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Archive Team Is Busy Saving Geocities
jamie found this note from Jason Scott, who organizes the Archive Team. They are busy downloading as much of Geocities as they can before it vanishes from the Net after Yahoo pulled the plug. (Note: that textfiles.com link is a good candidate for Readability.) "..after 48 hours of work, Archive Team has saved over 200,000 Geocities sites. We're now pulling in new sites at the rate of something like 5 a second. Is that fast enough? We'll see, won't we. ... A side-effect of the whole process is I now know way, way, way too much [sic] about Geocities than I ever expected to. We've had to dissect every aspect of how the site functions to understand how to mirror things, from its history through how it does crazy javascript ads. Some of it is stupid and some is hilarious... We think we have most every site from 1999 and before on Geocities that was left. ... It is more important to me to grab the data than to figure out how to serve it later. People who have been talking about copyright and stuff seem to think I'm going to sell it or take credit or some crap. I don't see how the final collection won't end up online, but how is elusive — maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is, I'll make sure people can get it, somehow."
I lost the password to my Geocities page 10 years ago. Think you might be able to find it?
I can see the fnords!
Yes, future generations must know about the horrors visited upon us by the millions of tubgirl and lolcats clones which populated Geocities. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Isn't anybody going to move a finger, while a significant part of our collective history disappears forever?
I really don't think anyone should be allowed to simply pull the plug, no matter what TOS say.
If I buy the Colosseum and then decide to blow it up "because it's mine", I bet I'd be stopped by someone, rightly so.
As a historian of year 2075, I'd really want to have access to Geocities if I am researching the '90s.
It happened at least once before. In the 50's and early 60's, video storage technology was expensive, and most video documentation was not not considered to be of any 'historical value'. As a result, most of it was just erased and we have lost forever an incredible source of information on that period.
Is there a productive way to scream? A petition of some kind? An attorney to be addressed?
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
Did you try hunter2?
This is just ridiculous the amount of work they have to go through to half ass archive geocities. Why can't yahoo just hand over a stack of hard drives to archive.org or someone?
I want to make sure that any geocities site I may have been affiliated with back in my formative years is not seen by anyone who might recognize me now.
Who do I make the check out to, and how many significant places will be required?
Along with people who insist on using fixed width fonts in a forum where *everybody* else uses proportional width fonts.
...to rhyme with 'atrocities' ?
What was that password? When you typed hunter2, all I saw was *******.
Be relentless!
"you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2" http://www.bash.org/?244321
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
You know, 40 years ago businesses with rare exception didn't have computers. There was no Internet. It took a professional typist about 10 minutes to bang out a professional letter. There were no cellular phones - hell, touch-tone wouldn't even be invented for fifteen years.
I've got more transistors in my house than existed then in all the world. I've got more storage in my desktop computer (3TB) than existed in the world at that time. I can communicate in ways that at that time were absurd speculative fiction, and would have seemed absurdly undesirable. For example, an annoying computer sends an email reminder every night at midnight to my cellular phone and I can't convince its administrator to make it stop. I could turn my cell phone into a streaming web beacon that updates my position on a world-visible map in real time and I don't actually know if it's doing that without my permission. I can stream my live first person perspective to everyone in the world bored enough to watch it. And now it takes a team of 3 most of a day to craft and deliver a professional email.
You're right. By then we may have lost the ability to communicate in the written form entirely, and lost the option to opt out. That would definitely be "more change".
Help stamp out iliturcy.