- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
“This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted,” Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, “like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online.”
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Musk should really be removed from power.
Vacation to El Salvador. Permanent.
Isn’t he an illegal? Oh he isn’t and you say he has papers? Oops! Sorry, cannot get him back, we don’t have that kind of power, shrug emoji!
I didn’t see any papers 👊 🇺🇸 🔥
he got in on a J-visa, so did his brother, he did something long enough so that him or his brother could permanently stay in the country. he allegedly was going to grad school? but quickly abandoned it once he got his citizenship.
CECOT or gitmo.
Musk should be removed entirely. He has gone completely authoritarian.
no one voted him in power in the first place, doesnt that go directly against democracy too?
He should join a Mario game as the second player.
…i believe that, officially, he’s just a consultant: some woman whose name i can’t remembre is the nominal head of the department which nominally-isn’t-DOGE…
Isn’t it weird how “doge” just goes after anything that actually benefits people?
To be replaced by something privately funded, if at all.
Libertarians must be creaming their jorts.
They are just after things that doesn’t benefit them
Ugh some asshole who’s only going to live a century depriving an endless future of historical knowledge. Musk needs to be detained and imprisoned.
Yes, “detained.” And “imprisoned.” ☠️
They used to burn books. Now they just defund information storage services.
You know what is so ironic? I remember not that long ago (OK, like 20 years ago…) that once something was on the internet, it is there forever as long as file sharing and multiple hosts do it… but it has become abundantly clearly that, despite the fact that it can be REALLY hard to get shit off the internet, it doesn’t make it impossible. We’ve already seen it happen. The truth is, there is so much stuff that people DON’T widely share, and even then, the interest in their sharing in a torrent style is limited (I once downloaded leaked emails regarding transphobic propagandists talking to one another and while I kept seeding for almost a year, I barely got anyone downloading), that it is actually possible to make large amounts of stuff just vanish.
I think the real point of the adage, “once it’s on the internet it’s there forever” is more about the fact that you, personally, can’t take it back. Someone might of screenshot, downloaded it, reuploaded it elsewhere. The real meaning being that, once it’s on the internet, you no longer control it. Which I think still holds true, but it definitely was heavily implied that it would be there forever.
Pretty much this. Once you put it on the internet it’s out of your control. It might disappear, it might not. Best just to assume it won’t. Unless it’s useful information, then it probably will.
I’ve seen several examples of things wiped before, so I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that adage. I’ve seen several niche forums, or even forums of small newspapers - just go completely offline.
It might be these are still sitting around on backups somewhere and will some day come to light and be hosted by some entity in an open format…
I made forum posts going as far back as 2000. Almost all of them are gone forever due to the reasons you mentioned. Even the wayback machine might have a snapshot of the forum, but not the threads made them, and not the posts made within those threads.
I’m wondering if any BBS posts I made way, way back when are on any drives anywhere. I’m sure it’s possible. I’m pretty sure the USENET posts I made back in the day started to get archived by Google (at least) and I’m pretty they will be around for quite some time.
Proprietary things built and run by private tyrannies using no standard protocol (like NNTP or ActivityPub) I don’t give much of a chance…
I made BBS posts in the early-mid 90s. They don’t exist anymore, because at that time the only BBSes I had any access to were local guys running one off a personal computer (and as such weren’t even available 24/7). The DMs and chats that happened there? If those guys actually kept the logs and kept transferring them from HD to HD, then I’ll be damned… but chances are likely they have disappeared into the ether.
Same. Some of my friends ran BBSes back in the 80s in the fashion you talk about - at least one friend had parents who were comparatively rich/doting and had a second phone line (!) so one of them was up quite often. I think he ran his from a C64.
Sadly, I could not afford a modem at the time - and my parents were not too keen on the idea anyway, because they assumed I’d be running up big bills. I didn’t have any access to a HD until late 1989 and that was all of 20MB (Mac SE). I didn’t get into BBSes until 1991 because I finally had a modem and a phone line…
i started joining forums in late 2000s when i was in CC, those were og"reddit" sites before i migrated to Y’Answers, then to reddit after that.
Yes, the trouble with archiving is knowing what will be important in the future, rather than just popular now. We saved a lot of games from the 80’s through 2000’s through piracy, because they were popular to pass around, but we lost a most of the early web because no one thought it would disappear until the internet archive came along.
