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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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Na I remember pretty well, there was literally nothing in the news for months before that, top story was shark attacks or something.

9/10/2001: Donald Rumsfeld admitting that $2.3 trillion was unaccounted for from the Defense budget. Backpage story for sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU

o_0

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#282
post #83

I like that the internet archive exists, but I don't like how they implement their opt-out policy. Sites can opt-out at any time, which I suppose is the correct thing to allow, but once they opt out then everything the Archive has gathered up to that point also goes away, which seems wrong.

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.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t go away, it’s just not public. This is to comply with copyright law. It’s still safely stored on disk.

Okay, if they have no choice in it then I understand. But as for keeping a copy on disk that practically no one can ever see, to me that strikes seems like a distinction without a difference.

The block requires active maintenance in the form of robots.txt. If the domain owner allows robots.txt to lapse, the content is automatically republished.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#284

I like that the internet archive exists, but I don't like how they implement their opt-out policy. Sites can opt-out at any time, which I suppose is the correct thing to allow, but once they opt out then everything the Archive has gathered up to that point also goes away, which seems wrong.

The archive needs to provide some extra-legal mechanism to allow people to hide data - otherwise they'll be in court all the time. The advantage of this system is that it runs both ways - sites can also neglect to opt out, having previously done so, which immediately republishes all the data.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#286
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is in-vogue, however, is to be a nazi (little n, colloquial meaning, because I know sometimes people like to be pedantic) amongst the American right and alt-right, as the current American President's election has coincided with a revival of right-wing populism and white supremacist identity politics. Can I offer a different perspective? A vocal minority on the left likes to assert that everyone on the right is…

As an european, seeing the american far right make a hold-up on so-called "western civ" is deeply unsettling. The thing they promote as rooted in "western civ" and say is shared among "westerners" is not related to anything I know here. It is also surprising to hear about the opposition to "multi-culturalism" when Europe has never had one single culture. So please if you want to promote that thing of yours, stop call…

You aren't clear in what things you claim the "far right" is advocating but I'm guessing it isn't the things that I think the right is advocating like:

    * individual rights
    * equality for women
    * limited government (especially at the national level)
    * free market economics
    * personal responsibility
    * separation of church and state
You are probably right that there are some things that are more American than European (expansive free speech rights, gun ownership), but I was trying to keep things simple by saying "western civ". The right wants to welcome people who support these ideas and shun people who don't support these ideas.

As for multiculturalism, your comments suggest that your use of that term is not the same as mine. Multiculturalism from the left is not about assimilating people from disparate cultures but instead is about insisting that the ideas I listed above aren't to be valued and instead all cultures and ideologies are to be accepted as is, leading to balkanization, discord, and the devaluation of the ideas that have made the "West" and America successful.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#287
post #203

> But Mr Graham argued that simply removing false information or offensive content isn’t necessarily the answer. Hateful material need not remain publicly available, he said, but certain researchers and politicians should be able to study it. They're planting the seed and seeing how the public reacts. This is ridiculous! Mark something "controversial", "possibly fake", but don't memory-hole us. An archive only archiv…

It reminds me of the famous photo that Stalin had altered to remove a person from, so as to erase them from history entirely. I don't think the practice magically becomes acceptable just because you promise to keep the original copy locked away in a vault somewhere for an elite class of special people to access (who both happen to be members of deep institutional structures with a long history of abusing their power)…

There's an interesting contemporary case of this going on regarding tobacco advertising. Because it's illegal in certain jurisdictions to distribute tobacco advertisements, some historical photographs have to be doctored for distribution there.

Take a look at the MP4/4 F1 race car shown on McLaren's website for an example: https://www.mclaren.com/racing/heritage/cars/1988-formula-1-...

Compared to an unedited version of the car: https://www.motorsport.com/f1/photos/ayrton-senna-mclaren-mp...

They even do this to videos of old races.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#288
post #83

I like that the internet archive exists, but I don't like how they implement their opt-out policy. Sites can opt-out at any time, which I suppose is the correct thing to allow, but once they opt out then everything the Archive has gathered up to that point also goes away, which seems wrong.

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.

Well get to it then.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#289
post #203

> But Mr Graham argued that simply removing false information or offensive content isn’t necessarily the answer. Hateful material need not remain publicly available, he said, but certain researchers and politicians should be able to study it. They're planting the seed and seeing how the public reacts. This is ridiculous! Mark something "controversial", "possibly fake", but don't memory-hole us. An archive only archiv…

It reminds me of the famous photo that Stalin had altered to remove a person from, so as to erase them from history entirely. I don't think the practice magically becomes acceptable just because you promise to keep the original copy locked away in a vault somewhere for an elite class of special people to access (who both happen to be members of deep institutional structures with a long history of abusing their power)…

There are old Looney Tunes (Bugs Bunny) cartoons from the 1940's, when America was at war with Japan - there's an episode titled "Bugs nips the Nips" that includes some very politically incorrect Japanese caricatures. They're working overtime to make this one disappear as though it had never existed.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#290

If they really want to be trusted as a source of truth, they need to find a way to publish cryptographic signatures of every page that can be validated to prove that the page was captured when they say it was. Maybe some sort of blockchain. Otherwise there's no reason to trust that an Internet Archive snapshot is an accurate representation of the archived page.

That's the opposite of what they're trying to do, though. They're not trying to preserve what was printed, but to get rid of some of those things entirely as if they had never existed.
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