#internet archive wayback machine

[nofollowgame]

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You can now visit more snapshots of Seo's site, Under Construction, on the Flashback Trip Machine! Click around -- you never know what you may find...

[beggars-opera]

One very important note on the immense value of the Internet Archive that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

It crawls major newspapers like the New York Times multiple times per day.

For anything other than one of those scrolling updates breaking news pages, you can access it from the Archive usually within an hour or two of it being published. No paywall. You want international news? You got it. Opinion? That too. Recipes? It's all here. Page not yet archived? There's a button for that and now you got it.

There are various paywall-evading extensions and tricks out there, but they don't always work. This does.

Go forth and read the newspaper.

[muppet-facts]

As someone who has relied heavily on the Internet Archive for research for not only this blog but also professional uses, I urge people to show their support to archive and openlibrary. Make sure if you have an account there, change all of your passwords!! Be safe out there!

[destielmemenews]

"Publishers accused the nonprofit of infringing copyrights in 127 books from authors like Malcolm Gladwell, C.S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, J.D. Salinger and Elie Wiesel, by making the books freely available through its Free Digital Library.

The archive, which hosts more than 3.2 million copies of copyrighted books on its website, contended that the library was transformative because it made lending more convenient and served the public interest by promoting "access to knowledge.""

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[mesopelagic-zone]

Internet Archive and 'The Wayback Machine' are Experiencing an Existential, Legal Threat.

Below is a link to a petition whose goal it is to save one of the most effective tools against digital censorship available to the public.

"At a time when digital information is being deleted, rewritten, and erased, preservation is more important than ever."

Signing this petition is FREE and takes less than 5 minutes.

Recently, user @we-are-astronomer was able to utilize Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to locate and preserve government articles DELETED from the NASA website by Trump Administration censors. For more information, their post can be found underneath the break.

If resources such as these are destroyed, we risk losing every digital article and file deleted under the Trump Administration's censorship. Without a method for restoring erased information, censorship proceeds unhindered. No body, no crime.

Collective action gets results. Do your part to protect public peace of mind.

[raavenb2619]

I’m not sure when exactly this happened, but I think it’s clear that the aro community really is a community, now.

For the longest time I’ve felt like we were still in stasis, not quite there; a proto-community, yes, but not quite a community. But we have more history now to lean back on, more of each other to talk to and laugh with and cry with and learn from. More people that’ll go forward and make a part of modern aro history. More people that believe us, believe in us, will stand with us if we ask them.

I wouldn’t consider myself an aro elder yet, though each year I’m surprised at how long aromanticism has been a part of my life, how long I’ve been free of doubt or insecurity about my aromanticism, how far we’ve come since I was questioning. Then again, when I was questioning, some of the people I looked up to for guidance were probably close to the age I am now, so I might be there sooner than I think.

And, I’m so so hopeful for all aros, young or old, new or not, because we’ve come so far. Day by day, progress is slow (and yes, it’s unfair, it should be so much faster), but looking back it feels fast. We are our own role models, the people we look up to for guidance. We carve our own path through life, making things up as we go. I used to find that terrifying, because I had no idea what the future would bring. But it’s actually amazing, because I can ignore all these silly “rules” and guidelines about what my life should be, and instead ask, “what do I want my life to be?”

Younger me, you have no idea how awesome your future is gonna be. I’m sorry about the pain and hardship you’ll go through first; it won’t be fair and you shouldn’t have to deal with it. But you’ll make it through, and one day you’ll be me. I can’t wait for you to get here.

[stickmenlover]

Just found these at Kenn Navarro's blog through Internet Archive. Not exactly the type of content I usually post, but I'll leave it here. Maybe someone will find it helpful.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Linkrot

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

Here's an underrated cognitive virtue: "object permanence" – that is, remembering how you perceived something previously. As Riley Quinn often reminds us, the left is the ideology of object permanence – to be a leftist is to hate and mistrust the CIA even when they're tormenting Trump for a brief instant, or to remember that it was once possible for a working person to support their family with their wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/27/six-sells/#youre-holding-it-wrong

The thing is, object permanence is hard. Life comes at you quickly. It's very hard to remember facts, and the order in which those facts arrived – it's even harder to remember how you felt about those facts in the moment.

