Slashdot Mirror
Where Is The Wiretap Archive?
cfusion asks: "Veterans of the Internet should remember the Wiretap Electronic Text Archive, at one point hosted by wiretap.spies.com and later by wiretap.area.com. It was a gopher/Web site that covered EVERYTHING under the sun, a digital library of sorts, with incredibly rich content. (A quick search of Yahoo for "Wiretap" will reveal the breadth and depth of their archives - everything from U.S. historical documents to texts about UFOs) Anyway, I recently went back to ">wiretap.area.com and found a message saying "No, we don't know where it went." It's gone. My question is really threefold: Where did it go and why? Are there any other Internet-based libraries that host as large a wealth of textual content? Couldn't someone write to the former curator of the site and offer to host it on their own site? Then turn it into a collaborative effort that maintains the sharpest digital library online. Perhaps my question is not so much about Wiretap, but about digital libraries in general. Although I do want to know where Wiretap went, and why someone else can't host it." This is a cool concept. Hopefully it, or something like it, will turn up again on the Net. Update: 04/25 8:45 by J : "It's back up for good," says its maintainer. Hooray!
http://wiretap.area.com/
www.everything2.com is a similar site - it's got tons of great stuff. Please read the FAW before making any nodes - E2 has an experience system, and it would suck for you if your first efforts at noding were, say, voted into the ground by vengeful elder noders :)
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Gutenberg Project comes to mind. As far as I understand it, it's the largest electronic text archive (vanilla ASCII) consisting of text in public domain (no copyright or copyright expired), active since 1971.
God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ --1Thes5:9
if someone gets this off the ground, i'll put up some resources and whatever else I can.
-neil
Isn't that what FreeNet is going to be all about?
www.cryptome.org
Good stuff.
Unfortunately, I never really saw the wiretap archive (I haven't been around THAT long!), but there does exist a large archive of old text files from the 70's, 80's, AND 90's.
www.textfiles.com is a great archive when you are looking for anything text related these days. They all those old BBS text files, ranging from all that H/P/V/A/C stuff to ASCII porn. Check it out!
Seriously though, perhaps the maintainer lost interest, and gradually forgot about it.
It's happened already to many sites on the internet...
BlackNova Traders
Currently, there is an effort to set up something along these lines at aftermath.net. Last I checked, the site was down, but I'm told that they're expecting to be up and running by the end of July. It might be worth paying attention to.
An armed society is a polite society
--
I noticed wiretapped gone about two months ago, and I wrote the DNS contacts.. I eventually ended up with that curators email address and I wrote in offering to host it.
I never got a reply.
Does anyone have a copy of wiretapped lieing around?
greg@linuxpower.cx
There is www.textfiles.com which has some of the more purely digital text from BBSing days. Probably not nearly as comprehensive as wiretap, though.
Check out http://www.textfiles.com/ -- it's got lots of stuff I remember from the BBSing days of yore (and lots more I'd never seen before).
Maybe we could stick it on freenet? My only concern is that little used documents could get pushed off the system...
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
er, read the FAQ. That's what I meant. Oh and beware - it's addictive as hell.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
A friend, for instance, runs infidels.org, a secular website with about 6000 documents in its library.
Anyway, I'm working on a site (anthology.org -- not much to it yet) that will be a directory of online texts. Though, more and more it seems that some sort of active involvement is necessary to support this type of thing -- rather than just cataloging. Shouldn't be horribly expensive as far as major philanthropic activities go $2000 for a RAQ server and $300-500 a month to host it.
BTW, let me know if there are archives missing from my anthology.org list.
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<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
I'm not familiar with the wiretap archive that started this topic. However, on a similar theme, Douglas Adams has started a site to create an "Earth Edition" of his Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy http://www.h2g2.com/. I found the information there to be fairly informative and usually amusing :)
I have a complete copy of the wiretap archive dated from shortly after Columbine, when I feared a crackdown on net sites that disseminated real information. I will provide it to people who are interested. Mail me at wiretapmirror@hotmail.com and I will reply with a URL you can obtain the back-up from.
I remember wiretap was one of the first things I found on the net. Back when a "internet service provider" was nothing more than a place that gave out unix shells (on 14.4's). In fact, I think I found the comedy section the first night I was on the net. I used lynx to read it... the funny thing is, about 90% of the forwards people send around to each now, were on there. My favorite was the "50 things to do on a final you're going to fail."
