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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 (A quick search of Yahoo for "Wiretap" will reveal the breadth and depth of their archives - everything from U.S. historical documents to texts about UFOs) Anyway, I recently went back to "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 :)
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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.
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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!
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
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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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 :)
Search for texts, textz, text archive, etc.
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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.
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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.
Ideal solution. And if you run your own freenet node, you can set up the wiretap archives to always remain resident on your local node (I can't imagine them being that large in today's stoarge-capacity. it's just text. Worse comes to worse you could zip it down)
This is a significant part of the kind of stuff is what FreeNet is meant to provide access to. And of course, the popular files will propagate around the freenet quickly.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Of course, I might just be paranoid
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
or is this not it: gopher://wiretap.area.com/?
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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 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
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.
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Tech Public Policy stuff
don't forget
Gopher!
My proxy at work has that service blocked but from the looks of it it ought to work...
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.
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