Not just games. Full operating systems from the 60s and 70s are being kept alive by hobbyists. Unfortunately there is no law or rule about proprietary/company specific software. In 50 years (or less) historians will know more about how the Romans did banking than how it was done in the early days of computing.
Piracy is the reason why video games survived what I call ‘the early creation purge’. Basically if you look at the 20th century and see various media that was created, most of the early stuff is gone. Like in the silent film era, 90% of all the films made (if we are using Hollywood movies as a metric) are lost, and probably also the film of other countries, too. Even 75% of all early sound film is lost, and for TV, the earliest broadcasts were never recorded, and many from the 1940s to 60s were also never recorded and are lost forever.
Video games? They’re the sole exception. Thanks to piracy and emulation, we can play computer and arcade and console games from the 1970s without issue. This has never happened before, and we have emulation devs and software pirates to thank. Ironically the overwhelming majority of abandonware video games online were not the originals… they were copies of copies that someone not only pirated back in the day, but also cracked. As a 90s kid, I smile whenever I see the RawCopy screen when I load up an old MS-DOS game.
Archive.org is doing God’s work for a lot of stuff.
It’s a crying shame what happened to early Doctor Who episodes, to be honest.
What a time to be alive. It’s like Ancient Rome has entered the peaceful minecraft nature server.
sounds like the same thing.
Extremists always destroy history so they can write their own.
I doubt the Library of Alexandria had permission from all rights holders to hold copies of many books. /s
Recent inconvinient history. They love to dig up ancient “glory days” (e.g., Ancient Rome, Teutonic knights…) and attach them to their image.
They’re not meticulous historians though. LGBTQ people were more accepted in the Roman Republic (and in ancient Greek) than today.
“Caius Julius Caesar: husband to all the wives, wife to all the husbands.” was a saying that my Latin professor taught us in school.
They’re not meticulous historians though. LGBTQ people were more accepted in the Roman Republic (and in ancient Greek) than today.
“Caius Julius Caesar: husband to all the wives, wife to all the husbands.” was a saying that my Latin professor taught us in school.
Being AMAB and bottom was stigmatized to the point their swearing system revolved around emasculation threats, so that’s different from what the queer movement of today aims for…
Our swearing system in modern English revolves around sex, violence and infidelity, but our society is also kinda into those things. Societies are complicated.
Edit: also sometimes people still say shit about bottoms when they curse.
I agree that it should not be the goal for any modern civilization to copy Rome. They were not a just society, they had slavery for starters, but Roman citizens enjoyed a lot of personal liberty. If you were dirt poor you would not even have the time for a “nonproductive” relationship, if you’ll excuse my expression. Kids were a resource more than a cost.
I’m not an expert but I think “stigmatized” is too strong a word in this context, I’m sure they did joke around if a rumour or a hunch was spread about a person’s romantic affairs by the people who hated them for their success or by their enemies, I’m not sure they really cared that much otherwise. Of course before the christian emperors came along.
Being bottom was really only stigmatized if you were bottoming for a social inferior.
Giving a woman head was more “gay”/stigmatized than taking it up the bum, unless maybe it was a slave penetrating you.
There’s no room or recognition for lesbians really. Trans issues are a tangled web, as they always are.
They don’t care. Just like with religious texts, they’ll shop around for the things they like and ignore those they don’t.
I wished we hadn’t voted for him. Wait a minute…
If you are USian, you did vote for him, either by voting, by not voting, or by not doing enough to prevent it. We on the outside of the US dystopia do get to suffer the consequences without having voted either way.
Modern book burnings create a lot less smoke and noise.
$345,000?
That’s like, 2 devs and an 8 CPU VM.
Holy shit, that’s like not even a rounding error to the US Government. So obvious what he is doing.
It’s trully disgusting and inexcusable.
That’s 1/100th the price Trump paid to send innocent people to CECOT.
This publicity will probably bring in more money for the internet archive than what was cut.
Still a dick move by musk, but I’m glad it’s not an existential threat to the project.
For a bit.
Public institutions need and deserve public funding.
He is literally a foreign terrorist. Deport his ass!
ironically hes from a country thats currently being influenced by russia too.
Deport? Dude he is still a man of serious means. It won’t stop him. He needs to be put in a supermax prison and in isolation. It is an intensely cruel punishment but the only appropriate one.