---
I maintain a website called Omphalos which contains some 18Mb or so of text files relating to modern Wicca, Paganism and the occult. The files are divided into 26 categories and are accessible from the menu on the bottom left of the main page. There are also humour files, SCA stuff, etc.
This is all stuff from the old BBS days preserved from when I closed down my Fidonet/PODS BBS and moved to the internet. The materials used to be maintained in a website called Atho's Pagan Files Collection but I have since consolidated the two websites.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Search for texts, textz, text archive, etc.
Got Rhinos?
That would be something worth doing, what we need is more good old plain ASCII files instead of smarmy commercial flash videos
The GREAT BOOKS INDEX at books.mirror.org mirrors many of the texts that were on Wiretap. I think it was their intention to at least mirror all of the literature on the site (as well as provide links to the original archive and the .txt and HTML versions on the net such as at Project Gutenberg ftp sites
There also was a Wiretap mirror at wiretap.spies.com, but I can't tell if it is still there since it seems to be SlashDotted.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I pulled down everything on wiretap's gopher a LONG time ago. I guess it's time to dig out the floppies.
Is that bad? (not that I've made any money yet, much less "each time someone clicks the link"). I think the link is certainly of interest to slashdotters (backed up by the fact that 170 of them have used the link in my sig to sign up), and using a link in a sig to promote a site which may earn money for the poster is not an unusual practice. I'd probably have a link to them even if they didn't have an affiliate program -- and why give a for-profit company promotion for free when they're willing to pay for it? Anyway, the posibility of earning any money with them is still months away, at least. And the payout amount still remains to be determined -- if I were really looking to make a lot of money from an affiliate link, I think I could find better terms than that.
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<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
I definitely remember wiretap, but I have never thought of it for sometime. What is very disturbing is to how easy it is for digital libraries to disappear like wiretap. What is even more worrying is that we are accumlating so much info that things can easily go bye bye without people noticing, and even when they notice... I heard someone say everything is a solution to this, I disagree. and I don't think freenet is a solution to this either. What bugs me now tho, is what the solution is?
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Although the Wiretap archives mirrored a lot of the Project Gutenberg texts, it was not the same thing - Wiretap had much much more information, and on many more topics. As the original post said, they had everything from Bush jokes to bomb making information to e-zines. I remember FTPing to the archive in the early 90s, and later I had to gopher to the site. But now, I don't know.
--Baelmix
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned http://www.literature.org. They have quite a few of the 'classics' on line. It seems to bea slightly different selection of authors than other sites out there.
http://crummysocks.com
Screw the dot-coms and the whole psuedo-information movement. Wiretap is an internet classic. It should have community support. The more of these types of sites that disapear, the poorer the internet becomes. If this keeps up, it'll just be interactive T.V. all advertising, all the time; no content.
"The Internet is made of cats."
The main problem with history editing is disappearing history. This has been true from www.deja.com's bit-decaying Usenet archive all the way back to the Library at Alexandria.
The only real way to address the disappearing history problem is a shift away from:
- Centralized archives with specialized search engines AND
- A variety of universal web search engines that don't archive
to a variety of universal web search engines that archive.Storage capacity just isn't expensive enough to justify anything but redundantly archived versions of everything ever published on the Web and Usenet. The indexes of such versioning archives are quite similar to the data structures needed for compression anyway, so this is a natural marriage.
I know the Xanadu cover story on Wired a few years ago ended by saying "somethings are best forgotten" but then that article was written by the kind of guys it is generally best to disobey at every opportunity.
Seastead this.
What's the problem?
ftp://wiretap.area.com
In terms of large & venerable Web-based collections of just about anything, Metalab (formerly Sunsite) is still going strong.
I once had a favorite site that I used for all kinds of references. One day the maintainer died. Since he stopped paying his bills, his ISP closed his account and erased his files. I've never again seen a copy of these files :( Since then I suck down entire web sites that are valuable to me and archive them to CD, if they fit. This seems like overkill, but what else is there to do?
