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We should aim at browsing the Internet by date. We're moving everything there ignoring the fact that as it is there is no built-in permanence. We're accustomed

• dredmorbius 7y ago
  "Browsing by date" is pretty much Brewster Kahle's ideal, and is what the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine approximates, thanks in large part to WARC storage. I'd also like to see a distinction between the idea of web servers, which are really publishers, and where archives are kept. Ideally not all in one single store, a/k/a the Internet Archive, but replicated fairly widely.
• thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > We're accustomed to that after Gutenberg: it wasn't that easy losing every copy of an important document. The effort has been made. Look at what happened with Tibet: > Caroe pulled off a rather notorious subterfuge in order to buttress the British claim to Tawang: he published the Simla Convention for the first time in 1938 with a note misrepresenting that it had included settlement of the border (and alienation of Tawang); and he arranged for the publication of official Survey of India maps that, for the first time, showed the McMahon Line as the official boundary. To advance the narrative, he also corresponded with commercial atlas publishers to put the McMahon Line on their maps as well. > In a telling indication of Caroe’s jiggery-pokery, to avoid the awkward question of why he was first publishing the Simla Convention twenty-four years after the fact in 1938, he instead arranged for the surreptitious printing of a spurious back-dated edition of Aitchison, deleting the original note about the Chinese government’s non-signature, and replacing it with a lengthy note stating, quite falsely, that “The [Simla] Convention included a definition of boundaries…” > Since 1) the McMahon Line had been concluded in secret bilateral negotiations between Tibet and Great Britain outside the Convention and 2) the Chinese had officially refused to recognize any bilateral agreement, boundary or otherwise, between Tibet and Great Britain and 3) had declined to sign the Simla Convention itself and 4) had notified Great Britain in 1914 that the specific sticking point was “the boundaries” this was hoo-hah. > The replacement copy was distributed to various libraries with instructions to withdraw and destroy the original edition. > The subterfuge was only discovered in 1963 when J.A. Addis, a British diplomat, discovered a surviving copy of the original edition at Harvard and compared it to Caroe’s version. ( http://www.unz.com/plee/the-myth-of-the-mcmahon-line/ http://www.unz.com/plee/the-myth-of-the-mcmahon-line/ ) Wikipedia confirms this, if you look hard, in a shockingly non-judgmental way: > Simla was initially rejected by the Government of India as incompatible with the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention. The official treaty record, C.U. Aitchison's A Collection of Treaties, was published with a note stating that no binding agreement had been reached at Simla. Since the condition (agreement with China) specified by the accord was not met, the Tibetan government didn't agree with the McMahon Line. > The Anglo-Russian Convention was renounced by Russia and Britain jointly in 1921, but the McMahon Line was forgotten until 1935, when interest was revived by civil service officer Olaf Caroe. The Survey of India published a map showing the McMahon Line as the official boundary in 1937. In 1938, the British published the Simla Convention in Aitchison's Treaties. A volume published earlier was recalled from libraries and replaced with a volume that includes the Simla Convention together with an editor's note stating that Tibet and Britain, but not China, accepted the agreement as binding. The replacement volume has a false 1929 publication date. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simla_Accord_(1914) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simla_Accord_(1914) )