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Geocities To Be Made Available As a 900GB Torrent
An anonymous reader writes "Felt a shortage of the blink tag in your life lately? Well, have no fear. One year after Geocities was shut down in a cost-cutting move by Yahoo, a group self-styled as 'The Archive Team' have announced they will be releasing a ~900GB torrent file archive. It doesn't have every single site, but they believe they got most of it. The team believes that it's important to not just delete our digital culture, and as crazy as Geocities may have been, it was an important cultural milestone in the history of showing that anyone could create content online."
I'd be interested to see who would host something like that.
if I had the bandwidth for a good price, I'd consider it.
And now my early-teen horrible taste and design ability will live forever in it's terrible FrontPage '97 designed glory. Hallelujah!
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
The only thing I have ever seen on Geocities is scam advertising from links in spam.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Not so crazy now, is it?
In this insanely litigious society, I wonder what kind of copyright release (from all the grillions of Geocities content copyright holders) these "Archive" chaps got? I hope it doesn't come back to bite them.
On an unrelated note, anyone wanna bet how many megabytes of this 1TB torrent is <blink> tags and "under construction" GIFs?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Awesome. But do I really need to download all 900GB of it just to see if my 4KB page is in there? I think not.
I have a way of getting those old files back. 900 GB. Let's see. Gotta be in there somewhere....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I was one of the idiots who lost files in geocities (don't ask me why i didn't backup it), maybe i'll download those 900Gb for a few IMPORTANTS kb.
It all can be stored on a drive that costs less then $100.
Now is that 900GB compressed or not? not compressed it would be a few hundred dollars for a RAID.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It basically told everyone how the internet as the web as a whole would be laid out, from a users perspective, not a technology perspective.
.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Seriously? Is anyone going to download an almost 1TB file just to browse a GeoCities? Why not just give it to archive.org and let them take up the strain?
I'm ALWAYS looking for ways to make my ISP hate me!
Or, maybe not me... how about my neighbor with the unsecured wireless?
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
If the torrent file were itself filterable in any reasonably non-labor intensive way, this would be pretty cool for scraping the 0.001% of Geocities that might be worth my while. (I'm not slamming the content authors for Geocities; everyone has a different 0.001% that is worth their while). We can already select individual files with in a torrent and avoid downloading the entire thing, but being able to select those files through keywords or regex or indexed search results rather than manually clicking a checkbox per file would be awesome.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
So I can download a small part of it and donate upstream for this good cause.
Since it wont be an illegal file (I would assume), I wonder if it will be subject to bandwidth throttling? :-D Dear ISP: Now is the time to hate me.
Or awful. Or both.
This justifies the invention of the internet.
Best Slashdot Co
And nothing of value was... saved?
For the sake of the tubes don't do it!
There's been a growing counter sentiment that I think is correct. Not only is it wrong that we must preserve everything, we should probably forget most things.
Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.
Human societies have this nice ability to forget. If you say something really horrible to me today, I'll be mad about it for a while, then get over it. Archiving everything means keeping this sort of thing around forever. Should we really? What's the benefit? It's not accountability. I've said stupid things online, at this point almost 20 years ago, that I now recognize to be stupid things. They aren't sentiments held by me today. Reading them today will cause you to think and feel things about me, when they were written by a quite different person. This is going to be all too common in the future when people are online in their childhood, when saying stupid things that will later embarass you is quite common, if not a daily occurrence.
In short, sure, we should remember our digital culture, but we should also throw out our digital garbage.
like it or not, its digital history. moreover, most of the early game cheat sites, content sites, predecessors of a lot of now-small-scale publishing operations and even some services started at blinky pages in geocities. have some respect. its like a 1902 model car in 1928 : it may look decrepit to you now, but when more time passes, the people who will come after you will see its vintage value. you cant, because it was just 1-2 decades ago for you.
Read radical news here
Certainly needs to be asked.
Link Please
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Could you please upload it to rapidshare or mediafire for me?
Google has the pages indexed but would they host them?
MOD PARENT UP!
