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Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has been false since many years. Most companies couldn't care less about keeping the wealth information th

Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has been false since many years. Most companies couldn't care less about keeping the wealth information they've accumulated accessible. I remember a few years ago TI got bored with updating their cpuwiki, and deleted the whole this - which stings to this day. The internet is still full of links to it to solve crucial issues, only to be greeted with a disappointing error message.

brutal_chaos_ 2y ago
Tbf, if you're lucky, there is web.archive.org and others like it, but yes, situations like those are common and disappointing.
- Roark66 2y ago
  It has became very obvious how reliant we are on Archive.org last time they had an extended outage (remember?, they got hacked,then they couldn't bring the system back up for weeks and weeks). Huge amounts of reference material suddenly dissappeared. Personally I think it is a huge error we don't force archive.org to allow others to mirror their data easily.
  - trilbyglens 2y ago
    Probably the real error is in not having a publically funded mirror.
    - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
      Certainly seems like something that the Library of Congress should be handling.
      - jacobgkau 2y ago
        The problem with this is that there's all kinds of user-generated web content that certain people wouldn't want tax dollars going towards preserving. I can already look at e.g. the National Film Registry and say I don't care about movies so my tax dollars shouldn't go towards preserving them, regardless of what some bureaucrat thinks is "culturally significant." The film industry has a pretty massive network of artists who are able to go to bat for that stuff, though. But then take pornography, or hate speech (and/or straight-up misinformation), or content that's illegal in the US but not elsewhere (like drug recipes or weapons schematics). It's already tricky for a private entity to handle convincing people of the value of preserving everything physically and legally possible to preserve. Making an argument for doing it as a public function, even in good faith, could easily turn into a mess-- especially when we can barely agree what should be allowed on the internet now.
  - __jonas 2y ago
    > Personally I think it is a huge error we don't force archive.org to allow others to mirror their data easily. What do you mean by this? I thought they definitely were open to mirrors, why would ’we’ need to ‘force’ them to anything? IIRC the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt had a mirror of the web archive up, though they may have failed to maintain it
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - Idesmi 2y ago
    It's not like the forbid mirroring. The problem is simply the size of it: around 100 petabytes.
- johnfernow 2y ago
  Right, archive.org is very useful if you have a URL, but if you're searching for a question that was answered in a forum, and that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in search results, then it's effectively undiscoverable as far as I'm aware. It amazes me how companies will have free volunteers help people to use their (often expensive) paid subscription products, and then delete all that info those volunteers wrote up. Don't they want people to use their products?! They're less likely to renew their subscription if they struggle or are unable to use the product for their particular use case. Unaffiliated forums not ran by the company are better in that the company can't decide to just delete all old posts one day (and while the owner could, certain types of unaffiliated forums are usually a bit easier to clone and republish.) The downside is you don't get assistance from people who work for that company, but often you rarely get that in official forums. The usual reason to use official forums is just that they have significantly more users asking and answering questions than unofficial ones.
  - krackers 2y ago
    >that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in search results I dream of someone taking the internet archive data, capping it at 2010 or so, then making a search engine out of it. I mean if AI companies are looking to gobble all the data they can get, then surely they'd jump at the chance to train on (higher quality) data from the past that simply no longer exists on the web. So it'd seem like a win-win situation if IA gave them a copy of the data on the condition that they maintain a permanent backup and provide some sort of searchable index on the data (maybe even via LLM), and in turn the AI companies got access to high quality data on obscure topics that simply no longer exists.
    - jraph 2y ago
      Yup, let's not tie such an important endeavor to AI and AI startups though, we need something robust and lasting :-)
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > I dream of someone taking the internet archive data, capping it at 2010 or so, then making a search engine out of it It sounds like you're describing CommonCrawl.org, and yes, it's already popular with AI companies.
bee_rider 2y ago
I think “the internet doesn’t forget” was not originally intended that way. It is a reminder that it is hard to reliably delete something from the internet. Unrelated to this auto desk issue. The internet does forget in the sense that stuff goes missing. Just, only stuff that you don’t want to go missing!
- Sanzig 2y ago
  It's essentially a law of the internet. Well-researched website on a niche topic written in the 00s? Lost forever. Your edgelord blog from when you were a teenager? Backed up in triplicate.
  - Jalad 2y ago
    Now that I think about it, this just looks like a specialization of Murphy's Law
    - jraph 2y ago
      Absolutely. You are screwed either way. It will fall on the wrong side.
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    WebArchive still has a copy of a website that I made that is just text "John Smith is stupid", with John Smith being a friend of mine from teenage years.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
matt3210 2y ago
It’s in the AI model now no worries
256_ 2y ago
I feel like there should a law about this, but I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe companies should have to at least give a warning before they do it, so Archive Team (or the likes of them) can go into panic mode and archive everything before it gets deleted.
- samtho 2y ago
  I don’t think the reaction to everything we dislike should be “let’s make it illegal” because you’re going to end up with unintended harms. If companies are forced to retain public information against their will, many will simply opt not to have a public forum. If anything, governments should be proactively funding organizations that archive content and governments can archive content of significant cultural or historical value like the library of congress does for physical media.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    I do think there should be some kind of law, but it would also have to comply with gdpr Right to be Forgotten.
  - precommunicator 2y ago
    Great! If they don't have a public forum there is no opportunity to do harm, I see no issue here. The community will still ask questions and answers somewhere e.g. in one of Stack Exchange sites which is less likely to be removed and/or forgotten
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I don’t think there should be a law requiring companies to keep a forum up. But perhaps it would be nice if we could have a customer protection based requirement to have some sort of customer support, along with acknowledgement that a customer support forum that could go away at any moment doesn’t satisfy that requirement (so either include better customer service or take steps to preserve the community). I mean we wouldn’t want companies to fall afoul of some law because they had to take their forums down due to some privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third party software they used for the server went out of business.
jraph 2y ago
> Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has been false since many years As a sibling comment says, I think such sentences have meant "you can't rely on the internet to forget". Of course the reverse is also true: "you can't rely on the internet to remember". In short: don't write things you could regret, but make backups.
- frereubu 2y ago
  Reminds me tangentially of the saying attributed to Mohammed - "Trust in God. But tie your camel first."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

