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Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

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Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#221

Post by 3pt14159 »

headmelted wrote: post #199
3pt14159 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that if this becomes widespread then we're going to get into copyright claims against the wayback machine. When I write content it is mine. I don't even let Facebook crawlers index it because I don't want it appearing on their platform. I'm happy to have wayback machine archive it, but that's with the understanding that it is a backup, not an authoritative or primary source. Ideally, links would be able…

But it’s also not guaranteed to be consistent. What if you don’t delete the content but just change it? (I.e. what if your opinions change or you’re pressured to edit information by a third party?).

I addressed this.

> I can still write updates to a blog piece or add translations that people send in and everyone benefits from the dynamic nature of content, while still being able to either fallback or verify content at the time it was publish via the wayback machine.

Updates are usually good. Sometimes you need to verify what was said though, and for that wayback machine works. I agree it would be nice if there was a technical way to support both, but for the average web request it's better to link to the source.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#222

Post by javajosh »

jhallenworld wrote: post #205
markjgraham wrote: post #197

We suggest/encourage people link to original URLs but ALSO (as opposed to instead of) provide Wayback Machine URLs so that if/when the original URLs go bad (link rot) the archive URL is available, or to give people a way to compare the content associated with a given URL over time (content drift) BTW, we archive all outlinks from all Wikipedia articles from all Wikipedia sites, in near-real-time... so that we are abl…

It's interesting to think about how HTML could be modified to fix the issue. Initial thought: along with HREF, provide AREF- a list of archive links. The browser could automatically try a backup if the main one fails. The user should be able to right-click the link to select a specific backup. Another idea is to allow the web-page author to provide a rewrite rule to automatically generate wayback machine (or whatever…

So this is a little indirect, but it does avoid the case where the Wayback machine goes down (or is subverted): include a HASHREF which is a hash of the state of the content when linked. Then you could find the resource using the content-addressable system of your choice. (Including, it must be said, the wayback machine itself).

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#223

Post by fwip »

falcolas wrote: post #195
marcus_holmes wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree. I know that journalism (as a discipline) considers this ethical. I kinda get that this is part of the newspaper industry as a public service - that withdrawing publication of something, or changing it without alerting the reader to the change, alters the historical record. But no-one has a problem with other creative industries withdrawing their publications. Film-makers are forever deciding tha…

This has a very easy answer for me: It's not ethical for film makers to decide that movies are no longer available. Copyright was created to encourage publication of information, not to squirrel it away. Copyright should be considered the exception of the standard - public domain.

Why not?

Is it unacceptable for an artist to throw her art away after it has finished its museum tour? Should a parent hang on to every drawing their child has ever made?

If you are a software developer - is all of the code you've ever written still accessible online, for free? (To the legal extent that you are able, of course.)

Have you written a blog before, or did you have a MySpace? Have you taken care to make sure your creative work has been preserved in perpetuity, regardless on how you feel about the artistic value of displaying your teen emotions?

Consider why you feel it is unethical for the author or persons responsible for the work to ever stop selling it.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#224

Post by falcolas »

fwip wrote: post #223
falcolas wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has a very easy answer for me: It's not ethical for film makers to decide that movies are no longer available. Copyright was created to encourage publication of information, not to squirrel it away. Copyright should be considered the exception of the standard - public domain.

Why not? Is it unacceptable for an artist to throw her art away after it has finished its museum tour? Should a parent hang on to every drawing their child has ever made? If you are a software developer - is all of the code you've ever written still accessible online, for free? (To the legal extent that you are able, of course.) Have you written a blog before, or did you have a MySpace? Have you taken care to make su…

> Is it unacceptable for an artist to throw her art away after it has finished its museum tour? Should a parent hang on to every drawing their child has ever made?

This boils down to the public domain, IMO. We have made a long practice of rescuing art from private caches and trash bins to make them publicly available after the artists' passing (the copyright expiring); regardless of their views on what should happen with those works.

> Consider why you feel it is unethical for the author or persons responsible for the work to ever stop selling it.

Selling something and then pulling it down is fundamentally an attempt to create scarcity for something that would otherwise be freely available. It's a marketing technique that capitalizes on our fear of missing out to make a sale.

Again, the right to even sell writings was enshrined in law as an exception to the norm of of it immediately being part of the public domain, in an effort to encourage more writing.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#225

Post by roberto »

sseneca wrote: post #24
romwell wrote: post #3

Good idea, by why not both (i.e. link to a webpage, and to the Archive)? Linking to Archive only makes Archive a single point of failure.

