4 ms·

It's pretty impressive how good a job the NYT has done of maintaining historical articles. You can even find quite old articles from key historical times and t

It's pretty impressive how good a job the NYT has done of maintaining historical articles. You can even find quite old articles from key historical times and they're presented just like articles today. For example, the famous Crittenden Compromise is at http://www.nytimes.com/1861/02/06/news/the-crittenden-compromise.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1861/02/06/news/the-crittenden-compro...

donretag 11y ago
The NYT had one of the first publicly known Hadoop clusters (for a major media company, not a tech company) which they used to process the historical articles. http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times-archives-amazon-web-services-timesmachine/ http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times-...
zitterbewegung 11y ago
Also the BBC seems to have no link rot on their old articles http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/736080.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/736080.stm
- dsl 11y ago
  http://bbcattic.org/ http://bbcattic.org/
  - whorleater 11y ago
    Sorta amusing that for a site that's meant to back up another site, one of the articles about it's origin story is itself gone from the internet.
unicornporn 11y ago
Aftonbladet, the largest news site in Sweden, went live on the web in 1994[1]. Here's a picture of their first server[2]. Aftonbladet was founded in 1830. Their article archive isn't nearly as impressive though. [1] http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/aftonbladetse18ar/article15304091.ab http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/aftonbladetse18ar/article1... [2] http://gfx.aftonbladet-cdn.se/image/12090393/496/normal/5b4f37651ba5b/f%C3%B6rsta+servern http://gfx.aftonbladet-cdn.se/image/12090393/496/normal/5b4f...
- Scoundreller 11y ago
  What's with the coat rack of cables behind the man?
remyp 11y ago
> "We have already more than once expressed our opinion, that the first duty of men of all parties, Democrats and Republicans, -- is to lay aside all their political differences and rally to the support of the Constitution and the Union, -- to insist that the Union shall be preserved, not as a matter of favor but of duty: -- and that when this result has been secured, it will be in order to consider what new guarantees or concessions are due to the South and essential to the public peace." I love how different the writing is in old articles like this. The complexity of the sentences compared to today's news writing is crazy.
kristopolous 11y ago
There's so much opportunity for Orwellian abuse in this new archival model. Sure there's archive.org - but in the old model, you'd say something in print, copy it a million or so times, then distribute it on paper around the world. If an evildoer wanted to change a claim from say, 20 years ago, they'd have to create a forgery that looks like it's 20 years old, then secretly swap out all the archival copies in libraries and get large-scale mass obedience from librarians or manually make the swap at each library individually. These days, you need to add an exclusion to the archive.org bot in robots.txt and then flip a few bits. It's a different ballgame. In the traditional model, someone could find say, an original copy of the 20 year old newspaper and present that as evidence. Forging that document would be sufficiently hard for a single individual. But in the new model, claiming something is an "original copy" of a web page can be easily disputed because such a forgery can be trivially crafted. Think about the implications in places with large civil unrest, very little free press, and mostly state-owned media. What's the solution for those societies? It's a problem.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > in the old model, you'd say something in print, copy it a million or so times, then distribute it on paper around the world. > If an evildoer wanted to change a claim from say, 20 years ago, they'd have to create a forgery that looks like it's 20 years old, then secretly swap out all the archival copies in libraries and get large-scale mass obedience from librarians or manually make the swap at each library individually. It has happened: http://www.unz.com/plee/india-v-china-border-games/ http://www.unz.com/plee/india-v-china-border-games/ (the relevant bit begins at "India’s claim to AP is complicated in an interesting way.") You're correct, of course, that it's become easier in the modern model. But people who feel strongly about the more adversarial issues of the modern day already archive enemy publications themselves, lest they mysteriously change in the future. The climate change issue is full of this sort of thing. Even the fact that forged "original copies" are easy to create can be overcome; you just need to contemporaneously deposit a copy somewhere that creates records of when you make deposits and withdrawals. Again, the amount of adversarial forethought required has changed enough to make a significant difference. I wish archive.org wouldn't delete old material based on new robots.txt policies, though. :/

donretag 11y ago

The NYT had one of the first publicly known Hadoop clusters (for a major media company, not a tech company) which they used to process the historical articles. http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times-archives-amazon-web-services-timesmachine/ http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times-...

zitterbewegung 11y ago

Also the BBC seems to have no link rot on their old articles http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/736080.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/736080.stm

dsl 11y ago
http://bbcattic.org/ http://bbcattic.org/
- whorleater 11y ago
  Sorta amusing that for a site that's meant to back up another site, one of the articles about it's origin story is itself gone from the internet.

unicornporn 11y ago

Aftonbladet, the largest news site in Sweden, went live on the web in 1994[1]. Here's a picture of their first server[2]. Aftonbladet was founded in 1830. Their article archive isn't nearly as impressive though. [1] http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/aftonbladetse18ar/article15304091.ab http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/aftonbladetse18ar/article1... [2] http://gfx.aftonbladet-cdn.se/image/12090393/496/normal/5b4f37651ba5b/f%C3%B6rsta+servern http://gfx.aftonbladet-cdn.se/image/12090393/496/normal/5b4f...

Scoundreller 11y ago
What's with the coat rack of cables behind the man?

remyp 11y ago

> "We have already more than once expressed our opinion, that the first duty of men of all parties, Democrats and Republicans, -- is to lay aside all their political differences and rally to the support of the Constitution and the Union, -- to insist that the Union shall be preserved, not as a matter of favor but of duty: -- and that when this result has been secured, it will be in order to consider what new guarantees or concessions are due to the South and essential to the public peace." I love how different the writing is in old articles like this. The complexity of the sentences compared to today's news writing is crazy.

kristopolous 11y ago

There's so much opportunity for Orwellian abuse in this new archival model. Sure there's archive.org - but in the old model, you'd say something in print, copy it a million or so times, then distribute it on paper around the world. If an evildoer wanted to change a claim from say, 20 years ago, they'd have to create a forgery that looks like it's 20 years old, then secretly swap out all the archival copies in libraries and get large-scale mass obedience from librarians or manually make the swap at each library individually. These days, you need to add an exclusion to the archive.org bot in robots.txt and then flip a few bits. It's a different ballgame. In the traditional model, someone could find say, an original copy of the 20 year old newspaper and present that as evidence. Forging that document would be sufficiently hard for a single individual. But in the new model, claiming something is an "original copy" of a web page can be easily disputed because such a forgery can be trivially crafted. Think about the implications in places with large civil unrest, very little free press, and mostly state-owned media. What's the solution for those societies? It's a problem.

thaumasiotes 11y ago
> in the old model, you'd say something in print, copy it a million or so times, then distribute it on paper around the world. > If an evildoer wanted to change a claim from say, 20 years ago, they'd have to create a forgery that looks like it's 20 years old, then secretly swap out all the archival copies in libraries and get large-scale mass obedience from librarians or manually make the swap at each library individually. It has happened: http://www.unz.com/plee/india-v-china-border-games/ http://www.unz.com/plee/india-v-china-border-games/ (the relevant bit begins at "India’s claim to AP is complicated in an interesting way.") You're correct, of course, that it's become easier in the modern model. But people who feel strongly about the more adversarial issues of the modern day already archive enemy publications themselves, lest they mysteriously change in the future. The climate change issue is full of this sort of thing. Even the fact that forged "original copies" are easy to create can be overcome; you just need to contemporaneously deposit a copy somewhere that creates records of when you make deposits and withdrawals. Again, the amount of adversarial forethought required has changed enough to make a significant difference. I wish archive.org wouldn't delete old material based on new robots.txt policies, though. :/