Interview with Brewster Kahle

Netmonger writes "A fascinating interview with the man behind The Wayback Machine. Some specs from the article: "It's 150-odd standard PC cases, with four drives in each.. 'Over 100 terabytes.. As plain text in book form, that'd be over 3000 miles of shelf space.." All I can say is.. Wow!"

Comments

Odd, no copyright questions

[dsanfte]

I was curious to how the Wayback Machine's operators view its legal status... I mean, it's not really a search engine in the broadly accepted meaning of the term. It doesn't just search what's out there, it archives entire pages of old information; And while search engine sites do this (google), this is ALL the wayback machine site does.

Surely they must know they're treading on untested legal ground. All it might take is one offended copyright holder to bring the whole thing to its knees. Basing it in a country other than the USA might have been smarter, then, given the existence of laws like the DMCA which could serve to shut the site down.

Re:A lot of internet information is crap...

[garcia]

I think that storing everything on computers will make historians jobs MUCH less difficult but a lot less fun.
Doing historical research is fun b/c you get to get your hands dirty (literally). I spent 6 hours a day for three weeks researching crime rates in Toledo, OH during prohibition (before, during, and after) and b/c the books were all handwritten and they were so old my hands turned black for days at a time...
It would have been MUCH easier if all the information was sorted and easily found I guess it would make future historians jobs easier but what fun would that be?

Just my worthless .02

Why only four?

[pla]

Out of curiosity, why only four drives per PC?

With a simple $10 PCI IDE card (per additional 4), you could have gotten at *least* 8 drives, possibly as many as 16, per case. Granted, not many cases will let you *mount* that many, but I would expect paying a few bucks extra for the IDE cards and a better case would save quite a bit of money (and physical space) by halving or quartering the number of PCs you need ($100 extra to save $1500 per $2000, not counting the drives themselves?).

88lf of machines vs 22lf. One requires an entire room, one would fit on a standard sized 3-or-4-tier storage rack. Of course, speaking of racks (of a different sort)... What on earth made you go with an array of standard PCs rather than a raid-in-a-rack?

The Wayback machine is a lie

[corebreech]

Try accessing news stories immediately prior to and after the September 11 attack and you'll see just how valuable this website is... or rather, isn't.

I have also personally ran a website which contained fairly controversial material (based on this story) that I saw listed on their website and then removed shortly thereafter. Tell me, why would a service like this ever have occasion to remove material once it's been archived, especially if there are *NO* copyright issues and the webmaster of the archived site never asked them to remove it?

The answer is simple: the powers-that-be saw how dangerous it was to make all this information available to anyone on demand so they took control. It would be a great service were it allowed to operate unfettered, but the reality is quite different.

And I'm the first to mention this here so far? You should all be modded down -1 for naiveté.