Yes, this makes the most sense in my opinion: Check out [this link]( https://... ) ([archived]( https://...) ) This can also help in the event of a "hug of death"

This is what I do on my blog, with some additional metadata:

    

      
        Aeroglyphs
      
      
        [archived]
      
      is an ongoing series of photos of nature with superimposed geometrical shapes drawn by drones.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#226

Post by fwip »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #155
marcus_holmes wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. I guess the answer is "don't mess with your old site", but that's also impractical. And I'm sorry, but if it's my site, then it's my site. I reserve the right to mess about with it endlessly. Including taking down a post for whatever reason I like. I'm sorry if that conflicts with someone else's need for everything to stay the same but it's my site. Also, if you're linking to my article, and I decide…

I certainly don't know about legal rights, but I think the ethical thing is to make sure that any writings published as freely accessible should remain so forever. What would people think if an author went into every library in the world to yank out one of their books they no longer want to be seen? I do think the author is wrong to immediately post links to archived versions of sources. At the least, he could link t…

Why is that the most ethical thing to do?

As a motivating example, I wrote some stuff on my MySpace page as a teenager that I'm very glad is no longer available. They were published as "freely accessible" and indeed, I wanted people to see it. But when I read it back 15 years later, I was more than a little embarrassed about it, and I deleted it - despite it also having comments from my friends at the time, or being referenced in their pages.

No great value was contained in those works.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#227

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

bad_user wrote: post #88
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if your personal site is, like so many others these days, on shared IP hosting like Cloudflare, AWS, Fastly, Azure, etc. In the case of Cloudflare, for example, we as users are not reaching the target site, we are just accessing a CDN. The nice thing about archive.org is that it does not require SNI. (Cloudflare's TLS1.3 and ESNI works quite well AFAICT but they are the only CDN who has it working.) I think ther…

The "target site" is the URL from the author's domain, and Cloudflare is the domain's designated CDN. The user is reaching the server that the webmaster wants reachable. That's how the web works. > The nice thing about archive.org is that it does not require SNI I fail to see how that's even a thing to consider.

If the user follows an Internet Archive URL (or Google cache URL or BING cache URL or ...), then does she still she reach "the server the webmaster wants reachable".

SNI, more specifically sending domain names in plaintext over the wire when using HTTPS, matters to the IETF because they have gone through the trouble of encrypting server certificate in TLS 1.3 and eventually they will be encrypting SNI. If you truly know "how the web works", then you should be able to figure out why they think domain names in plaintext is an issue.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#228

Post by ponker »

javajosh wrote: post #222
jhallenworld wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to think about how HTML could be modified to fix the issue. Initial thought: along with HREF, provide AREF- a list of archive links. The browser could automatically try a backup if the main one fails. The user should be able to right-click the link to select a specific backup. Another idea is to allow the web-page author to provide a rewrite rule to automatically generate wayback machine (or whatever…

So this is a little indirect, but it does avoid the case where the Wayback machine goes down (or is subverted): include a HASHREF which is a hash of the state of the content when linked. Then you could find the resource using the content-addressable system of your choice. (Including, it must be said, the wayback machine itself).

I've found that web pages have so much dynamic content these days that even something that feels relatively static generates two different hashes almost on every pageload.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#230

Post by a1369209993 »

javajosh wrote: post #222
jhallenworld wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to think about how HTML could be modified to fix the issue. Initial thought: along with HREF, provide AREF- a list of archive links. The browser could automatically try a backup if the main one fails. The user should be able to right-click the link to select a specific backup. Another idea is to allow the web-page author to provide a rewrite rule to automatically generate wayback machine (or whatever…

So this is a little indirect, but it does avoid the case where the Wayback machine goes down (or is subverted): include a HASHREF which is a hash of the state of the content when linked. Then you could find the resource using the content-addressable system of your choice. (Including, it must be said, the wayback machine itself).

> (Including, it must be said, the wayback machine itself).

Citation needed? Eg something like http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=http://haskell.cs.... produces lines of the form:

  edu,yale,cs,haskell)/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/haskell-report-1.2.pdf 20170628055823 http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/haskell-report-1.2.pdf warc/revisit - WVI3426JEX42SRMSYNK74V2B7IEIYHAS 563
But there seems to be no documented way to turn WVI3426JEX42SRMSYNK74V2B7IEIYHAS (which I presume to be the hash) into a actual file. (Though http://web.archive.org/web/$DATEim_/$URL works fine, so it hasn't been a problem in practice.)
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