brutal_chaos_ 2y ago

Tbf, if you're lucky, there is web.archive.org and others like it, but yes, situations like those are common and disappointing.

Roark66 2y ago
It has became very obvious how reliant we are on Archive.org last time they had an extended outage (remember?, they got hacked,then they couldn't bring the system back up for weeks and weeks). Huge amounts of reference material suddenly dissappeared. Personally I think it is a huge error we don't force archive.org to allow others to mirror their data easily.
- trilbyglens 2y ago
  Probably the real error is in not having a publically funded mirror.
  - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
    Certainly seems like something that the Library of Congress should be handling.
    - jacobgkau 2y ago
      The problem with this is that there's all kinds of user-generated web content that certain people wouldn't want tax dollars going towards preserving. I can already look at e.g. the National Film Registry and say I don't care about movies so my tax dollars shouldn't go towards preserving them, regardless of what some bureaucrat thinks is "culturally significant." The film industry has a pretty massive network of artists who are able to go to bat for that stuff, though. But then take pornography, or hate speech (and/or straight-up misinformation), or content that's illegal in the US but not elsewhere (like drug recipes or weapons schematics). It's already tricky for a private entity to handle convincing people of the value of preserving everything physically and legally possible to preserve. Making an argument for doing it as a public function, even in good faith, could easily turn into a mess-- especially when we can barely agree what should be allowed on the internet now.
- __jonas 2y ago
  > Personally I think it is a huge error we don't force archive.org to allow others to mirror their data easily. What do you mean by this? I thought they definitely were open to mirrors, why would ’we’ need to ‘force’ them to anything? IIRC the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt had a mirror of the web archive up, though they may have failed to maintain it
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Idesmi 2y ago
  It's not like the forbid mirroring. The problem is simply the size of it: around 100 petabytes.
johnfernow 2y ago
Right, archive.org is very useful if you have a URL, but if you're searching for a question that was answered in a forum, and that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in search results, then it's effectively undiscoverable as far as I'm aware. It amazes me how companies will have free volunteers help people to use their (often expensive) paid subscription products, and then delete all that info those volunteers wrote up. Don't they want people to use their products?! They're less likely to renew their subscription if they struggle or are unable to use the product for their particular use case. Unaffiliated forums not ran by the company are better in that the company can't decide to just delete all old posts one day (and while the owner could, certain types of unaffiliated forums are usually a bit easier to clone and republish.) The downside is you don't get assistance from people who work for that company, but often you rarely get that in official forums. The usual reason to use official forums is just that they have significantly more users asking and answering questions than unofficial ones.
- krackers 2y ago
  >that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in search results I dream of someone taking the internet archive data, capping it at 2010 or so, then making a search engine out of it. I mean if AI companies are looking to gobble all the data they can get, then surely they'd jump at the chance to train on (higher quality) data from the past that simply no longer exists on the web. So it'd seem like a win-win situation if IA gave them a copy of the data on the condition that they maintain a permanent backup and provide some sort of searchable index on the data (maybe even via LLM), and in turn the AI companies got access to high quality data on obscure topics that simply no longer exists.
  - jraph 2y ago
    Yup, let's not tie such an important endeavor to AI and AI startups though, we need something robust and lasting :-)
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > I dream of someone taking the internet archive data, capping it at 2010 or so, then making a search engine out of it It sounds like you're describing CommonCrawl.org, and yes, it's already popular with AI companies.

