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Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

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Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#31

Post by aeturnum »

chx wrote: post #12
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry to hear this. I will make an additional donation on your behalf. I can appreciate how authors feel, but they must also realize copyright laws are asymmetrical (tilted heavily towards copyright owners) and in these times, many have no access to their local public library. They are essentially robbed of access to the book materials their tax dollars (which pays an author) have paid for during this time. It’s…

I also find it amusing that sofware developers do not recognize any more how we are on the same side in this fight. Imagine if we were still selling boxed software and they decided that in light of COVID-19 they just hand it out with a two week limit. It's an imperfect comparison but the current situation is not a reason to just discard the law. It might not be the best law, the place to fight that is in Congress and…

I mean, imagine they did.

So a huge group of people get to try your software for free. There's a system to try and cut them off at two weeks but it might fail. This is basically free marketing. All sorts of people who may never have tried your software try it. Nearly all of them don't buy it, but some do. It doesn't cost you any money and you're able to help people in need.

There's evidence that, in general, piracy lowers sales, but the specifics are complex and uncertain[1]. Piracy can have positive impacts on the fortunes of the original artist. I think that a crisis like this is exactly the time to try new and experimental ways of making things available.

[1] https://marketly.com/does-piracy-impact-sales/

Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#32

Post by chrisseaton »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #2

archive.org feels like an irreplaceable treasure, the Wayback Machine alone is a time capsule of our digital history. I donate to them monthly and know a lot of other people do as well, so I don't worry much about their financial stability. I'm more worried about external pressures taking content down. I hope the data is backed up six ways to sunday, and that somewhere there's a plan to make it all accessible if Inte…

> archive.org feels like an irreplaceable treasure

Yes I save some dead sites that I think are critically important resources to tarballs that I'm storing separately in case the Wayback Machine disappears.

Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#33

Post by badsectoracula »

chx wrote: post #12
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry to hear this. I will make an additional donation on your behalf. I can appreciate how authors feel, but they must also realize copyright laws are asymmetrical (tilted heavily towards copyright owners) and in these times, many have no access to their local public library. They are essentially robbed of access to the book materials their tax dollars (which pays an author) have paid for during this time. It’s…

I also find it amusing that sofware developers do not recognize any more how we are on the same side in this fight. Imagine if we were still selling boxed software and they decided that in light of COVID-19 they just hand it out with a two week limit. It's an imperfect comparison but the current situation is not a reason to just discard the law. It might not be the best law, the place to fight that is in Congress and…

> Imagine if we were still selling boxed software and they decided that in light of COVID-19 they just hand it out with a two week limit.

You mean like shareware?

Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#34

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

They increased the bandwidth and traffic immediately filled the new capacity. While this could be just a faster web site attracting more users / users were giving up due to slow loads before, it could also indicate that they have a lot of automated traffic that will consume whatever resources are available and can be throttled without endangering their mission.

I hope they'll look into it, find a way to identify that traffic, and then (ideally) classify it accordingly and continue to serve it only after all human traffic has been served (i.e. if they run into a bandwidth crunch due to bots, only the bots suffer, and they don't need to upgrade as quickly).

Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#35

Post by aesh2Xa1 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #32
mostlysimilar wrote: post #2

archive.org feels like an irreplaceable treasure, the Wayback Machine alone is a time capsule of our digital history. I donate to them monthly and know a lot of other people do as well, so I don't worry much about their financial stability. I'm more worried about external pressures taking content down. I hope the data is backed up six ways to sunday, and that somewhere there's a plan to make it all accessible if Inte…

> archive.org feels like an irreplaceable treasure Yes I save some dead sites that I think are critically important resources to tarballs that I'm storing separately in case the Wayback Machine disappears.

That's useful for personal use. I think that the IPFS is designed for this purpose as well, but meant to be accessible to anyone.

Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#36

Post by chrisseaton »

aesh2Xa1 wrote: post #35
chrisseaton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> archive.org feels like an irreplaceable treasure Yes I save some dead sites that I think are critically important resources to tarballs that I'm storing separately in case the Wayback Machine disappears.

That's useful for personal use. I think that the IPFS is designed for this purpose as well, but meant to be accessible to anyone.

Well the idea is I can provide it publicly (not sure how... don't know how they get the copyright to do it) myself in the future if needed.

Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#37

Post by therealcamino »

mcherm wrote: post #26
chx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find it amusing that sofware developers do not recognize any more how we are on the same side in this fight. Imagine if we were still selling boxed software and they decided that in light of COVID-19 they just hand it out with a two week limit. It's an imperfect comparison but the current situation is not a reason to just discard the law. It might not be the best law, the place to fight that is in Congress and…

> Imagine if we were still selling boxed software and they decided that in light of COVID-19 they just hand it out with a two week limit. I think that is a fair comparison. As a software developer, I would JUMP at the opportunity to do that. Partly because it would be an opportunity to help sustain the world through this time of crisis at no real cost to myself (perhaps some opportunity cost). And partly because it w…

That's not quite what happened here -- your software is given away whether or not you want to jump on that opportunity, because they don't care what you want. If you happen to notice what's going on, you can ask them to stop. And you don't get any goodwill from giving it away, because it was the Internet Archive and not you that made the gesture.

Honestly they would have gotten huge buy-in from authors if they'd bothered to ask. What bothers me more is the intellectual dishonesty of their FAQ's.

Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#38

Post by airstrike »

endgame wrote: post #21
makomk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments aren't the only ones overwriting old information with new either. The BBC has developed an annoying habit of completely overwriting old articles about Covid-19 with new, semi-related ones, meaning that the only way to see what they were saying earlier in the pandemic is through sites like the Internet Archive. There's also at least one outright correction that only seems to exist on the Internet Archive n…

Here's another one: "some of our old tweets were wrong so we just quietly deleted them lol": https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/1242537366620966912

Related https://twitter.com/nyt_diff

Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#39

Post by therealcamino »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #29
therealcamino wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As an aside, many SaaS products have given away their product for free due to COVID and widespread forced WFH." I'm sure a lot of authors would have contributed their work to the effort, if they'd been asked. But they weren't asked. It's difficult to imagine how you'd similarly force SaaS companies to give away their products for free during the pandemic -- lucky for them -- but if you found a way to do it technical…

Honest question: how do you propose a non profit online library ask every author for written permission, while also considering the legal interests of their publishers?

Sounds difficult, but not a justification for breaking copyright laws, or interfering with people's livelihoods without asking.

Re: Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth

#40

Post by cperciva »

est31 wrote: post #17

60 Gbit/s of continuous traffic is a lot. If I'm reading the graphs right, Wikipedia "only" has 13.4 Gbit/s of outbound traffic [1]. Of course still well below the single-digit Tbit/s traffic of large internet exchanges [2] [3], but still unexpectedly large. [1]: adding up the outbound numbers for each datacenter: 1.888 + 8.003 + 810 + 1.958 + 807: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000605/datacenter-global-... [2]:…

60 Gbps is about 1/3 of the traffic served by a single Netflix CDN node.
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