to do so.

Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#238
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, it's getting harder every day to find DRM-free content. For audio, CDs are getting out of fashion, and piracy channels lack the seeders because everybody is on Spotify.

What do you mean? Google and Amazon both sell DRM free music. (Apple might too, I've just been out of that ecosystem for so long that I don't really remember)

I buy almost all of my music through Bandcamp these days. The nice thing there is that I can buy digital, vinyls, and sometimes even CDs or cassette tapes.

Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#239
post #216

Hmm, all they got to do is have a dynamic robots.txt that forbids wayback from the deleted articles, and they'll remove the workaround even. yes?

Once it's stored I imagine they don't need to even scrape the page again, so robots.txt wouldn't do anything.

Internet archive does rescrape periodically, and it removes archived pages based on the current robots.txt. This behavior is documented behavior of the archive that goes beyond the normal conventions of robots.txt.

Re: Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

#240
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the author changes his views, it wouldn't be acceptable for someone else to print new copies of the book. When the author burns their own book and forbids new ones from being made is the only time that it's acceptable to print new copies. Need I remind you of the purpose of copyright? >To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to…

>When the author burns their own book and forbids new ones from being made is the only time that it's acceptable to print new copies. Do you mean acceptable from a legal point of view? Because I seriously doubt that it is.

Without that view, we wouldn't have most of the works by Kafka.
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