bee_rider 2y ago

I think “the internet doesn’t forget” was not originally intended that way. It is a reminder that it is hard to reliably delete something from the internet. Unrelated to this auto desk issue. The internet does forget in the sense that stuff goes missing. Just, only stuff that you don’t want to go missing!

Sanzig 2y ago
It's essentially a law of the internet. Well-researched website on a niche topic written in the 00s? Lost forever. Your edgelord blog from when you were a teenager? Backed up in triplicate.
- Jalad 2y ago
  Now that I think about it, this just looks like a specialization of Murphy's Law
  - jraph 2y ago
    Absolutely. You are screwed either way. It will fall on the wrong side.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  WebArchive still has a copy of a website that I made that is just text "John Smith is stupid", with John Smith being a friend of mine from teenage years.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

matt3210 2y ago

It’s in the AI model now no worries

256_ 2y ago

I feel like there should a law about this, but I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe companies should have to at least give a warning before they do it, so Archive Team (or the likes of them) can go into panic mode and archive everything before it gets deleted.

samtho 2y ago
I don’t think the reaction to everything we dislike should be “let’s make it illegal” because you’re going to end up with unintended harms. If companies are forced to retain public information against their will, many will simply opt not to have a public forum. If anything, governments should be proactively funding organizations that archive content and governments can archive content of significant cultural or historical value like the library of congress does for physical media.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  I do think there should be some kind of law, but it would also have to comply with gdpr Right to be Forgotten.
- precommunicator 2y ago
  Great! If they don't have a public forum there is no opportunity to do harm, I see no issue here. The community will still ask questions and answers somewhere e.g. in one of Stack Exchange sites which is less likely to be removed and/or forgotten
bee_rider 2y ago
I don’t think there should be a law requiring companies to keep a forum up. But perhaps it would be nice if we could have a customer protection based requirement to have some sort of customer support, along with acknowledgement that a customer support forum that could go away at any moment doesn’t satisfy that requirement (so either include better customer service or take steps to preserve the community). I mean we wouldn’t want companies to fall afoul of some law because they had to take their forums down due to some privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third party software they used for the server went out of business.

jraph 2y ago

> Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has been false since many years As a sibling comment says, I think such sentences have meant "you can't rely on the internet to forget". Of course the reverse is also true: "you can't rely on the internet to remember". In short: don't write things you could regret, but make backups.

frereubu 2y ago
Reminds me tangentially of the saying attributed to Mohammed - "Trust in God. But tie your camel first."

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]