Slashdot Mirror
Snapshotting the Whole Internet?
Anonymous Coward writes "CNN is running a story about a company that is saving periodic 'snapshot' archives of the whole www (or as much as they can) for historical purposes. Interestingly they say that although they might have considered saving everything except ads, they didn't throw away the ads because historians claim that ads give a better "glimpse of what life was like" in the past. I wonder what legal ramifications will arise for possessing such archives of the "whole web" as snapshots-in-time. Thoughts of DeCSS, CPHack, MS Kerberos' click-wrap license, I.P. "ownership" of collected databases cross my mind."
i parsed this as
"Slashdotting the whole internet"
help me....
Sounds like an excuse for having the worlds largest pr0n collection 8^)
.
There is info on the side on how the archive is accessed, created, who pays for it, everything. Read it before you hit that post button another time.
---
END OF LINE
Our website is at http://www.archive.org.
We are *NOT* a company. We are a non-profit organization making our archives freely available to researchers, scholars, historians, etc.. A for-profit company may not be the right model to insure long term longevity of the collections. We only archive publicly available information on the Internet.
We currently have about 17TB of Web pages and images on disk. We've also got about 6TB of older stuff on tape that we are migrating to disk. We're growing at about 3-4TB/month. We are not yet getting Usenet or streaming media because of labor limitations. Anyone wanna come work for us?
We buy storage PC's with twenty 75GB IDE hard drives, 2 667Mhz CPUs and 512MB RAM. We run Linux, but are migrating to FreeBSD because of the 2GB file size barrier.
Access currently requires a bit of UNIX skill. There is no browser interface to our collections. You'll need to be able to write your own search software, as the only index we have right now is a URL index. If you want access, you'll need to fill out a form at http://www.archive.org/proposal.html.
Kurt Bollacker
Technical Director, Internet Archive
kurt@archive.org -- www.archive.org
P.O. BOX 29244, San Francisco, CA 94129
vox: 415-561-6796 -- fax: 415-561-6768
So you're saying that because the web isn't perfect and it doesn't reflect the general society, it won't be useful to historians? If you ask me, this would make it more interesting, not less. This transition will have an extremely short lifespan (probably under 20 years in length), so the more data the better (for the historians).
And, FYI, just because the Royal Family doesn't reflect English society, it does not mean that historians don't find them interesting.
Well I suppose that the sheer amount of perversion and degredation available on the net at this point in history will provide a lot of interest to future historians, so in that context sure it'll be "historically interesting"!
You just don't get it, do you? Should historians gloss over the Holocaust, the Reconstruction, and the Dark Ages simply because they were "icky?" Sometimes the darker elements of society are the most worth examining in a historical context. The whole point of the saying about those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it isn't that you should study only the good points and avoid them.
But, pornography aside, what is there of real historical value on the net? Sure there are any number of mindless geocities homepages full of drivel about people's pets, but sifitng through this would drive anyone mad and there are a lot more "insightful" sources already available about today's culture.
Do you think it's not just as frustrating to shuffle through archives of old 19th century newspapers to find ads and articles about the medicine of the day? The point that the man speaking for the Internet Archive was making is that this is not a study of only the famous. With these archives at hand, you can study the transition from the early days of research papers to the rise of pornography and personal websites to the current days of e-commerce to whatever major social trend the web next holds. An archive of the web shows how society has adapted to the format. You can see what issues were hot enough to spur crops of websites only to fade away in the span of a year or two.
Face the music that the majority of humanity isn't putting out "insightful" commentary. Ignoring the common man is a mistake that many historians simply can't ignore because there's nothing available about them. All the "mindless" Geocities sites give an insight into the kind of people that use them.
Unfortunately the web as it stands at the moment shows the worst side of humanity rather than its best side - historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
Sounds like you're the one with the hardly balanced view of society if you honestly think that is what the majority of the web is. The fact is that the majority of the web currently is commercial sites and those "mindless" Geocities sites you like to talk down about. Though there are some bad elements on the web, it's also worth historical note that the web led to the coming out of many of these fringe groups. The very anarchy and rebellion of the web is of major historical interest, and the web is becoming one of the more important socio-economic influences of the turn of the century, at least in America.
But unless it will be used as the basis for future studies then this project is a waste of time, so I don't think you have a valid point here.
Ah, but it will be. Say in 30 years you want to do some research on the Y2K histeria of the turn of the century. While there will be plenty of books to read through, a major factor in spreading the word about Y2K was the Web. However, these web sites are already mostly gone from the Web today. Fortunately, the Internet Archive may have already preserved them for future study.
Would you like to study the rise of Linux or of the web itself? Many of the early web pages about the topics could provide priceless research. Hell, even if you really object to the large amount of pornography, the booming porn industry on the web was a major driving factor in advances in e-commerce. It would also be valuable in studying the "warez" counter-culture of today.
Plus, like it or not, it's not for you to say. This is being done by a privately funded group. If you really feel so strongly that the web is worthless and should absolutely not be archived for historical purposes, then go torch the place. While you're at it, go ahead and start burning those libraries that hold material about history you object to. Otherwise, your choices are "shut up" and "like it."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Sure, this'll be a useful reference for future generations, won't it? I'm sorry, but as much of a fan of the web as I am, I really wouldn't consider it to be something worthy of archival in the state that it is at the moment. Why? Well, because currently the web is still in the transitional period between the days of ARPAnet and purely academic use and acceptance as a medium through which the general public can communicate. And as such, it's still in a state where teething problems overwhelm content.
The trouble with the web is that although it is supposedly accessable to anyone with a phone line and a PC, the harsh reality is that cost and communications infrastructure have meant that only those of a certain socioeconomic group are currently able to use the web, and this group is mainly comprised of the priviliged, a group which most /.ers fall into by dint of their jobs or backgrounds. Research carried out my both my consultancy group and others all indicate that the majority of people able to use the web are white, middle-class and certainly in higher than average tax brackets.
So given this, how does taking a snapshot of the web give a view of how society is at the moment? It doesn't, any more than looking at the Royal family of England gives a picture of what England is like (despite what some Americans seem to think). The views that are expressed on the web are those of a priviliged class who do not have to suffer the effects of current liberal free-market policies and the increasing divide between the rich and the poor.
No, this exercise will be a "Who's Who" of society, showing only those who are rich enough to be able to afford net access. The majority of people, unable to benefit from the web, will be left by this study as an underclass, something which I view as incredibly wrong and an example of the undeniable arrogance that most people on the net display towards those that are perceived as their inferiors. Indeed, I have suffered the same myself here on this forum for expressing views that people consider "outdated" or "primitive", even they are held by many others.
Anyway, any study that attempts to categorise how we live at the moment using the web is doomed to be prejudiced and incomplete. Until everyone is online and has equal access, this is just another arrogant study attempting to categorise who is worth enough to be able to use the net.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
You know, Google is doing something similar. They have copies of websites cached from the last time they crawled it.
On topic, though, doesn't this threaten to change accountability from people who post commitments on their sites that they cannot meet? In the past, these people could change their website at will, and since there wasn't a physical copy, there was no evidence of the previous comittment.
I anticipate this also being used in court. Think about it, if someone sues for libel, the evidence could be available in the 'snapshot' archive. This converts their project into a legal document, and means that the company doing this net archiving could be in danger of contempt hearings if they don't take extraordinary measures to ensure the integrity of the data.
I don't know, this sounds like an awfully big responsibility, and I hope this company has a good bunch of lawyers.