This is where blogging comes in – for me, at least. Back in 1997, Scott Edelman – editor of Science Fiction Age – asked me to take over the back page of the magazine by writing up ten links of interest for the nascent web. I wrote that column until the spring of 2000, then, in early 2001, Mark Frauenfelder asked me to guest-edit Boing Boing, whereupon the tempo of my web-logging went daily. I kept that up on Boing Boing for more than 19 years, writing about 54,000 posts. In February, 2020, I started Pluralistic.net, my solo project, a kind of blog/newsletter, and in the four-plus years since, I've written about 1,200 editions containing between one and twelve posts each.

This gigantic corpus of everything I ever considered to be noteworthy is immensely valuable to me. The act of taking notes in public is a powerful discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a rigor on the note-taking that makes those notes far more useful to me in years to come.

Better still: public note-taking is powerfully mnemonic. The things I've taken notes on form a kind of supersaturated solution of story ideas, essay ideas, speech ideas, and more, and periodically two or more of these fragments will glom together, nucleate, and a fully-formed work will crystallize out of the solution.

Then, the fact that all these fragments are also database entries – contained in the back-end of a WordPress installation that I can run complex queries on – comes into play, letting me swiftly and reliably confirm my memories of these long-gone phenomena. Inevitably, these queries turn up material that I've totally forgotten, and these make the result even richer, like adding homemade stock to a stew to bring out a rich and complicated flavor. Better still, many of these posts have been annotated by readers with supplemental materials or vigorous objections.

I call this all "The Memex Method" and it lets me write a lot (I wrote nine books during lockdown, as I used work to distract me from anxiety – something I stumbled into through a lifetime of chronic pain management):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Back in 2013, I started a new daily Boing Boing feature: "This Day In Blogging History," wherein I would look at the archive of posts for that day one, five and ten years previously:

https://boingboing.net/2013/06/24/this-day-in-blogging-history.html

With Pluralistic, I turned this into a daily newsletter feature, now stretching back to twenty, fifteen, ten, five and one year ago. Here's today's:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#retro

This is a tremendous adjunct to the Memex Method. It's a structured way to review everything I've ever thought about, in five-year increments, every single day. I liken this to working dough, where there's stuff at the edges getting dried out and crumbly, and so your fold it all back into the middle. All these old fragments naturally slip out of your thoughts and understanding, but you can revive their centrality by briefly paying attention to them for a few minutes every day.

This structured daily review is a wonderful way to maintain object permanence, reviewing your attitudes and beliefs over time. It's also a way to understand the long-forgotten origins of issues that are central to you today. Yesterday, I was reminded that I started thinking about automotive Right to Repair 15 years ago:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/right-repair-law-pro

Given that we're still fighting over this, that's some important perspective, a reminder of the likely timescales involved in more recent issues where I feel like little progress is being made.

Remember when we all got pissed off because the mustache-twirling evil CEO of Warners, David Zaslav, was shredding highly anticipated TV shows and movies prior to their release to get a tax-credit? Turns out that we started getting angry about this stuff twenty years ago, when Michael Eisner did it to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911":

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/us/disney-is-blocking-distribution-of-film-that-criticizes-bush.html

It's not just object permanence: this daily spelunk through my old records is also a way to continuously and methodically sound the web for linkrot: when old links go bad. Over the past five years, I've noticed a very sharp increase in linkrot, and even worse, in the odious practice of spammers taking over my dead friends' former blogs and turning them into AI spam-farms:

https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-of-an-ai-clickbait-kingpin/

The good people at the Pew Research Center have just released a careful, quantitative study of linkrot that confirms – and exceeds – my worst suspicions about the decay of the web:

https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/

The headline finding from "When Online Content Disappears" is that 38% of the web of 2013 is gone today. Wikipedia references are especially hard-hit, with 23% of news links missing and 21% of government websites gone. The majority of Wikipedia entries have at least one broken link in their reference sections. Twitter is another industrial-scale oubliette: a fifth of English tweets disappear within a matter of months; for Turkish and Arabic tweets, it's 40%.