This simple method doesn't work for sites like Slashdot that have their data in a database, rather than in separate web pages that can be sucked down by a web bot. If Slashdot suddenly went away, how could we resurrect it? I wonder if we could.
Hey-
:)
It's not there anymore because there's a new version 2.0 of wiretape. It's called the World Wide Web.
Seriously, isn't this pretty much what the web is about, with a little more organized index? And a lot smaller.
Just some thoughts.
Jason
or is this not it: gopher://wiretap.area.com/?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
gopher://wiretap.area.com/ It's just not running a web server is all. Gopher still works just fine, although since I've never been there till now, I wouldn't know if that's a trimmed down archive or not.
----- sXe
If it goes offline again, perhaps this old address could reach someone:I found that address in the comments at http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Libr ary/Classic/, dated June 24, 1994 -- the P.O. box may or may not still be valid...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
I just went to the site linked to in the initial article, ie, http://wiretap.area.com/
and everything seems to be up and running (perhaps some of the content is missing, I didn't have time to look around too much). I know this could be considered redundant; there was a reply to another message that mentioned something similar and several people have mentioned that it's still working through gopher, but I figured it might be useful to point out that the web server seems to be fine in the main thread. Moderate as you will.
- Wombat
or, old school BBS style, WôMBÄT
I just tried going to the spies site and it was there. (to my surprise, since it's been down for a while now.)
Anyhow, one of the "80's BBSes that wouldn't die" is Temple of the Screaming Electron at http://www.totse.com/ They have a fair amount of textfiles.
Thanks, I've been looking for this..
Used to be "text.com", then it disapeared.
I hope they have ascii cows,
I love ascii cows for some reason... And "Deep thoughts by jack handy.."
Then green on black brings me back to VT-100 memories....
I can't BELIEVE the moderators +1'd this to 5! No wonder Slashdot's content is going downhill. Are the moderators selected these days purely by how frequently they post? Must be, because I haven't posted too much lately and I can't recall the last time I was selected.. (not that that's important to me... what's important is the MECHANISM for selecting moderators).
This is as stupid as those "please forward this to everyone you know" virux hoaxes. These moderators need a bitch slap.
I would suggest that if you were seriously thinking about a Digital Library project, you should familiarize yourself with the "state of the art" and what others are doing in real-world projects in this area.
I find that a lot of the work out there is very research oriented, and conducted by library science folks really, really concerned with "getting it right". It's a little *too* anal for my purposes, but you have to admit, all the 'i's are dotted and the 't's crossed.
I just wrapped up design on an object-oriented framework for a Digital Library project (modeled on my earlier work for Early English Books Online http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo), and I found the work being done at Cornell very valuable as an inspiration. The Making of America II project is also an excellent overview of a well-thought-out Digital Library project.
So, for those interested in a little theory and practice, check these links out:
Digital Library Links and Resources:
http://www.ifla.org/II/diglib.htm
Cornell Digital Library Research Group
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/
Making of America II
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/MOA2/
FEDORA (an architecture for information storage and retrieval, *very* nice).
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/FEDORA. html
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
(Readers of "Lucifer's Hammer" may remember that a copy of COSMIC was one of the treasures which was mentioned)
Take a look at this classic title to see what I mean (it's in the paragraph beginning "October, 1993 [Etext #85]").
...or am I missing something?
It's at http://wiretap.area.com/. I don't currently have a gopher client, so I can't say if the gopher version is up, but I can see it through the WWW.
Or am I missing something somewhere?...
...or am I missing something?
The above is a paragraph from the home page. My guess is that ""No, we don't know where it went." is their 404 Error... due to a temporary outage or something like that.
Check it yourself.
y2k info - http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/y2k.html
Tech Public Policy stuff
Works for me. The link was fine, and entering the site, it looked like everything was there.
Is there a problem?
MyopicProwls
My homepage
h2g2 is more than an online digital library, it is a community editable online digital library. Anyone can add entries.
In theory, it is the most complete library imagineable. In practice, well, not everyone contributes so its reach is finite.
However, they plan to develop handheld, wireless devices to access the h2g2... with Don't Panic written soothingly on the cover. Maybe they'll make a springboard device.
