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Internet Data Is Rotting

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Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#41

Post by Causality1 »

adossi wrote: post #14
Causality1 wrote: post #5

I read somewhere that the lifespan of the average hyperlink is only about two years. I count myself lucky I was introduced to the HTTRACK archiver program many years ago and thus have complete offline copies of many of my favorite websites of the early 00's.

Can you give some examples of these 'favorite websites'? I'm interested in knowing what kind of website would be so interesting that I would want an entire offline copy of it. (Besides maybe Wikipedia)

Mostly defunct webcomics but also some of the small personal sites that documented and collected resources for particular events or strange people. A lot of those arose out of the SomethingAwful forums. For example, there was a guy named Brian who wrote batshit insane fanfiction about himself. One of these sites archived the fiction, interviews with Brian, videos, recordings of collaborative reading skype parties, etc, all neatly on one site and now safely tucked away on my drives. Now I have a little piece of nostalgia from 2004 I can step back into.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#42

Post by dlkf »

dev_dull wrote: post #13

I’m okay with internet rot and you should be too. I’m not sure where we got the idea that “our data must be preserved forever”. This can be especially harmful for teens and young adults whose indiscretions now follow them forever. Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. Let it…

You are potentially conflating two different issues.

> Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever.

This is an excellent point, and I agree 100%. But it's not a priori obvious that we need to embrace internet rot to solve this problem. Perhaps we can work towards a future where privacy rights and digital literacy protect individuals from offense archaeology, and at the same time, work to preserve the knowledge, ideas, and sheer human weirdness that get posted every day (as long as the creators don't want it removed. My understanding is that the Internet Archive has explicitly stated that they are not interested in preserving stuff where there has been a takedown request.)

One might argue that we have to make a choice. This is touched on in the article - redundancy presents a tradeoff between persistence benefits and security/privacy risks. But we should examine this tradeoff more closely and see if there isn't a healthy middle ground before we ask for one side wholesale.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#43

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

gambler wrote: post #18
fooker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wget -r ?

No. There are some cases where it is useful to download many pages in a batch, but what I am talking about is, effectively, partial local replication. Bookmarking I describe should create a tiny (but useful) version of the web on your computer. It needs to be seamless. It needs to be searchable. It would be incredibly useful if it would capture relationships between pages (links) in addition to pages themselves to na…

You can't seamlessly replicate a REST server.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#44

Post by CGamesPlay »

gambler wrote: post #16

This needs to be solved on the protocol level. Of course, the players who have control over our protocols are exactly the people who don't want this to be solved at all. The next best thing would be to redefine what "bookmarking" is. When I bookmark a page, I want it to be permanently stored on my local machine and full-text indexed. In fact, it's rather ridiculous that after 25 years browsers don't have anything of…

Shameless plug: I built an app for that. It’s not super polished but it is at a point where I use it to store technical documentation that doesn’t ship with the software (aka docs for every Javascript package I use). It works for moderately complex JavaScript apps as well.

https://github.com/CGamesPlay/chronicler

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#45

Post by idle_zealot »

gambler wrote: post #18
fooker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wget -r ?

No. There are some cases where it is useful to download many pages in a batch, but what I am talking about is, effectively, partial local replication. Bookmarking I describe should create a tiny (but useful) version of the web on your computer. It needs to be seamless. It needs to be searchable. It would be incredibly useful if it would capture relationships between pages (links) in addition to pages themselves to na…

HTTrack does most of that, minus "seamless". You could probably write an extension that automatically sent bookmarked urls to HTTrack for mirroring/archival, then they would all be browsable offline.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#46

Post by griffinkelly »

GuiA wrote: post #15
dev_dull wrote: post #13

I’m okay with internet rot and you should be too. I’m not sure where we got the idea that “our data must be preserved forever”. This can be especially harmful for teens and young adults whose indiscretions now follow them forever. Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. Let it…

Letting MySpace rot is fine. As the article points out, a more concerning issue is that “universities, governments and scientific societies are struggling to preserve scientific data”.

I just went on my Myspace account for the first time in probably 10 years. It was like going into a broken time capsule. Some pictures from a different age, others are gone.

Such is life?

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#47

Post by return1 »

And that s a great thing! There is no reason to maintain everything, in fact the entire function of our brains is to filter out useful information from a cataclysm of sensory input. The internet figures out what to keep and what to throw away, the hard thing seems to be to willingly make it forget stuff.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#48

Post by return1 »

papln wrote: post #33
oceanplexian wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm OK with it because otherwise you are whitewashing history. For example I have recordings of the Colbert report going back to ~2005. Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019. Of course he, and mainstream broadcasting companies would love it if you didn't think about that. There are plenty of news clips and interviews where mainstream politicians (on Left AND Right) c…

Why is it so important to blame someone now for something they haven't said publicly in over 13 years?

Because he said it on public broadcast. And i believe public broadcasts are the least likely to be deleted from the internet. Private stuff , or things said in a small circle of social network friends are much less important.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#49

Post by return1 »

GuiA wrote: post #15
dev_dull wrote: post #13

I’m okay with internet rot and you should be too. I’m not sure where we got the idea that “our data must be preserved forever”. This can be especially harmful for teens and young adults whose indiscretions now follow them forever. Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. Let it…

Letting MySpace rot is fine. As the article points out, a more concerning issue is that “universities, governments and scientific societies are struggling to preserve scientific data”.

There will never be enough time to analyze that data anyways. Scientists are struggling to analyze their own data already. I think that is a known failure of contemporary science: too many small experiments that are often replicating each other.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#50

Post by rchaud »

oceanplexian wrote: post #21
dev_dull wrote: post #13

I’m okay with internet rot and you should be too. I’m not sure where we got the idea that “our data must be preserved forever”. This can be especially harmful for teens and young adults whose indiscretions now follow them forever. Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. Let it…

I'm OK with it because otherwise you are whitewashing history. For example I have recordings of the Colbert report going back to ~2005. Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019. Of course he, and mainstream broadcasting companies would love it if you didn't think about that. There are plenty of news clips and interviews where mainstream politicians (on Left AND Right) c…

> Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019.

Yeah, I'm going to need some proof for that. Eddie Murphy's '80s HBO standup routines are available in full on YouTube, and some of that material is absurdly homophobic. He isn't a pariah by any means.

People do see nuance and understand that values and mores change over time, and what might have been socially acceptable at one point, is no longer so.

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