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An update on Wayback Machine access

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Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#31

Post by xp84 »

dallen33 wrote: post #11
swingandamiss wrote: post #10

[flagged]

Yeah cuz X is fucking shitty, why would I want to give them any traffic?

Then... don't? If it sucks so much why do you need to read the tweets?

Great take: "This private website is owned by a man I don't like, so I refuse to pay for it - or even give it the possibility to monetize my traffic with ads!"

Still quite mainstream take: "... so I'll use an adblocker on it"

Immature take: "This private website that I hate and boycott is also an important part of our culture, but the posts on it are too important and valuable to ignore, so I'll use a proxy to scrape it"

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#32

Post by ronsor »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #21
simonw wrote: post #3

> Here’s what’s going on. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we’ve put protections in place to keep the service running. I'm pretty certain this is scrapers that are trying to workaround blocks on accessing original sites by hitting the Wayback Machine copy instead. Appalling behavior. In addition to the load it puts on this vital non-profit piece of Int…

It is. They will most likely eventually need to move to a walled model for Wayback due to scraper aggressiveness (like Reddit deprecating anonymous old.reddit.com), or behind Cloudflare for aggressive bot and scraping protection. Hard to defend against abuse of a public resource when its intent is public access with as little restriction as possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons (no affiliatio…

Reddit has no excuses for the anonymous old.reddit.com removal; they're simply greedy.

On the other hand, the Internet Archive is a non-profit offering a free public resource.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#33

Post by ValentineC »

gambiting wrote: post #29
bsimpson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an open secret that you can often circumvent paywalls by searching Wayback.

Every single paid article linked on HN has the way back machine link as the very first comment.

The links are usually to Archive.today (aka archive.ph and a bunch of other domains), not Wayback Machine (which is run by Internet Archive).

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#34

Post by celsoazevedo »

Onavo wrote: post #6
croes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s one thing to archive other companies content, it’s another to sell the access to it

That's for the lawyers to sort out, they have a lot of flexibility as a US nonprofit. The case law isn't that clear cut for this.

They need access to sites to archive them. It's already hard to do it as it is, imagine if they start selling access to content. They'd be shooting themselves on the foot, independently of what the law says.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#37

Post by bonoboTP »

faefox wrote: post #15
croes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s one thing to archive other companies content, it’s another to sell the access to it

Yeah, who does the Internet Archive think it is, (insert literally any AI company here)?

Which AI company is selling access to reliable verbatim copies of websites? I don't mean "it may regurgitate a paragraph", but as a reliable service where you can repeatably get website content snapshots to a reliability level that makes such a use case viable?

Using the information for training purposes is not the same thing. Not legally the same and otherwise.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#39

Post by toomuchtodo »

ronsor wrote: post #32
toomuchtodo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. They will most likely eventually need to move to a walled model for Wayback due to scraper aggressiveness (like Reddit deprecating anonymous old.reddit.com), or behind Cloudflare for aggressive bot and scraping protection. Hard to defend against abuse of a public resource when its intent is public access with as little restriction as possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons (no affiliatio…

Reddit has no excuses for the anonymous old.reddit.com removal; they're simply greedy. On the other hand, the Internet Archive is a non-profit offering a free public resource.

Examples provided as technical examples, strong feelings are out of scope for this thread.
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