Yes, I like your idea much better
Solitary confinement is absolutely torture, and a supermax prison like USPS Florence ADMAX sometimes make people question if they even exist anymore.
But for people like Elon it is the only appropriate punishment. They need to be isolated from everyone and everything.
I am not now, nor have I ever been a Christian, but shit like this makes me go Jesus Fucking Christ.
Archive.org is a critical repository of knowledge and archiving the internet. Elon has cut nothing, but damaged a ton. It is kinda incredible how many damage he has done.
Elon Musk is what you’d get if you gave the illusion of personality to a 4Chan troll.
He’s the poster child for scared, greedy, paranoid nepo babies shielded from reality by wealth inheritance and wealth inequality, incapable of empathy turning him into a fascist bigot idiot trying to kill other people to hoard more money.
Elon Musk is what you get when “it is not a phase mom” is a credo.
Like those villains that are made of million of insects, each cell in Musk’s body is a 4chan troll.
Oooooh I like that idea. Horrific imagery, but clever.
Both the Internet Archive and Wikipedia are really important. I guess the way is to make alternatives or datahoard in these difficult times.
Why make alternatives when these fantastic organizations already exist? It’s not the first time they’ve come under fire and it definitely won’t be the last.
If vandalous cunts like Musk wish for them to go away and will de-fund them to that end, best thing we can do is donate to them and spread the word they need help.
Why make alternatives when these fantastic organizations already exist? It’s not the first time they’ve come under fire and it definitely won’t be the last.
You’ve answered your own question: because one day they might not take the fire and collapse. It’s like saying it’s not the first time your old HDD has been showing bad sectors and definitely won’t be the last. That’s all the more reason to make a backup!
I agree with you that we should donate to them and make them more people-funded, but ideally you want that taken care of through public funding coming out of taxes. You can’t just sustain every single entity through individual donations.
I feel this is a bad analogy, Wikipedia and IA are not a hard drive spinning in a server rack, they are community projects - made for the public good. They do not face the same issues. The problems they repeatedly face are always the same - funding (which is largely solved) and the issue discussed on topic - legal.
The reason it’s important to defend the IA/Wikipedia and pile our resources behind them instead of splitting off new projects is that if they lose legal cases, any other projects with the same or similar goals will face exactly the same attacks and results. Unless you intend to host your replacement on the moon.
Fair enough. In that case, let me amend my prescription:
Whether or not it’s the same project is immaterial — it’s about redundancy of the data, hosting it in multiple countries, in such a way that if one country turns authoritarian and wants to burn it down, they’ll be backed up in 10 other countries. The community as well should be international and redundant in a way that allows for responsibilities to shift if push comes to shove.
Ultimately it’s about not being vulnerable to one country having one bad day.
Unless you intend to host your replacement on the moon.
No, just countries that don’t want to destroy IA/Wikipedia. If there’s none of them left, then we’ll have much bigger problems.
I think that if we work together as people we can achieve more than just a couple of good organizations that can fade. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t donate to Wikipedia or Internet Archive. The goal isn’t to compete, it isn’t a business. Just to make things stronger.
I think that if we work together as people we can achieve more than just a couple of good organizations that can fade.
That is exactly what the Internet Archive and Wikipedia are - a bunch of people who wanted to achieve a shared goal in an open, free, and democratic manner.
As soon as you start building something to replace what they’ve made you’ll quickly realize what they did - it’s very big, so it needa layers of governance, and you don’t want mismanagement by any one person or handful of small people, so you incorporate it and make a charter of your mandates, policies, procedures for stakeholders to vote for removal of people causing issues, clauses stating the data and corporation are owned by your non-profit entity and may never be for-profit… And pretty soon you have yourself an institution.
Downloading and accessing Wikipedia offline through Kiwix is actually pretty easy.
How does it work? Does it download all Wikipedia or any other website I point it to (like Project Gutenberg as it says on the website) pages or does it download it when I access the page?
You get a .zim file that is either just text on the pages or text + pictures. One I have is like 109GB~ w/ pictures. There’s many others to choose from as well I believe not just the ones I mentioned
Oh god. I’m gonna need more storage
Trying to burn digital books. Fascism in 2025.
Best $100 I ever spent.
You are far more generous and capable than I am. I started a monthly 5 dollar donation.
Every penny helps.
