I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked • Hacker News Board

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#291

Post by ptx » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 6:06 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #275

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different. For one, it was largely un-monetised. There were no banner ads, no ad trackers, no giant shopping sites, no market-driven content design. But many ISPs offered free web space, and HTML 1.0 was so simple almost anyone could hack together a basic site with a plain vanilla text editor. So people did. For fun. Lots and lots of them. It looked…

> There were no banner ads There were, however, tons of animated 'under construction' banners, which gave the same 'visual noise' problem.

You could stop all animations on a page by pressing escape (or the stop button, I think) in Netscape, but Firefox removed that feature a while back.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#292

Post by toptalkedbooks » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 6:12 AM UTC

I curious why you did that, but you did a nice job.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#293

Post by kwhitefoot » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 6:33 AM UTC

bootsz wrote: post #53

garethsprice wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all information on the Internet is created equal and not all information needs to be available in perpetuity. "Free $tuff From the Internet" from 23 years ago is closer to a restaurant guide than a book containing literary or academic references. I'd imagine most of the references in an 1850s coupon book or almanac would also be long dead.

This. I'm really excited about projects like IPFS but I'm not totally comfortable with the "everything persists forever" philosophy as it stands now. Preventing link rot is a very worthwhile cause, but content creators should have control over what persists and for how long (see: "Right to Be Forgotten").

> content creators should have control over what persists and for how long (see: "Right to Be Forgotten").

Strange idea.

The "Right to Be Forgotten" in EU law refers to personal data not to works that you have published, it is about privacy not copyright. See the Commision's factsheet on the subject: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#294

Post by INTPenis » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 6:48 AM UTC

Where did you live in 1994? Who lives there now? Is the building still standing?

I'm sure I'd get mixed answers to that and that's still the physical world, not the virtual one where "buildings" can come and go at the press of a button.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#295

Post by honestoHeminway » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 7:38 AM UTC

addicted wrote: post #120

CharlesDodgson wrote: post #45

I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

Is it richer and deeper now? Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook. When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about.…

The really bonus of the internet of old was that text was most of its content. Today you have video, pictures, emojys and music and - in my opinnion it reduces the experience.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#296

Post by rand005 » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 8:14 AM UTC

nebabyte wrote: post #269

ernsheong wrote: post #259

I'm working on https://www.pagedash.com , sort of a personal web archive. Hope it helps people like journalists or authors to keep links alive with their original content, even if the original website goes down.

Sounds like pinboard.io

You probably meant pinboard.in

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#297

Post by biofox » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 8:34 AM UTC

neoCrimeLabs wrote: post #110

Somewhat Unrelated. I noticed that the wayback machine no longer lists historical sites if the latest/last revision of robots.txt denies access. Has anyone else experienced this? In the late-90's I helped build one of the first fortune-500 e-commerce web sites. The website was shutdown years ago, but it view viewable on the wayback machine as recently as a year ago. The company in question put a deny-all robots.txt o…

Applying denials retroactively makes no sense whatsoever -- it defeats the whole point of archiving.

Do you know if archive.org still has a copy?

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#298

Post by aaron695 » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 8:54 AM UTC

For millions of years 'people' did or made cool things.

There must be billions+ of artistic objects and acts lost from the past.

Does it matter if they ALL don't make it? (I wish a lot more did, but ALL?)

In fact their loss adds value in many ways, if Woodstock was exactly the same year in year out would it have been as special to those who went.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#299

Post by CM30 » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 9:04 AM UTC

c22 wrote: post #92

mfoy_ wrote: post #5

A similarly really annoying thing is when you find old technet articles, stack overflow questions, or blog posts that seem potentially really useful, but that have broken images, broken links, etc... so the content (possibly extremely useful at the time) is completely useless now. It really stresses the importance of directly quoting / paraphrasing the content you want in your plain text, and not relying on external…

The one I hate is when I find old forum posts explaining how to do something in the physical world and all the embedded photos are broken. Not because the image host went out of business or the user deleted them, but just because they didn't log in for a year and the host deactivated their account. This is why whenever I link a photo I upload it to my own server and I never change the URL.

Or when they're broken because the image host discontinued third party image hosting/started charging for it, despite said feature being the only reason their site caught on in the first place.

Looking at you Photobucket. And all those useful images now replaced with a meaningless Photobucket placeholder.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#300

Post by daemin » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 9:22 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #105

Asooka wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that illegal, since you don't own the copyright? Or are you not distributing it and keeping it for archive purposes?

It's on my website, which is a blatant copyright violation. So far the NYT hasn't asked me to take it down. It could potentially be considered fair use, since I'm not making a profit and I provide commentary.

I figure you're doing the same as someone that cuts an article that they are mentioned in out of a newspaper and frames it on their wall. I've seen plenty of restaurants and businesses do it.