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The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

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Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#311
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got frustrated with this one time when I tried to look up a defunct website in the Wayback Machine. The website was gone, but had been replaced by a domain squatter with a restrictive robots.txt. Because of the new roboots.txt, all of the old site was retroactively made unavailable. As time passes and more websites change hands, it would be a nice compromise if the default behavior was only to make retroactive dele…

Would be cool if this could be tied to SSL keys. Being able to serve requests with the same SSL key could be used as verification. (obviously some edge cases like people that are behind some kind of common SSL cert like a subdomain with shared hosting)

I think it would make more sense to tie the behaviour to the domain's whois record. If that changes significantly, chances are the domain has changed owners.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Yeah but for me, and probably many other people, it really felt like we were just on the verge of moving past all that. Up until about, say, 5-10 years ago. Now it feels like we took a sharp turn off a cliff, into some kind of feverish madness.

I'd say so too. I somehow tuned out religious fear of ideas, perhaps because I didn't really think of those people as even pretending to pretending to be intellectually honest. But now non-religious people from my own generation and younger are behaving that way too. Even intelligent and supposedly non-nutty people like computer programmers.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#313
post #282
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that policy to be morally wrong. If a site WAS accessible then that old version should continue to be until an active legal tool is used to request the offline archiving rather than free access as it was at the time of observation.

That's exactly what they do. They are treating "robots.txt" as an "active legal tool". You could argue that they should make it harder, but I doubt they want to find themselves in court over every little thing. Better to make it easy to block to avoid liability, and also easy to allow that block to lapse - if they forced you to get a court order to hide information, then the information would be gone forever.

An active legal tool might be as little as requiring an official claim of copyright and a related Cease and Desist to be mailed physically to them.

That would prevent the issue of domain squatters with robots.txt files in most cases, and offer the public a means of challenging such ownership requests (and freeing up the content on archive.org) if they desire.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#314
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be cool if this could be tied to SSL keys. Being able to serve requests with the same SSL key could be used as verification. (obviously some edge cases like people that are behind some kind of common SSL cert like a subdomain with shared hosting)

I think it would make more sense to tie the behaviour to the domain's whois record. If that changes significantly, chances are the domain has changed owners.

This is true, but the whois isn't really a highly official source.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#315
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it's still utilized to justify mass genocide by the state of its own citizens, and has happened multiple times and in greater numbers, let's just count this as the more dangerous book.

Which part exactly is it that is used to justify genocide? And how? This response suggests to me it is quite likely you haven't read it.

Playboy seldom ever directly suggests the exploitation of women, and yet somehow people who enjoy exploiting women read it.

Perhaps someone is not so adept at reading between the lines. Just a guess.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be wary of the "the far right does it therefore everyone else who does it is far right" fallacy. In particular, when a fact checker says that they need to do something about , _even though I personally dislike those political movements_, I know that they're probably biased.

What one fact checker says (or is rumored to have said) does not invalidate fact checking by everyone everywhere. In fact it does not even alter whether any given statement is true or false. But incredibly there are those who very comfortably dismiss things they acknowledge as true solely because they dislike the politics of the source. That overlooking falsehoods is acceptable in the scope of a larger political caus…

> What one fact checker says (or is rumored to have said) does not invalidate fact checking by everyone everywhere

It doesn't, but we're talking about that very fact checker, not fact checkers generally. And if you'd like to talk about fact checkers generally, then understand that very few people are opposed to fact checking generally, they're opposed to certain fact checkers that they believe are biased.

> In fact it does not even alter whether any given statement is true or false.

Yes, bias does affect whether certain statements are true or false. It can also be marshalled against one group to make them appear to be disproportionately full of shit. And they might actually _be_ full of shit, but if you are biased against them anyway no one knows whether you're full of shit or they're full of shit or both.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#317
post #272
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like that too but the government will make laws and all the peers from the p2p network will get scared

There is an argument to be made that archival and distribution are two different things. There are justifiable cases where you might want to remove something from the public internet. Some problems of p2p distributed proposals is that the only way to take down a single bit is to dismantle the entire network. In this sense a federated system is objectively better.

> There is an argument to be made that archival and distribution are two different things.

of course download and upload are 2 different things...

which is why Torrent users often get emails about their download activities...

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#318
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which part exactly is it that is used to justify genocide? And how? This response suggests to me it is quite likely you haven't read it.

Playboy seldom ever directly suggests the exploitation of women, and yet somehow people who enjoy exploiting women read it. Perhaps someone is not so adept at reading between the lines. Just a guess.

Ok, so which paragraphs is it we should read what between the lines from,then?

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#319
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would make more sense to tie the behaviour to the domain's whois record. If that changes significantly, chances are the domain has changed owners.

This is true, but the whois isn't really a highly official source.

Actually, it is. It's the TLD registrar's record.

The usefulness of WHOIS has been declining precipitously, largely as useful information has been horribly misused and abused.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#320
post #317
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an argument to be made that archival and distribution are two different things. There are justifiable cases where you might want to remove something from the public internet. Some problems of p2p distributed proposals is that the only way to take down a single bit is to dismantle the entire network. In this sense a federated system is objectively better.

> There is an argument to be made that archival and distribution are two different things. of course download and upload are 2 different things... which is why Torrent users often get emails about their download activities...

This meaning that a closed archive is still a valuable archive.

(For torrents I believe that there is (in many jurisdictions) a presumption that if you are downloading torrents then you are automatically guilty of distributions; similarly how in many places being drunk in a turned off car can be sufficient for a DUI)

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