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Tumblr Blocked Archivists Just Before Starting the NSFW Content Purge (techdirt.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: By now, of course, you're aware that the Verizon-owned Tumblr (which was bought by Yahoo, which was bought by Verizon and merged into "Oath" with AOL and other no longer relevant properties) has suddenly decided that nothing sexy is allowed on its servers. This took many by surprise because apparently a huge percentage of Tumblr was used by people to post somewhat racy content. Knowing that a bunch of content was about to disappear, the famed Archive Team sprung into action -- as they've done many times in the past. They set out to archive as much of the content on Tumblr that was set to be disappeared down the memory hole as possible... and it turns out that Verizon decided as a final "fuck you" to cut them off. Jason Scott, the mastermind behind the Archive Team announced over the weekend that Verizon appeared to be blocking their IPs. Thankfully, it didn't take long for the Archive Team to get past the blocks. Scott tweeted on Sunday: "why look at that the archiving of tumblr restarted how did that happen must be a bug surely a crack team of activist archivists didn't see an ip block as a small setback and then turned everything up to 11."
OK. In a legal battle between legitimate archival of content, and the laws governing unauthorized computer system access, which one wins?
It is quite clear that Verizon DID NOT authorize the archivists to archive the data prior to the mass purge, as evidenced by the imposition of the IP blocking. As such, there is a strong case to be made that Archive.org was in contravention of the CFAA, and the workaround could be said to be a technical means of circumvention of that restriction of access (and thus, technically 'hacking', even though I REALLY hate to use such a word for such a simple solution.)
It is also quite clear that there is a cultural asset that was going to be removed, purely for PR reasons by Verizon-- which was in need of preservation, and the Archive.org folks acted to accomplish that preservation.
So... Which wins here? Just curious.
Technically, the exemption to the DMCA that legitimate archival teams have allows them to violate copyright for the purposes of preservation. Copyright is the authority to impose a terms of use; For the use that Archive.org has, (archival), they are granted an explicit blanket exception--- so, they can basically ignore a terms of use document as long as their reason for doing so lies within their established operations.
However, there do appear to be several grey and unexplored areas, legally speaking, with this action. See below, my semi-serious question.
people hosted websites by spinning up an Apache instance that spoke HTTP and would serve their content to anyone who asked. And so there was never that big of a stink about censorship-by-nonprovision-of-services
How did people become "anyone who asked" in the first place?
there's no reason that the next big thing in social networking can't be designed as an open protocol, with no central point of control
The IndieWeb community is trying to build a more protocol-centric social web. Each IndieWeb user registers a domain and buys hosting to hold his or her own posts, and IndieWeb sites use Webmention requests (similar to pingbacks) to notify other sites that replies have been posted. Right now, the biggest missing piece of IndieWeb is a recommendation engine to suggest related works by other authors.
Hardware capability is through the roof now.
IPv4 address space, by contrast, is not. Nor is IPv6 routing; I haven't seen evidence that an IPv6-only website can become successful in gaining and keeping readers.
My smartphone has more storage, more processing power, and more bandwidth than the machines hosting IRC servers not that many years ago.
But it's missing one thing: the ability to accept incoming connections on IPv4. Most cellular ISPs put their subscribers behind carrier-grade NAT, as do even home ISPs in some countries. These ISPs give the same public IP address to a whole neighborhood and will refuse to forward inbound port 443 on your neighborhood's IP address to your machine.
Agreed. Unfortunately, there's not a clear path from here to there.
The good news is that in the lists of Tumblr alternatives, I did see some people seriously considering Plume, which is a federated blogging platform that can connect to other Fediverse federated blogs.
In practice, the vast majority of people are not technical and aren't going to figure out how to run their own servers. That doesn't mean they'll never run their own servers; it means people with technical skills have to make running your own server user-friendly before they will. FreedomBox is one project working on that; the current state doesn't look super-user-friendly, but I think the goal is to be able to sell a box that you plug into your home internet that already has the software installed and can be configured over an easy web interface. Obviously, getting someone to install software is easier than getting them to buy a piece of hardware... although, most of the FreedomBox project is about making the software easier to use.
Getting away from the corporate-hosted model for everyone's content involves both the outreach of making people understand it's a bad idea and actually giving them better options.