SouthBeach/Lights/5479 iirc.. only been 12+ years or so
Good.
The Internet Archive should pick this up, if they haven't already. I'll talk to some people.
Archiving is getting easier. I had a minor part in preserving the archives of the Stanford AI lab. That required weeks of loading 6250bpi 2400 foot open reel tapes.
When I set up my first website (not counting a little "Hey, it's me" page I did while in college), I hosted it on GeoCities. Eventually, I outgrew them and moved to a paid hosting provider. Still, for all of the flack they get for bad design, GeoCities was to the Internet what free blog hosting sites are now: a place to put your stories, photos, etc without paying anything. If Information Wants To Be Free, then Geocities was an important part of making this happen.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I may store this on a ZFS volume. It will shrink to about half a GB with all those copies of animated flaming skulls de-duplicated.
Trolling is a art,
What if I don't want them to make my shitty Geocities site available? I don't care about you and your archiving high horse. I, and every other shitty Geocities site owner, made my choice when I didn't migrate. They're intentionally going against my implicit decision.
Geocities was the digital equivalent of Cabrini-Green.
This means the dodgey utility I wrote in high school to give my WarCraft II saved games maximum gold, wood and food will live on forever.
It is very easy to publish something on the Internet, and very hard or even actually impossible to delete it again.
Like you, I've said a lot of things about anything and everything. While nothing is actually a big deal, you can get some very detailed info on me if you were to combine all of this published material.
That was all in the distant past (at least 10 to 15 years ago) and I've wised up since. Not posting under my real name, periodic switches to new accounts on blog sites, just the standard precautions against data trawlers. Yet, I would rather have all that old stuff deleted. I have tried, and it's not going to happen. I made an effort to remove a specific picture of me, with some success. I had them all removed, or so I thought. After a few years, a few new copies surfaced. No idea how and why. And just forget about removing stuff from Usenet, even with x-no-archive it all get's stored for eternity.
And I'm in no way special or even remotely interesting to anyone. If I can't get my old shit deleted, no one can.
There really should be an expiry date to some stuff...
Great, now this can live on forever, much to the chagrin of his wife: http://geociti.es/Colosseum/2417/ryansteve.jpg
no comment
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=.tta+file
Aww crap. I forgot what my neighborhood was. I'll never remember my 4 digit UID. And I'll certainly never remember what content I put up.
I think it would be fun to find it, but I have no idea how to start looking.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I think we should showcase our brilliant designs to aliens!
Also, interestingly enough, blinking text, marquees, and spinning logos still reflect business advertisements today, just look at your $mainstreet or Times Square.
The thought occurred to me that the simplest way to archive would have been to purchase the Geocities disk drives. Then there would have been a near certainty that all of it was gotten. At the very least I hope there was coordination amongst all the archivists to prevent duplication and speed up getting the content.
They may not have a huge amount of value to future historians, but I bet this data does have value to the people who originally generated much of that content.
To plot a line, you need to points of reference. For us, the present provides one point of reference, and the past another. It's much easier to see where we are going as people when we can see how far we've come. Yeah, many of those old pages are embarrassing, but much like reading my own journal entries, it really helps me appreciate how I've developed as a person.
Keeping those old web pages around also shows us about the history of social network. These days, if someone wants to throw some personal information on the web, they'll open up a facebook account. With a minimal investment of time, they'll have a fairly professional place to put their thoughts, photos, comments to friends. Back in the late 90s, little or none of that existed; geocities was the closest equivalent. Without a framework, people with no talent for web design were left to code up ugly websites with copious under construction signs. I'm sure more than a few of them went on to be professionals.
We've come a long way, baby.
Why is it that every insignificant little snippet of HTML becomes an important historical artifact? Seriously, guys, just delete it and move on. It's dead tech and should be consigned to the trash heap.
Will the world be a better place tomorrow because of this site? I seriously doubt it.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
The vast majority of this torrent has got to be (badly optimised) GIFs. They should do a version without those included which would be interesting all the same.
