4 ms·

Could the internet archive offer this as a paid service? For a reasonable fee, we'll archive your site, and give you back a copy of the assets you can turnkey

Could the internet archive offer this as a paid service? For a reasonable fee, we'll archive your site, and give you back a copy of the assets you can turnkey host on the original domain for cheap with a static hosting solution (s3, cloudflare, etc). Everybody wins

toomim 3y ago
I've been wondering this too. I've even been considering authoring a web standard to allow hosts to specify how their pages can be archived in a standard way (e.g. which scripts to include, etc.) and then pitch the IA to offer a "pay $X to archive this data forever" deal to the universe. I'm really curious what the cost per byte would be to make it worthwhile to offer a "host this byte forever, for one up-front fee" service.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Intralexical 3y ago
  > I'm really curious what the cost per byte would be to make it worthwhile to offer a "host this byte forever, for one up-front fee" service. https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ > *What are your fees?* > At this time we have no fees for uploading and preserving materials. We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte. While there are no fees we always appreciate donations to offset these costs. There's some discussion about this idea on this thread, including comments by ?id=markjgraham, who manages the Wayback Machine, thoughts from John Carmack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1473327982605385735 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1473327982605385735 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1473327982605385735.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1473327982605385735.html
  - toomim 3y ago
    Amazing references! Thank you!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
grepfru_it 3y ago
https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/
- mofosyne 3y ago
  That works too, but there is something to be said about a turn key solution friendly to corporations who are willing to just throw some money to make a problem go away. Plus archive will get a bit of extra money for the Wayback machine! Just pay some donation, redirect your DNS to the way back machine and bingo.
jfoster 3y ago
Could they (or a for-profit company) bid on it? Do liquidators in the US have to consider any offer, even if it was unsolicited? Does it vary from state to state?
flexagoon 3y ago
They seem to offer something like that: https://www.archive-it.org/ https://www.archive-it.org/ However, the footer of that website says 2014 and the about page is broken, so not sure if it's still supported. Also, Cloudflare has a partnership with Web Archive and they offer something similar, but I think it's only made for temporary outages and only archives the most popular pages on your site
- hobo_in_library 3y ago
  The site's last act was to archive itself
massysett 3y ago
No no, the exact opposite. If this bundle of content is so valuable, then someone can make a business out of buying it. Vice could go to WeBuyOldIntellectualAssets.com and get a flat price for it all, and that company would host it or do whatever with it. The same thing happens with brands - someone bought the Montgomery Ward brand at a bankruptcy auction or something - and with store inventory: once the store goes bankrupt, they just sell the entire store contents, right down to the fixtures, to a liquidator who brings in the "Going out of business! Everything must go!" signs.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  Not just brands, but software too. The primary software I support at my day job was acquired by a company that, based on their other assets, can be described as where software goes to die. We’re migrating away but they’ll squeeze out what they can from those that don’t/can’t/won’t. But they still have to provide continuous support, some amount of updates to keep customers functioning, and maybe even get some new customers as a “value” option (that’s barely functional). Happens to forums all the time (fuck you Internet Brands and Vertical Scope). 100000x easier to do all this with static web content.
- im3w1l 3y ago
  I think the issue with this solution is that the seller loses control over their branding (namely what ads to show) if they do this.
- ffsm8 3y ago
  Found the young'un :) That's too attractive to malware peddlers. It's not particularly widespread currently, mainly because most of the content has been centralized into the same big silos... But what you're envisioning here is just going to get abused by abusers
- bandrami 3y ago
  This is how Saks Fifth Avenue is actually, when you peel back all of the onion, the honest-to-God 17th century Hudson's Bay Company
billywhizz 3y ago
they are already on it. they do really important work. worth helping them out with funding. https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760755908219466017 https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760755908219466017
- CYR1X 3y ago
  That's the archive team, not the internet archive.
  - billywhizz 3y ago
    yes, but everything is going on the internet archive. https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760764792887746724 https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760764792887746724
- Intralexical 3y ago
  Note that Archive Team and the Internet Archive are separate, unaffiliated entities, though they do often work together. Archive Team is a loosely organised group of individual volunteers that share a common interest in Internet preservation, and develop tools and share notes to serve that goal. They're basically one of your old-school Mediawiki communities, with very little budget: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ Internet Archive is a full-blown multimillion dollar `501(c)(3)` nonprofit, which functions as more of a general-purpose library. They maintain physical offices and datacentres in multiple countries, host many petabytes of data, do activism, run conferences, and when they develop custom tools it tends to be somewhat more advanced than the Archive Team's decentralized web scrapers, like custom book scanning hardware: https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107 https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107 A lot of the information in the Wayback Machine, which is run by the Internet Archive, was saved and contributed by Archive Team. For example, as of writing this comment, that is true of the latest snapshot of `https://www.vice.com/en https://www.vice.com/en`. You can see this with the "About this capture" button on a Wayback Machine capture. Both groups have ways to receive monetary donations. For Archive Team though, I wonder if it would be more useful to donate compute by running their Warrior archiving VM/container, or contributing code to their GitHub: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Dev/Source_Code https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Dev/Source_Code
CYR1X 3y ago
I think the issue is for the IA that isn't lucrative enough to make it worth there time. Someone already did it for them for free, even if it wasn't 100% as good as they could have done it.

