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Thrifty, Anonymous Benefactor Backs Up BBC Websites Before They Go Dark
revealingheart writes "The BBC is set to close down 200 of its websites in the near future as part of cost-cutting measures. Hearing that 172 of these sites would be deleted from the Web entirely, an anonymous individual has taken matters into his or her own hands. The result is a BitTorrent file that anyone can download to store a backup of these 'lost' websites forever. The cost of the project? Apparently no more than $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and retrieve all the sites."
Is how many millions of pounds were spent developing all those sites.
The wayback machine is unreliable and slow. It also goes out of its way to make it difficult to make local copies of anything found there. Torrents are much better.
The real reason the BBC is cutting back on its online presence is hidden pressure from the commercial sector who have always seen it as a threat to their revenue. "News Corporation's James Murdoch has said that a "dominant" BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK". Of course we all know what kind of 'independent' journalism he really means. One where some Australian pornographer decides who gets to be president or Primeminister.
"James Murdoch, son of Rupert and the man in charge of BSkyB has criticised the BBC iPlayer, insisting that the popular online VOD service is squashing competition" link
So, what you're saying is that to reprint a book costs wildly less than to produce a book?
Websites aren't books.
That an electronic copy with no attempts to guarantee availability is much cheaper than a resilient set of servers which deliver instantly and accessibly to goodness-knows-how-many-people per minute?
Yes, electronic copies don't cost Auntie anything, which is sort of the point.
And that the cheapest thing of all is to do so without asking anyone's permission?
If he's british then the matter of permission is a grey one: having paid his license fee it could be argued that he has a right to this material and making it available to other Britons is merely an extension. Of course, sticking it on BT for all to grab would complicate matters but I don't see Auntie getting her knickers in too much of a twist.
Look, we can all observe an assault undique to neuter and privatise the BBC. But OP is attention whoring with a cheap technical demonstration which alienates him from the very people he might think he is supporting.
If there is an assault on the BBC it's coming from the government and not even the shower we have now would privatise the Beeb (hell, not even Thatcher tried that). OP may be attention-seeking - he's a Twitterer, go figure - and what he did may have been simple but it's hardly alienating. It never hurts to have another alternative archive of lost material, especially when one has been stung in the past by all those lost tapes of Dr. Who.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
He is not alone, archive.org and I expect many others have done the same thing. It is trivial to do with free software from your own PC at no cost.
I'm sure the BBC will keep copies too. The pages will be removed from the web but we are talking about data that can easily fit on a USB flash drive. The BBC probably has some kind of long term archival system too, e.g. tape. No-one wants a repeat of the video tape wiping debacle of the 70s.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Firstly, the privatisation began years ago under New Tories - the worst hit from a geeky PoV being selling of infrastructure to Siemens.
Secondly, the BBC isn't a public body in the sense that is, say, the British Army. The Army is funded by a general, compulsory taxes on income and other trade. The BBC is funded by a licence which you only need to pay if you choose to watch (possibly time-shifted) live broadcast television.
Thirdly, anyone who thinks that this round of government cost cutting is even slightly relevant to getting out of recession is an idiot. Money is wasted because government acts as an agent for private benefactors, in particular (i) units are sold off and services contracted back to well-back-scratched government officials at profit; (ii) money invested in private wars, trade and military, under the guise of "free trade" or defence of the realm. Much of our debt represents investment in banks from which (if we do things right) we stand to make huge profit once we've sold off again.
Finally, government debt per se is not bad - it acts as a mirror private wealth of creditors. What matters is whether debt is sustainable. The approach after WW2 to a record level of debt was to invest more to grow local technology, industry and services. The approach today is to burn all society's bridges for firewood. Thatcher executed round one, and Cameron prepares kindling for remaining edifices. Then there's nothing left, and Britain will have got exactly what she asked for.
A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them. The licence fee is a compulsory tax on anyone who watches broadcast TV, whether or not they consume or even care about BBC services. Now I'm not saying that I don't enjoy BBC output, or even that I necessarily resent paying the licence fee, but please don't try to use weasel words and pretend it's something it isn't. It might be a special purpose tax and the money it generates might be ring fenced, but it's a tax and the BBC is a public body.
But in the USA you do something like that you end up in court.