Damn, I'm back to remembering when Adobe Imageready 1.0 came out . . . .
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Who to call for tech support?
I haven't been able to log into my geocities sites lately.
I need my cha-ching to get some bling.
I'm amazed that most of Geocities can now fit on a $50 hard drive. We've come a long way on storage.
I'd bet if they filtered these things out they wouldn't be able to fill a free Dropbox account with whats left. Same goes for Myspace...
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
I believe the correct reference was this: Slashdot News Story: Geocities Shutting Down Today
OMG... at 99.9%... pls seed!!!
Good times!
That's a lot of midi and felix the cat walking back and forth animated gifs.
The 'death' of Geocities is wildly exaggerated Last time I checked, Geocities.jp domain is hosting sites.
I am (I assume) younger than you, but I also have very fond memories of the site. I am now in college (turning 21 soon) and began studying HTML when I was 11 or so.
The thing is... My father was a software engineer and I was intrigued by computers but didn't really know anything about them. You know how some kids tell stories about how they've seen monsters and whatnot? Well, when I was in the second grade I told stories about how I tried to hack CIA and got through the first two firewalls but not past the third... Of course, I had no idea what a firewall was but I knew it had something to do with hacking. (Actually, I seem to have possessed the amount of knowledge that is required if one intends to write or direct a hacker movie)
Anyways. I eventually asked my father to teach me some computer language. He was boggled by the question and asked what exactly I would like to learn. My answer was "What is, for example, the computer word for 'red'?". Oh, the memories... Anyways, he ended up teaching me some HTML. The first actual "site" I created was a website for IDGR (Imitate Demons Group. Inside joke.), which was my operation Flashpoint clan. That would put it somewhere around 2001-2002...
I put the "site" in quotes because it was... Well... It was what could be expected. :) A dark green background, text flowing from top to bottom, some links at the bottom to act as a navigation... The text might or might not have been red. There was definitely an animated skull GIF... But that's not the point. The point is that it got me interested in creating stuff on a computer. (I now study Software Engineering, following in my father's footsteps [Okay, he studied electrical engineering at the time... But the point remains])
Perhaps even more importantly... I have some very fond memories. Fond memories of the pleasure of learning. Fond memories of spending time with my father... Parents, remember to be geeky with your kids. They'll appreciate it just as much as some kids might appreciate memories about playing baseball with their father!
But alas... I'm rambling. And I'm too young to have nostalgic ramblings like this. Geocities was indeed an important milestone, both for the internet and for many individual people. As horrible as the sites were, it warms my hear to know that all that content isn't lost. It still exists somewhere. And 50 years from now, some sociologist browsing through it might find himself at the dark green IDGR website and dedicate a few second to wondering what is the story behind it, before he moves on to the next site.
I'd be interested to see who would host something like that.
if I had the bandwidth for a good price, I'd consider it.
If Yahoo was run by sane people, instead of issuing halt command, they could keep on hosting it. It wouldn't cost a dime.
Or, if they were nice, they could also transfer subdomain to archive.org and donate some machines to carry it. That is in case if they want to play Steve Jobs instead of actually thinking like him. Steve Jobs didn't destroy old macs, he donated them to museum.
It is absolutely static html with very simple cgi scripts (if exists), it doesn't cost anything to host it. That is the part that makes me mad and the fact that trivial to compress them.
For the "blink" tag elite geniuses... Archaeology and history sciences would be in very different place if people from 300-400 years ago were unwise to erase "lame graffiti" all over the historic places. Europeans of dark ages were more clever than today's "it is lame, lets delete it" elite it seems.
User maintains more than a dozen sockpuppet accounts on Slashdot.
I missed you old friend. I hope all is well with you.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There were some pictures of a self-built trebutchet on Geocities. Amongst other things, they shot a dead cow a pretty long way; I seem to remember a cow-shaped crater.
Does anyone have those pics and/or know if they can be found in that torrent?
s/smirchless/tigers of probity
I don't want the social algorithms of the future to determine that I wasted twenty minutes of my life on the above post without nailing the smugger-than-thou power-chord of purple persuasion.
