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Does any outside service check the integrity of the content on Web Archive?
or do we just accept as it's? I'm just curious. If nothing checks it, it gives them a bit of a power.
- pause_break 3y agoYou could always start your own 'Web Archive' or start a nonprofit that funds the maintenance and operation of one
- themodelplumber 3y agoYou mean the Wayback Machine? I've seen downloads on regular IA with hashes posted.
- _5uxp 3y agoYes but I'm more curious about how they archive the content at the first place. It's not tamper-proof so it gives them a power.
- cratermoon 3y ago> it gives them a power To what purpose? And why would their integrity be different from other archival services, like libraries and museums?
- ezekg 3y agoWho controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.
- VanTheBrand 3y ago[flagged]
- cratermoon 3y agoO for crying out loud. Where do people come up with this nonsense?
- simongr3dal 3y agoHow exactly would you check if a webpage in the Wayback Machine precisely matches a thing that used to be? You would also have to trust whoever checks them.
- zamnos 3y agoIt pains me to say it, but that might actually be something that a blockchain can really actually be used for. Just watch out for a 51% attack.
- Mezzie 3y agoBlockchain with Proof of Authority and distribution of said authority across geographic and (to a degree) professional boundaries might help. If the institutions with authority are, for example, every legal depository, W3C, the IA, a UN agency, and selected non-Western institutions, performing a 51% attack would be very difficult. It'd be more centralized than people think of with blockchain, but it would be decentralized among institutions and geography which means that if there was a war in Canada/the US in 50-100 years, we wouldn't have to worry about losing our digital heritage. It also means that if the US or Canada do turn into authoritarian states in the next ~100-200 years that they can't start scrubbing the archive. I respect the IA greatly, but it's currently a single point of failure and vulnerable to geopolitical disruptions on a long enough scale. They're also playing a dangerous game in mixing their archival work and political activism. (That I agree with said activism doesn't keep it from being dangerous to the continued existence of the Archive).
- VanTheBrand 3y agoAn interesting long play hack would be to compromise a site but only feed false material to the archive’s crawler. Then you could actually pull off what Joy Ann Reid pretended happened[1] when people found some old posts she wanted to disavow. [1]https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims-of-manipulated-blog-posts-in-the-wayback-machine/ https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims...
- slyall 3y agoI assume this is in reference to Elon Musk's recent claims that somebody's "uncle owns the Wayback machine & you’re saying he deleted information for nepotism".. Claims that have been very refuted. https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/1659283393753006082 https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/165928339375300608...
- bombcar 3y agoThe power of the IA is deleting things that should not be remembered, not altering copies.
- than3 3y agoYou are incorrect, its both.
- MilnerRoute 3y agoTinyURL.com was accused of something similar. They offered a "link shortening" service. But if you linked to a page on Amazon, they'd wait a few years and then swap in their own referrer code in place of yours. When confronted, they claimed this was the nefarious work of a third-party to whom they'd outsourced their link-redirecting...