"But your honor, I was only trying to help them."
"Your honor, he has no RIGHT to help us!"
But seriously it would be a great clause in the copyright scheme that if a copyrighted work is taken out of distribution it should automatically go public domain. Otherwise publishers can simply delete history like those old racist Warner Brothers videos they keep taking down from Youtube.
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A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them.
You seem to be overly worried about whether something can be called a "tax" or not based on whether it's compulsory (I'd like to propose, then, that food purchases are taxes because they are compulsory for survival). Consider instead the allocation of funds.
Scrapping Trident is a valid cost-cutting measure when the government has decided that it's overspending on unnecessary shit during a recession: if you scrap Trident, you suddenly have a few 10s of billions more GBP to allocate other than against an imaginary enemy who is already being sufficiently resisted.
Even tax on fags and booze goes to central government. The extra taxation isn't allocated for health or policiing services for cancer patients and drunks.
But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.
What is more, I regard the licence fee as the cost the viewer pays for (i) the content produced by the BBC; (ii) even if he chooses not to watch the BBC, the permission given by the people to private broadcasters to use parts of the e-m spectrum (and other artificial/natural monopolies) to broadcast stuff in their interests. The "cost" in this case is the right for the people to provide a counterpoint - something sorely lacking, in, say, the bastion of free press that is the USA.
The BBC is (ideally) the people's counterbalance to the freedom of the press belonging to the owners of the presses.
Theres a very noticable left wing bias at the BBC, especially on Radio 4. We need right wingers like murdoch to provide balance.
Then there's nothing left, and Britain will have got exactly what she asked for.
I didn't ask for it, nor did the vast majority of people in the UK. Governments presume to think they know best when they clearly don't most of the time.
Ceci n'est pas une
The BBC speaks for nobody except the Guardian-reading leftists who work for it. They consistently monster any Conservative (or lately LibDem) who appears on their programmes while giving Labour an easy ride and packing the audiences of shows like Question Time with baying Trotskyites. "people's counterbalance"... don't make me laugh!
Question Time audiences are designed to give a fair representation of the local population - they're not "packed" at all. The BBC balances the private media (well, News International, since they control 90% of the UK's print and TV media that's not the BBC). When Labour was in power, The Sun newspaper fell over themselves worshipping New Labour and the BBC counterbalanced that. Now that we have a Lib Dem/Conservative coalition, BBC balances the now blatantly, staunchly Tory-loving media output. Thus the balance of the Universe is maintained...
Ceci n'est pas une
I have a couple of points to make:
1. People shouldn't assume that this means that shutting the websites would have only saved £3.99 from the BBC budget. Given large orgs and the cost mulitpliers for internally supported servers, it could well be tens of thousands of pounds per year.
2. Instead of people like Ben Goldacre boo-hooing and expecting the government (which the BBC is effectively an arm of) to save the sites, he could have shelled out the £4 and done it himself. Could it be that - GASP - sometimes governments aren't the best way to get things done? :-O
But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.
In the last license fee review, the BBC was given responsibility for funding the World Service, S4C and BBC Monitoring, as well as providing funding for setting up local TV services and various other schemes - all while the license fee was held at its current rate. In other words, the Government offloaded a load of its own expenditure onto the BBC without increasing the BBCs funding, meaning that not only do the Government save its own money, it forces the BBC to reduce costs.
So yes, while the BBC is separately funded, that doesn't mean that it doesn't get screwed by the government and forced to carry out its own cost savings measures...
BBC features have a bit of a bias, but the hard news is straight-up, objective journalism. Your claim that Murdoch, whose media have been proven to slant and misrepresent hard news, will provide "balance" us complete, utter bullshit.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Uh, the definition of a tax is that it is compulsory,
It is not compulsory to watch TV as it is broadcast, so you'll need to give a better definition than that.
AFAICT, starving yourself is the only legal way to commit suicide in most jurisdictions.
The '60s called.
Your definition of a tax is outdated - a tax is defined as whatever the government say it is.
The BBC License Fee was reclassified as a tax in 2006 by the Office of National Statistics, and has been treated as one by the Government and the BBC ever since.
See: Devillier Donegan Enterprises.
An American company that saved the original Monty Python tapes from being wiped, IIRC.