Strangely, Tigers of Probity is the name of a Thai virginity club with an unfortunate literal translation based in a city with an unfortunate transliteration.
On the other hand, maybe not.
How condoms became famous in Thailand?
In a strange linguistic cock-up, rubbers in Thailand are promoted with the slogan "Erase for the Future".
No, on second thought, delete that last joke.
Legacy management is such a burden. Final revision:
In a strange linguistic cock-up, rubbers in Thailand are promoted with the slogan "Erase for the Future". No, on second thought, delete that last joke. To cock-up is beneath me.
There was just no way I was going to find that epic groaner over the board on the blitz-screed time clock (one cup of coffee). Occurred to me on the way back to the grinder.
Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.
Problem one: "future value" can't be determined in the present. You can't know today what bits of ephemera will assume great importance next month, or next year, or next century, even if only for a single person.
The vast majority, of course, will remain unimportant. But those terabytes of trivia tossed every day might include the last words and thoughts of your parent or child killed in an accident, or footage of the teens casing your house for next week's burglary, or messages concerning the "arrangement" between a crooked developer and the state politician who'll be leading the Presidential race ten years down the road.
Problem two: we don't need to "forget", we need to ignore. The amount of data we produced in the last 48 hours is greater than the amount of data we (humanity) produced between 2003 and the beginning of time. Even if we persisted nothing for more than 24 hours, we'd still need extensive triage skills just to deal with the new stuff flooding past us. We can, and always will, apply that same triage to the things we retrieve from archives.
You're embarrassed about something you said 20 years ago? Welcome to adulthood. You can't unsay it, and you can't make other people forget it. You can demonstrate that you've learned something in the two subsequent decades. And when you encounter something stupid someone else said 20 years ago, you can give them the same benefit of the doubt -- if they're still saying the same thing, or still promoting that 20-year-old comment, you can (and should) form a bad impression of them; if they're saying the opposite, or specifically repudiating or apologizing for the earlier comment, your impression of them should improve.
Triage can be tuned, adjusted, improved as we learn more about what is and isn't important. Forgetting is absolute and irreversible. The potential cost of forgetting the wrong thing should often justify the known cost of keeping "everything".
Geocities should be only the start of this preservation effort, if support can be found. About.com, by their behavior over the past few years, has shown that they have no regard for the past, even what they label as 'archives.' About.com is owned and operated by the New York Times, but their policies are anything but newsworthy or literary. When a new "guide" takes over a topic site, they wipe out all previous comments, and when they discontinue a site it's either wiped from the forum's archives or the topic forum is removed from their index entirely. Clearly, this ignorant behavior disregards the history, contributions, and cultural snapshots of the deleted posts. In the spirit of Orwell's 1984, we appear to be rewriting history as we go, by deleting the contributions of previous posters and discontinued forums - not just on About.com, but on many discussion forums. Would the National Archives or the Computer History Museum be interested in supporting such a data-recovery program? Historians make a big deal about the letters of previous generations. These discussion board posts are our generation's history. I.
These discussion forums are the record of our generation, much as newspapers and hardcopy letters were the record of the previous few generations. Preserve it (even with the 'insignificant snippets') or lose the record of how we got to where we are and who we will be. I.
As useless and angst-filled as many of these pages were, I do think they're important. If nothing else, they serve as historical importance. This story is absolutely heart warming.
Information on Cosmology Vedas Interlinks- Copy right books http://in.geocities.com/vidyanand1941 Any one interested may see ebookomatic.com -author Nanduri http://www.scribd.com/doc/17291010/Cosmology-Vedas-Interlinks-Information
wow, that's kinda small compared to today's hard disk sizes. But downloading 900G is going to last quite some time.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
The plural of iso is isos. You do not want an apostrophe before the s. If an iso could own something, you might type something like, "the iso's chair is broken."
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
If only they had cross-linked every image of a floating spinning skull and under-construction worker, they could have gotten this down from 900gb to about 100mb!
(my own geocities site included)