11–20 of 188 posts
Personally, I think eternally archiving everything and infinitely available public data has been not-so-great. If this was an "archive with consent" sort of system, then sure. My response may be better summarized as, "Does IA support robots.txt, and if not why?"
The feature I most want from the Internet Archive is the ability to donate them an old domain name and enough cash to renew it for the next hundred years such that they can keep an archived version of a site available (without breaking any incoming links) for a very long time. They would also need to be able to handle legal administration costs of things like DMCA take-down notices, but I assume they already have to…
The feature I most want from the Internet Archive is the ability to donate them an old domain name and enough cash to renew it for the next hundred years such that they can keep an archived version of a site available (without breaking any incoming links) for a very long time. They would also need to be able to handle legal administration costs of things like DMCA take-down notices, but I assume they already have to…
It wouldn't be hard to maintain a hand-crafted database of when domains are reused for something completely different, or even when the same conceptual website has breakages, and use that to choose between Internet Archive or live web accordingly. When one is browsing from an internet archive page, the date is known, when someone is browsing from a live website, heuristics can be used, along with "bisecting" dates when the link is dead.
Ultimately we want more content addressing to avoid this problem entirely (see below), Or DNS -> PubKey, PubKey -> latest content, with some law that the pubkeys shall not be reused for unrelated things. vs DNS which is mere ephemeral Huffman encoding. So see below for the stuff on IPFS. But the trick above is a good stop-gap, and indeed the database itself used to back the extension could be on IPFS.
Personally, I think eternally archiving everything and infinitely available public data has been not-so-great. If this was an "archive with consent" sort of system, then sure. My response may be better summarized as, "Does IA support robots.txt, and if not why?"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this problem the ideal use case for projects like IPFS? Anyone interested to preserve the content can join as a node to balance the load, right? And if so, why don't we see widespread adoption?
That is to say, IPFS doesn't help if the desire blooms after the nodes dry up. Things could still be lost.
Personally, I think eternally archiving everything and infinitely available public data has been not-so-great. If this was an "archive with consent" sort of system, then sure. My response may be better summarized as, "Does IA support robots.txt, and if not why?"
You're consenting by posting it on public internet in the first place.
And requiring an explicit opt-in would basically mean no IA.
To be clear, the IA is a positive, maybe even a great one. But it skirts by because most people don't care. (They did as you say post whatever on the public internet.) Add the facts that they're a non-profit, aren't trying to monetize their hosting, and will generally take things if the owner asks.
Libraries and other archives have some very limited special rights (which mostly relate to making physical backups of physical books). But invoking "library" isn't some general get out of jail free card with respect to copyright.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this problem the ideal use case for projects like IPFS? Anyone interested to preserve the content can join as a node to balance the load, right? And if so, why don't we see widespread adoption?
I was involved with planning https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/ for just this reason --- hopefully we will finally be able to start work on it sometime too far off. Indeed the real challenge of archival is not loosing the stuff, by making sure that people can still find the stuff. "Orphaned" information that no one knows exists, or is bothering to interact with, isn't that valuable compared to resources t…
Of course, ensuring that there's persistence of attention as well is a tougher problem. But one only needs to look at sites like https://reddit.com/r/tumblr to realize that there is immense societal interest in "meme archaeology." Reducing the barriers to entry to would-be archaeologists, giving them a "chain" of breadcrumbs that lead to content, and building communities that will socially reward people for their archaeology work, is the best thing we can possibly do.
that would be a huge and expensive paradigm shift for internet service backends that traditionally have been only designed to be run by one entity and typically are a mix of custom, open source and proprietary software that is run in a specific way.
i suppose it could be done, but there hasn't been any reason to make that investment. service backends also tend to be more "living software" where part of the system is the team that continuously builds, updates and operates it.
basically, it would look something like java applets, but for entire internet service backends. one step and all the services, databases, everything would spin up and start serving. that would be great but is probably a ways out.
Doesn’t IA already partner with Cloudflare to do exactly what Carmack is suggesting.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-always-online-and-th...
Personally, I think eternally archiving everything and infinitely available public data has been not-so-great. If this was an "archive with consent" sort of system, then sure. My response may be better summarized as, "Does IA support robots.txt, and if not why?"
Trying to muddle in privacy concerns with the accumulation of public knowledge undermines the whole concept of a shared society, or there being even the potential of accumulating "progress" in the first place.
Also, historically speaking, people with means used to save their letters for posterity, which proved to be a very valuable resource for future academics, so the idea of, what, deleting all your proton mails and signal messages as encouraged is arguably overshooting the return to some pre-internet norm.