221–230 of 323 posts
9/11 in the Archive. Go look at all the news websites on September 10th, 2001... and back about a month or two. All empty until 9/11.
Na I remember pretty well, there was literally nothing in the news for months before that, top story was shark attacks or something.
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> It's currently in-vogue to be scared of and hate nazi's. For some reason though that sentiment never took root against communists. It did, there was plenty of paranoia and hatred of communists during the Cold War days, we just never fought an actual war against communists (edit: except in Vietnam and Korea, I forgot that for some reason...) Of course, a lot of that Red Scare stuff was just a thin coat of patriotic…
> What is in-vogue, however, is to be a nazi (little n, colloquial meaning, because I know sometimes people like to be pedantic) amongst the American right and alt-right, as the current American President's election has coincided with a revival of right-wing populism and white supremacist identity politics. Can I offer a different perspective? A vocal minority on the left likes to assert that everyone on the right is…
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You do realize you're describing quite a lot of popular books such as the Quran and the Communist Manifesto, right? You want to quarantine them to research labs only? How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas? Have you run out of real problems to worry about? Or are you just too young and naive to realize that ideas aren't simply good and evil and that, alone, they don't cause people to do th…
>How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas? Catholics used to attack Evangelicals. You see the Evangelicals had dangerous ideas that had to be eliminate lest the common folk would be lead astray. People have always been afraid of ideas. This nonreligious religiosity is novel but we've seen this play before.
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And they would be wrong. Liberation literature is not in the same category as hate screeds. I don't buy the moral abdication you're selling. You know what's evil - it's the stuff full of race hate and misogyny. There is no moral equivalence.
Assuming you agree with this, then why is Das Kapitall less dangerous/hateful/offensive/objectionable than Mein Kampf? The death toll is 50-80 million people from each book individually. That's the impact. Are you saying that the intent should be considered more important here? If so, why?
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I'd rather not have a manual for starting a neo-nazi race war archived to be honest
I think it's worth discussing this comment instead of downvoting it. There was a lot of controversy around the copyright expiration of Mein Kampf in Germany a few years ago. The Bavarian government owned the copyright and refused to allow it to be printed. When the copyright expired, annotated versions were released, putting the book in context. There are certain disadvantages that not printing had: making the book m…
If they really want to be trusted as a source of truth, they need to find a way to publish cryptographic signatures of every page that can be validated to prove that the page was captured when they say it was. Maybe some sort of blockchain. Otherwise there's no reason to trust that an Internet Archive snapshot is an accurate representation of the archived page.
Better than crypto stuff which might not scale well would be to have multiple independent archives run by people with a diversity of political views and nationalities. The authenticity can be easily verified if the same page is archived to a site run by left-wing people in San Francisco and also a site run by right-wing people in London.
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Honestly, no it's not. When society doesn't just ban, but abhor Nazis, then Nazi groups are small. There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot. When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread. And when society permits it to be mainstream politics, you're one solid resistance movement away from genocid…
> Honestly, no it's not. When society doesn't just ban, but abhor Nazis, then Nazi groups are small. There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot. > When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread. There's a lot of certainty in the way you are saying it. I'm not saying you are wrong, but do you have an…
I don't know if censorship is the answer. But because our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice.
*By true honest dialog I mean actual dialogs between people that try to convince each other with the goal of understanding where there is agreememt. And where there isn't one, where it stems from, and how it can be mitigated by some synthesis of opinions. This, as opposed to one sided commentary that it's goal is only to discredit the other side by focusing on disagreements and inducing fear and radicalization in your intended audience.
> But Mr Graham argued that simply removing false information or offensive content isn’t necessarily the answer. Hateful material need not remain publicly available, he said, but certain researchers and politicians should be able to study it. They're planting the seed and seeing how the public reacts. This is ridiculous! Mark something "controversial", "possibly fake", but don't memory-hole us. An archive only archiv…
It reminds me of the famous photo that Stalin had altered to remove a person from, so as to erase them from history entirely. I don't think the practice magically becomes acceptable just because you promise to keep the original copy locked away in a vault somewhere for an elite class of special people to access (who both happen to be members of deep institutional structures with a long history of abusing their power)…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So... Hence the "In the Soviet Union, the future is known with certainty. It's the past that keeps changing." joke.
Archiving everything published by any institution as immediately-and-systematically as possible, in a cryptographically sealed and timestamped (blockchain!) publicly accessible form, may prove precious when it comes to fight such behavior. However, as usual, somebody has to fund this effort, and most institutions may not be willing to do so.
If they really want to be trusted as a source of truth, they need to find a way to publish cryptographic signatures of every page that can be validated to prove that the page was captured when they say it was. Maybe some sort of blockchain. Otherwise there's no reason to trust that an Internet Archive snapshot is an accurate representation of the archived page.
I wouldn't say "no reason", I'd just say that it should be self-aware that they are functionally similar to a news website in that they live and die on their reputation. The second someone can demonstrate that they've manually misrepresented some archived page they lose nearly all of that credibility. Better than crypto stuff which might not scale well would be to have multiple independent archives run by people with…
Running a general internet archive isn't cheap, so it's not like there would be dozens of them.
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Apparently, we need a storage capacity breakthrough so that everyone can store everything so that we do not have to relay on what someone else say is acceptable.
That will never work. Data will always expand to use up all available storage. It's like trying to build more roads when your city has a traffic problem. You build roads to reduce traffic and improve commute times, and then more people start commuting from further away.
Or think of it this way: the lifetime output of George R.R. Martin is <10MB. The output of 100000 writers like him could fit in a 1TB drive ($50). If everyone in the US was as prolific as GRRM, you could archive their lifetime output for $150000. Everyone in the world, $5 million. That's 1/20th of the investment that Juicero got.