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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!"
It's a shame that some fo the more interesting moments in Internet history are so transient the wayback machine can't catch them.
e.g. The Ded Kitty picture we put up when napster shut down at the star of september, it was only there for a few hours but it will be lost.
Of course, some of the more interesting transient events are websites that are hacked, but there exist dedicated archives for this kind of event, so you can relive the hilarity of RIAA.org being repeatedly defaced.
There's an excellent interview with Kahle on technical details at O'Reilly's own archive -- here.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
We're not qualified to judge what "good stuff" is.
For example, a ciouple of centuries ago old household accounts would have been considered valueless. But today's historians find a wealth of social data in them - what did people eat? how much did they get paid? did families tend to enter service together? how often did servants get new clothes?
Disc space is cheap. Keep everything, let future historians sort it out.
http://www.mindjack.com/feature/archive.html
In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote it, so be gentle.
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.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Probably the limiting factor there is the PCI bus. Modern ATA HDDs tend to saturate vanilla PCI busses (which is why most chipsets have custom busses between the north and southbridge these days). Add ATA cards and your PCI bus quickly becomes saturated and not very good for serving webpages. Worse, since the NIC probably sits on the PCI bus as well, you can easily starve your NIC with too many ATA devices on PCI ATA controllers.
I know, I have a fileserver at home that has this exact problem, but I don't care if my fileserver is slow so it's not a problem.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
on how long before a politician has to resign because of some over the top statements he/she made in a flamewar back in college? Or maybe that webpage of ethnic jokes that seemed so hilarious back in high school.
I have a feeling we are either going to have to become way more forgiving, or we're going to be stuck with only faceless boring types with no opinions as our leaders (no wisecracks, it could be much worse than it is now).