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Can the Internet Be Archived? (2015)
- Overtonwindow 9y ago(2015)
- nervousvarun 9y agoWhy are you repeating a section of the linked title?
- eric_h 9y agoLikely it wasn't in the title when this poster posted it, 2 hours before you replied. It's common on HN for older stories to get posted and get upvoted to the front page, and commenters will make a note in the comments that it is an older story and should be marked as such in the hopes that the mods will notice and add e.g. (2015) to the title. The tersest way to do this is to simply post a top level comment with the year the article was written, surrounded by parentheses.
- nervousvarun 9y agoThat makes perfect sense thank you.
- nehakpur 9y agoConnect Broadband service is best internet connection in Chandigarh. Visit me at http://connectbroadbandservice.in/panchkula http://connectbroadbandservice.in/panchkula
- nehakpur 9y agoNo! the Internet can never Be Archived?
- ry_ry 9y agoShould the internet be archived? Seriously. It's a transient medium, somewhere between a beautifully illustrated book and a shopping list scrawled on the back of a napkin in crayon, recited down a megaphone by a drunk. Let content live or die in its merit, rather than the desire to arbitrarily preserve it.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoCulture should be preserved. Let future generations judge its merits.
- nxsynonym 9y agoFor as much great information that exists on the internet, there's 10x as much noise. I'm all for selective preservation - but I agree - no reason to preserve just for the sake of it. Not every book printed is worth reading, saving, and passing down. Not every thought is worth speaking and hearing. Not every meme, click bait article, or shitpost needs to be saved.
- eric_h 9y ago> there's 10x as much noise Honestly I think you're being extremely generous about how much signal there is in the noise. I think the decimal point needs to move at least two places to the right, but probably more like four.
- kalleboo 9y agoThere's so much data that it's an impossible task to select what is worth preserving or not. For just the salary of one "preservation judge" you could just buy another couple thousand TB of storage and store it all
- kalleboo 9y ago> Not every meme, click bait article, or shitpost needs to be saved. Unless you want to unravel how Trump got elected?
- WalterBright 9y ago
- jxramos 9y agoLet's submit HackerNews comments to the Library of Congress. Seriously!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- xj9 9y agoIA is better! https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
- jxramos 9y agotouché, but my comment was precipitated not by any particular practicalities but by the article's text: "Sites hosted by corporations tend to die with their hosts.... Twitter is a rare case: it has arranged to archive all of its tweets at the Library of Congress."
- greglindahl 9y agoThat was the intent, but I think it ended up being too big for the lack of budget.
- zorpner 9y agoStackExchange uploads anonymized data dumps to the Internet Archive annually: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange To the sibling comment -- as far as I know, no one's ever seen those tweets. You can get content back out of the Archive, at least.
- jorgec 9y agoYears ago, somebody asked me if i could copy the internet in a 3 1/2 floppy.
- hexane360 9y agoWell I sent an internet to my friend the other day and he just got it. How big can it really be?
- basicplus2 9y agoIsn't it a little black box with a red light on top? I'm sure I saw it on an IT show...
- delegate 9y agoArchived - maybe. But it would be much more fun to transcribe it. You know, the way they used to copy books back in the days before the printing press. Lock yourself in a cave with some (hemp) oil candles, paper and an iPad and ... you'd be doing humanity a huge favor. When, in your monumental quest, you come across this message, know that somebody thought of this moment a long long time ago and hereby officially thanks you for your effort.
- DavidFlint 9y agoPossibly archiving the internet is, what transcribing was to speech and events in old times.
- nehakpur 9y agofunny and too confusing
- basicplus2 9y agoDon't forget to do two separate backups...
- avuserow 9y agoThe Archive Team (not affiliated with the Internet Archive) is working on it (and you can help): http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
- vervas 9y agoThe importance of archiving is huge taking in account the numerous times libraries have been burnt, footage being lost and others parts of history being buried into the ocean with shipwrecks. But more importantly if one thinks of Orwell's 1984, were all printed records were manipulated on a daily basis to reflect a different state of reality while the events were changing, in the days of internet that is not just a tedious sci-fi process but one that can be performed in a fairly efficient and methodical manner to an extent that it cannot be told what was real or not.
- aethertron 9y agoTo guard against manipulation is why we should have our own personal archives. Decentralisation. Also, cryptography to validate authorship. (Basically, I still want Xanadu.)
- EGreg 9y agoI personally think that HTTP should be gradually supplanted by things like IPFS, all documents would be content-addressable and both accessing an archiving would be done in a decentralized manner.
- nippples 9y agoArchiving is a great tool against those who like to employ memory holes as strategy.
- aethertron 9y agoI'm interested in the the possibility of individual internet archives. Web browsers (or something like those) could automatically save all of a user's own stuff (article comments, blog posts, tweets, emails) and everything they're interested in (bookmarks, rss feeds). Users could connect p2p and make bigger, more public archives.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoThe Washington Post has published a yearly list of the most challenging schools in the nation since 2013. This year, they redirected all guys to the old lists to the 2017 version. They block Google from caching their content, and the internet archive caches only the front-end HTML and not the final DOM, which means the list, populated via JS, is not in the IA's cache. I needed to reference that list and spent hours scouring the internet for individual mentions of awards and placements to piece together a partial view of the results for one state for some of the years. It was horrible, but the worst part of it was the realization that this is but a single example, that the impermanence of the internet it's going to lead to a very sad loss of some very important data that we will dearly regret in the years to come. It's also no longer sufficient to cache text and HTML; sites like NYT and WaPo have put massive work and countless man-hours into web apps that contain valuable data that relies on the presence of a back end server to populate the front-end, and rich JS apps to portray that data. It's going to be a challenge.