So instead of complaining that there are no good digital libraries, just contribute everything you know to h2g2 and it will be more complete than any other.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
You just have to check it out via Gopher. You do remember Gopher, don't you? You can also access it through FTP.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
I miss gopher. ;(
remember when schools had gopher sites, and no web sites?
remember ftp-by-mail?
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
e2 seems to have been slashdotted. Anybody see the humor in this? Mirror anyone?
The first time I tried, I got the 404, then I messed around a bit. It seems to be some kind of web foible. FTP works, Gopher Works, and ...
I'm glad it's not gone.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
Project Gutenberg will probably get close to nothing written in 1923 or after. Every time the year comes close to when copyrights will start expiring again, Disney pays the legislators lots of $$$ to renew all works still under copyright for another twenty years. First it was 56 years, then it was 75 or life + 50, now (as of the Sonny Bonehe^H^H^Ho Act of 1999) it's 95 or life + 70. Isn't retroactive copyright extension a violation of the "limited times" clause in the part of the Constitution that authorizes Congress to establish copyright?
Will I retire or break 10K?
if you are interested in etext/ebooks for reading or archiving can be found here. The list there is almost as comprehensive as my bookmarks, and much better organized!
If you check http://wiretap.area.com/ you will notice it is still up (to an extent, to an extent) also, last time I checked, phearios.org was getting pretty nice. Course they have been down for a little while, but should be up soon.
http://www.theguyinthecorner.com
jerkcity
brutal
As we know, Google is storing local copies of most of the pages its spider comes across. I know I'll be flamed to oblivion for saying this, but I think this approach is *very* problematic from a copyright point of view (no, I don't think fair use applies to copying and archiving whole sites).
The Internet content economy as it exists today revolves completely around traffic and advertising/sponsorship revenue generated from that traffic. Search engines that store pages locally are already affecting the number of visitors on a site, eating away the sustainability of free, commercial content on the Internet.
Marko Karppinen
www.wiretapped.net - Well, it isnt wiretap but its pretty damn good.
woo.
Stupidity.org has a bunch of things like that, including (unless there are two of them) the very joke you mentioned.
But I've sent the cookie to my workplace so I can continue there...
*borkborkbork*
Everything embraces everybody.
Or close to it. Some nodes will be killed with extreme prejudice. The general rule? If a node contains absolutely no information or stylistic flair, the Everything editors will strike it down. But, quite frankly, it's edited with a very light touch. We'll allow most anything on. Because it's part of Everything, you dig? (Or, at least, most of us edit with a light touch. Dem Bones, he gets his panties in a wad, and suddenly he's Charles Bronson fron Death Wish. 'Stick 'em all in a concentration camp...')
The end result? Jump randomly to the story about H.L. Mencken's bathtub hoax to a node of feminist/light-bulb jokes to a node about how a girl lost her imaginary cat when she was 6, with a detour where a guy is going after the 'ultra-liberal media'. It's Everything. At least, it will be, if you join and start adding all your worldly knowledge.
Sorry. I'll shut up now. Other Everythingers know I'm longwinded by nature.
discofever, Everything2 Editor
The Greenstone Digital Library software
distributed by the New Zealand Digital
Library project may suit your needs.
see http://www.nzdl.org
though it may be down - power cut.
In short, it works. You feed it input text and
a configuration file; it builds you collections
that you can serve on-line or on CDROM. If you
have specialised docment formats, you can write
plug-ins (in perl) to handle them. You get all
sortsof extra functionality for free.
Disclaimer: I work there.
ive lost all sense.......is there anything hotter than britney???? i dont think it involved beowulf or Strong Armmmm.......
Ok, you've insulted me. And that's Not Nice. I guess I'll defend myself.
/. back when E1 was advertized knows about E1 - but I only learned (or re-learned) about E2 a month ago. And I love it.
It is not the case that everyone knows about E2. Maybe everyone who was on
Also, THE SLASHDOT OWNERS DO NOT GIVE OUT KARMA. It's slashdot users. Someone must have thought my post was insightful.
Maybe it was someone who had been to E2 in the last little while - someone who knows about the vast variety of public domain stories and poems that are on E2. See something missing? Node it.
Please do not insult me again. Also, anyone who calls for moderation of a post, while posting as AC, is an asshole - if you don't like a post, make a reply to it - the moderation categories are there for a reason.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used