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http://web.archive.org/web//http://stepwise.com http://web.archive.org/web//http://stepwise.com I'm assuming that if he asks them to, Archive.org will remove

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://stepwise.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://stepwise.com I'm assuming that if he asks them to, Archive.org will remove it from their archives? Disclaimer: I don't know anything about Stepwise or the author, so hopefully I don't offend anyone. Things like this and the disappearance of newmogul.com make me nervous about the ability of one individual to destroy knowledge on a whim. It might be useful to have offshore archive centers where it's harder to get rid of stuff like this. Yeah, I know this was the property of this one guy, and he has the right to destroy it, but something about it doesn't sit well. Sites like this seem to be a collection of knowledge from many different people, and it's a bit disconcerting to see it disappear overnight. What if archive.org decided on a whim to disappear into the night? That's a lot of knowledge lost. Maybe the answer is decentralized archival in general. Some kind of opt-in network where people agree to store a bit of the internet on their machine. Hmm...in fact, we already do this with caching. Maybe some kind of browser plugin that makes use of those cache files for decentralized archival purposes? Sorry...rambling a bit. It's an interesting problem.

htsh 17y ago
No apology necessary -- your rambling reminds me tangentially of Max Brod's decision to publish some of Kafka's writings after Kafka had explicitly asked him not to do so. The same question was at play -- whether one should interfere with the destruction of knowledge by its creator. Brod ended up publishing and for it we got Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle. I can see arguments for both sides. Genius can be self-destructive and susceptible to manic episodes, and perhaps there's an argument where knowledge can forcibly be kept alive against its creator's will. But it is his information, and as far as I can recall, its his right to get rid of it.
aristus 17y ago
You are on the right track. If you are interested, I wrote a post on this idea a little while ago: http://carlos.bueno.org/2008/08/save-web.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2008/08/save-web.html
tlrobinson 17y ago
I grabbed the pages that were in the Google cache (about 100 pages), which was much more current than Archive.org, though possibly less complete. I'm not sure what to do with them now though...
- aristus 17y ago
  contact jason@textfiles.com

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://stepwise.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://stepwise.com I'm assuming that if he asks them to, Archive.org will remove

htsh 17y ago

No apology necessary -- your rambling reminds me tangentially of Max Brod's decision to publish some of Kafka's writings after Kafka had explicitly asked him not to do so. The same question was at play -- whether one should interfere with the destruction of knowledge by its creator. Brod ended up publishing and for it we got Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle. I can see arguments for both sides. Genius can be self-destructive and susceptible to manic episodes, and perhaps there's an argument where knowledge can forcibly be kept alive against its creator's will. But it is his information, and as far as I can recall, its his right to get rid of it.

aristus 17y ago

You are on the right track. If you are interested, I wrote a post on this idea a little while ago: http://carlos.bueno.org/2008/08/save-web.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2008/08/save-web.html

tlrobinson 17y ago

I grabbed the pages that were in the Google cache (about 100 pages), which was much more current than Archive.org, though possibly less complete. I'm not sure what to do with them now though...

aristus 17y ago
contact jason@textfiles.com