The Internet Archive Is Building a Canadian Copy To Protect Itself From Trump (theverge.com)

The Internet Archive, a digital library nonprofit that preserves billions of webpages for the historical record, is building a backup archive in Canada after the election of Donald Trump. The Verge adds: Today, it began collecting donations for the Internet Archive of Canada, intended to create a copy of the archive outside the United States. "On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change," writes founder Brewster Kahle. "It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a web that may face greater restrictions. It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase."

Comments

Valid

[TFlan91]

With Trumps position on libel laws, smart move to project against legal action.

Still need to project against the ever-in-the-news cyber vulnerabilities. In today's world, physical location only goes so far.

Who Will Protect the Internet Archive Itself?

[Baldrson]

If you have a domain name under which you have a lot of content -- an example is kuro5hin.org -- and, after a decade or so you find yourself impoverished and stressed to the point that you can't renew the domain registration (as did Rusty Foster), a domain squatter jumps on it and holds it hostage for thousands of dollars. When that happens, frequently even "The Wayback Machine" is told to deep-six the archived content by the simple expedient of placing a robots.txt file in the home directory of the hijacked domain. "The Wayback Machine" then dutifully removes public access to the content. OH but the fun doesn't stop there! So now let's say you fork over the ransom money to the domain squatter, get the domain name back and remove the robots.txt. Of course "The Wayback Machine" then restores public access to all those articles... right?

WRONG!

archive.org does keep it stored and it is accessible to those with insider status, but no more public access EVER.

There really is value in hoarding history and if you can get away with it by doing it "on accident" all the better!

Re:Well then...

[HornWumpus]

At least three backups, Iceland, Russia and China. Not that Russia and China are great, their data will likely have to be encrypted...but they are among the few that won't just take an American order and execute.

Each should have a provision for marking part of its dataset 'edited by court order' (in the foreign copies, so out of the crooked courts reach).

Canada's hate speech laws are awful, almost rival Muslim nations for 'worst practice'.