This absolutely made my morning.
Edit: Never mind, already knew about the Wayback machine. I thought it was the rest of the archive.
Still good news.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
853 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
58692 readers
4019 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Maybe it’s time to federate the IA.
One of the rare use cases of a blockchain actually being useful. A federated internet archive that uses a blockchain to validate that the saved data has not been altered by a malicious actor trying to tamper with proofs
That would be really cool but horribly inefficient because of the sheer amount of storage required
horribly inefficient
The core feature of all blockchain tech.
To be fair that would not necessarily be because of the blockchain part, more because of the decentralized/federated nature of this theorical network
Sure, but the networking and consent-finding are defining features of a blockchain. Nobody calls a git repo a blockchain.
I mean you don’t need the blockchain for that. The same way that distro mirrors don’t need the blockchain. It can be federated, with each upload being verified through hashes that they are in fact the real upload. I would argue that something like blockchain would remove the authority from them, granting the position of a bad actor spinning up enough servers to be able to poison the blockchain just because they had the computing power, claiming authority
Bro hear me out bro
We put the whole thing on a blockchain. BUT
-
entry order isn't super important
-
you don't need to validate the entire archive
So basically a blockchain, but for a bunch of files, not ordered. So instead of a native token, users can just trade bits of information as currency. 🙀
If it goes really well, we could even recruit one of the Bitcoin developers to help.
lol I fucking hate this because idiots will read this and be like “oh shit is this the new blockchain”
Well done
isn't this what ipfs is?
Sounds like BitTorrent, too
Yes, this is a great example of where ipfs would work (specifically for file hosting, not necessarily for the actual web interface), and also, no ipfs is not a blockchain, and it shouldn’t be. I thought we were past the whole “can this be a blockchain” thing, but here we are. Blockchain is cool tech. It’s also incredibly inefficient for anything beyond a transaction ledger, or in today’s case, money laundering and trying to avoid taxes and regulation.
The thing is sometimed articles must be removed from IA (copyright (I disagree with that one) or when information is leaked that could threaten lives), with a blockchain this would be impossible
this would be impossible
Perfect.
I'd be interested in seeing real examples where lives are threatened. I find it unlikely that the internet archive would be the exclusive arbiter of so-called deadly information
There was an actual example where a journalistic article about afghanistan accidentally leaked names of some sources and people who helped westerners in afghanistan, which did actually endanger those people’s lives.
You need a useless 51% of good nodes to assure that, making it even more wasteful.
I don't know if that's a good idea.
How would you go about implementing the infrastructure for that?
That’s an excellent question. Unfortunately I do not have an answer. But I believe it’s worth discussing some means of redundancy for the IA; even if it’s as simple as rsync to other hosts.
It's worth noting that the saved pages are the only thing that are back for now. Their other services have not yet been brought back online.
A commenter on Ars suggested donating, so I did. You can too with this link! https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/internetarchive
I verified this is indeed the method listed on the Internet Archive website.
I need to do this again. I donated last year, but it's one of my favorite and one pretty important site.
Such good news!
I realize it's like the least important aspect of this, but yay! My podcast is back! I listen to Lawrence Manzo's Mahabharata podcast every night to go to sleep, and I haven't slept well since the attack
If you rely on it that much maybe its time to download it all and keep it.
I honestly don't know how I'd get it until it comes back. I can download through the podcast app, but until then, to my knowledge, it's completely lost anywhere other than archive.org Even the original blog it was posted to back in 2010 doesn't have the audiofiles anymore, just links to the archive.org
It should be possible to download the audio files directly from archive.org, using a browser.
Once it's back, I'll definitely do that. It's still not available as of yet.
This is why it breaks. It's not a streaming CDN. Do you torrent over tor as well?
Maybe if you're rude to more people you can fix everything.
I use a podcast app, and apparently it pulls from there. I never knew before it went down. But I tried a bunch of different apps over the course of this, and they all pull from that.
Okay, which one is missing?
follow the ~~money~~chemtrail
Only the way back machine is restarted to me not archive.org