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Posted in Site News at 3:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum b29da11a5ae25c7597c459e8e4c320b2
http://techrights.org/videos/archiving-techrights-site.webm
Summary: Today we upload 15 years’ worth of blog posts to the Internet Archive (IA), or close to 32,000 stories along with Daily Links; we suggest that other sites do the same in order to tackle ‘Internet rot’ and preserve information (otherwise there’s room for obscene revisionism)
THE INTERNET won’t stay around forever. The Soviets, back in the old days, tried to develop something similar to it. The Internet will probably survive the next decade or two, but fifty years is a stretch; as for the World Wide Web, it has already devolved into a transport layer for JavaScript and DRM, having been rendered bloated and malicious in practice (albeit not in theory; one can still produce elegant Web sites).
Earlier this year we moved to Gemini and more than a year ago we adopted IPFS, which is used to circulate daily bulletins and IRC logs in a decentralised fashion. Our IRC channels all became self-hosted (in our network) earlier this year — an ambition that we’ve had for years but didn’t get around to until Freenode collapsed.
Archiving a Web site isn’t the same as format changes and protocol changes. It’s also not about making more copies, especially if those copies are as vulnerable to censorship as one another. Here in this site we have some public domain (PD) works that are of relevance to us and can be accessed in gemini://. Most of the works, however, use a Creative Commons licence. We are not a curation site per se, but it helps to keep copies of historical material, such as antitrust material demonstrating Microsoft’s crimes (as tactics barely change over time). Well, by Internet standards we have enjoyed a long span of 15 years (articles and daily links) and we remain active on the daily basis. The same is true for Tux Machines, which turns 18 this coming summer, so a lot of the material we have here is no longer available anywhere else, except the Internet Archive (IA).
A few years ago we started making site archives in IA and we also recommended the site to people, dubbing it the most important site on the Web. It’s no eternal site however; as an associate of ours explains, “the IA is very important but it will succumb as the WWW is phased out in favor of obfuscated, proprietary JavaScript.”
IA can barely cope with (e.g. spider/index/save/navigate) many of the “modern” Web. When you add DRM to the mix (EME), then it’s not a “format-shifting’” task as that too becomes an impossibility. Sites need to evolve or perish, which may mean getting off the Web and one day planning for the demise of the Internet as a whole. Like IA, our associate explains, “archive.is is interesting, but it’ll die one day. In the long run they will all pass away. In formal archives, one of the initial decisions the institution has to make about any given artifact is that of how long it shall be preserved for. Nothing lasts forever, but there are ways of stretching things out and the duration determines the methods of preservation.”
For a site such as ours it makes sense to keep the material available for 50 years, which is maybe how much longer I can live (if I’m lucky).
“Media shifting will obviously be involved,” the associate notes, “but at a loss for some items. The plan pre-dates AWA by a great many years.”
Last weekend we turned 15. “Already in 15 short years,” our associate remarks, “many whole sites are gone. And of the sites that remain, many have lost all their old articles in clumsy reorgs. Of that which is left, some of those have purged documents with “inconvenient” messages or themes… even Groklaw purged its comments. I suppose few to none of the Groklaw comments made it into the Library of Congress archives.”
At the time of writing I’m still uploading 205 MB of archives (as shown in the video above). We hope it can inspire other sites to think ahead and do the same. It’s not a big task and it’s better done before it’s “too late”…
Our associate concludes by saying that “many programmers and even engineers are conscientious in erasing anything “old” even important records. Now with electronic media, there is often only a single copy of anything any more and that introduces, obviously, a single point of failure. So in the old days, one could maintain a relevant personal or professional archive. Now those are all centralized and continue to exist only at the whim of participant consensus. Anyone with administrative privileges, can “tidy” up and easily erases the world’s last copy of a standard or other evidence or similar material.”
We are going to add more material to IA and it can be found here as that piles up along with some material that isn’t ours. █
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