toomim 3y ago

I've been wondering this too. I've even been considering authoring a web standard to allow hosts to specify how their pages can be archived in a standard way (e.g. which scripts to include, etc.) and then pitch the IA to offer a "pay $X to archive this data forever" deal to the universe. I'm really curious what the cost per byte would be to make it worthwhile to offer a "host this byte forever, for one up-front fee" service.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Intralexical 3y ago
> I'm really curious what the cost per byte would be to make it worthwhile to offer a "host this byte forever, for one up-front fee" service. https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ > *What are your fees?* > At this time we have no fees for uploading and preserving materials. We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte. While there are no fees we always appreciate donations to offset these costs. There's some discussion about this idea on this thread, including comments by ?id=markjgraham, who manages the Wayback Machine, thoughts from John Carmack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1473327982605385735 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1473327982605385735 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1473327982605385735.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1473327982605385735.html
- toomim 3y ago
  Amazing references! Thank you!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

grepfru_it 3y ago

https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/

mofosyne 3y ago
That works too, but there is something to be said about a turn key solution friendly to corporations who are willing to just throw some money to make a problem go away. Plus archive will get a bit of extra money for the Wayback machine! Just pay some donation, redirect your DNS to the way back machine and bingo.

jfoster 3y ago

Could they (or a for-profit company) bid on it? Do liquidators in the US have to consider any offer, even if it was unsolicited? Does it vary from state to state?

flexagoon 3y ago

They seem to offer something like that: https://www.archive-it.org/ https://www.archive-it.org/ However, the footer of that website says 2014 and the about page is broken, so not sure if it's still supported. Also, Cloudflare has a partnership with Web Archive and they offer something similar, but I think it's only made for temporary outages and only archives the most popular pages on your site

hobo_in_library 3y ago
The site's last act was to archive itself

massysett 3y ago

No no, the exact opposite. If this bundle of content is so valuable, then someone can make a business out of buying it. Vice could go to WeBuyOldIntellectualAssets.com and get a flat price for it all, and that company would host it or do whatever with it. The same thing happens with brands - someone bought the Montgomery Ward brand at a bankruptcy auction or something - and with store inventory: once the store goes bankrupt, they just sell the entire store contents, right down to the fixtures, to a liquidator who brings in the "Going out of business! Everything must go!" signs.

Scoundreller 3y ago
Not just brands, but software too. The primary software I support at my day job was acquired by a company that, based on their other assets, can be described as where software goes to die. We’re migrating away but they’ll squeeze out what they can from those that don’t/can’t/won’t. But they still have to provide continuous support, some amount of updates to keep customers functioning, and maybe even get some new customers as a “value” option (that’s barely functional). Happens to forums all the time (fuck you Internet Brands and Vertical Scope). 100000x easier to do all this with static web content.
im3w1l 3y ago
I think the issue with this solution is that the seller loses control over their branding (namely what ads to show) if they do this.
ffsm8 3y ago
Found the young'un :) That's too attractive to malware peddlers. It's not particularly widespread currently, mainly because most of the content has been centralized into the same big silos... But what you're envisioning here is just going to get abused by abusers
bandrami 3y ago
This is how Saks Fifth Avenue is actually, when you peel back all of the onion, the honest-to-God 17th century Hudson's Bay Company

billywhizz 3y ago

they are already on it. they do really important work. worth helping them out with funding. https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760755908219466017 https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760755908219466017

CYR1X 3y ago
That's the archive team, not the internet archive.
- billywhizz 3y ago
  yes, but everything is going on the internet archive. https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760764792887746724 https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760764792887746724
Intralexical 3y ago
Note that Archive Team and the Internet Archive are separate, unaffiliated entities, though they do often work together. Archive Team is a loosely organised group of individual volunteers that share a common interest in Internet preservation, and develop tools and share notes to serve that goal. They're basically one of your old-school Mediawiki communities, with very little budget: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ Internet Archive is a full-blown multimillion dollar `501(c)(3)` nonprofit, which functions as more of a general-purpose library. They maintain physical offices and datacentres in multiple countries, host many petabytes of data, do activism, run conferences, and when they develop custom tools it tends to be somewhat more advanced than the Archive Team's decentralized web scrapers, like custom book scanning hardware: https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107 https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107 A lot of the information in the Wayback Machine, which is run by the Internet Archive, was saved and contributed by Archive Team. For example, as of writing this comment, that is true of the latest snapshot of `https://www.vice.com/en https://www.vice.com/en`. You can see this with the "About this capture" button on a Wayback Machine capture. Both groups have ways to receive monetary donations. For Archive Team though, I wonder if it would be more useful to donate compute by running their Warrior archiving VM/container, or contributing code to their GitHub: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Dev/Source_Code https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Dev/Source_Code

CYR1X 3y ago

I think the issue is for the IA that isn't lucrative enough to make it worth there time. Someone already did it for them for free, even if it wasn't 100% as good as they could have done it.