Thankfully, someone has plugged the web's memory-hole. Since 2001, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has allowed web users to see captures of web-pages, tracking their changes over time. I was at the Wayback Machine's launch party, and right away, I could see its value. Today, I make extensive use of Wayback Machine captures for my "This Day In History" posts, and when I find dead links on the web.

The Wayback Machine went public in 2001, but Archive founder Brewster Kahle started scraping the web in 1996. Today's post graphic – a modified Yahoo homepage from October 17, 1996 – is the oldest Yahoo capture on the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/19960501000000*/yahoo.com

Remember that the next time someone tells you that we must stamp out web-scraping for one reason or another. There are plenty of ugly ways to use scraping (looking at you, Clearview AI) that we should ban, but scraping itself is very good:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And so is the Internet Archive, which makes the legal threats it faces today all the more frightening. Lawsuits brought by the Big Five publishers and Big Three labels will, if successful, snuff out the Internet Archive altogether, and with it, the Wayback Machine – the only record we have of our ephemeral internet:

https://blog.archive.org/2024/04/19/internet-archive-stands-firm-on-library-digital-rights-in-final-brief-of-hachette-v-internet-archive-lawsuit/

Libraries burn. The Internet Archive may seem like a sturdy and eternal repository for our collective object permanence about the internet, but it is very fragile, and could disappear like that.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#pew-pew-pew

[harrisonyaoi]

gay beatles slash fanfiction has existed since beatlemania, unsurprisingly. so here's some stuff on that topic

"The most visible rock based BandFic community during this era is The Beatles.   On August 18, 1960, The Beatles started playing under that name for the first time at an event in Hamburg, Germany. (Whelan)  It would be four more long years before the band would make their American debut, an event that occurred on February 7, 1964 when they arrived in New York City for their first American tour. (Whelan)  According to Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs in their essay "Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun," this event marked "the first mass outburst of the sixties to feature women – in this case girls, who would not reach full adulthood until the seventies and the emergence of a genuinely political movement for women’s liberation."  This group, composed primarily of middle class, white teenagers, would form one of the core groups in the nascent bandfic community.  In their adulation of the band, they would create many of their own fan related products including stories, zines and art. The fannish oral tradition that is alive today is implicit in the existence and circulation of fictional stories about band members during the early years of the band's history. Because the audience was young and not connected into a professional or underground movement, much of the material created by this group of fan girls never was published.  The production, in most cases, likely consisted of one to five copies of a story being circulated only among the fan’s immediate peer group. The emergence of The Beatles, their popularity and their fans dedication to creating fan works was helped because of the era in which they appeared. The Beatles were at the forefront for many white, middle class teenage girls in helping them redefine their own definition of sexuality and their own definitions of what it meant to be female. (Ehrenreich)  This was taking place in an era where there was that increased debate on subjects like "birth, a woman's obligation to society, and conception, bringing with it all of the bitterness and acrimony that have long surrounded these issues, beginning with perhaps the most obvious one of them all -- Sexism." (Rowland) Legal gender differences between men and women were beginning to fall. (Rowland) For young, white, middle class female Beatles fans, writing stories about the band was an opportunity to challenge their parents, to revel in the new ideas regarding male sexuality, to explore their own and more.  They could write about marrying Ringo or having children with Paul McCartney.  They could write about being noticed by the George Harrison at a concert and all that followed afterward.  Most fans knew that none of those scenarios were likely to happen. Some deeply resented the idea of a member of the band becoming involved with any woman because it destroyed their own fantasies.  They did not want to see that happen. It is highly probable, that given this and the fact that they were writing fictional stories featuring the Beatles, that some of the Beatles were written as homosexual if only as a way to ensure that the object of the fan's lust, since they could not be hers, would never belong to another female fan.  The idea of writing male on male pairings to cut out other female fans is one that would reappear again and again during the next forty years as new bands were discovered and attracted new groups of young female fans." (X)

[buck-tick-stash]

Oh, goody. It looks like the Internet Archive may be under yet another DDoS attack, a good time to remind everyone that two versions of Cayce's "This is NOT Greatest Site" are currently being built.

Kagidokei, formerly known as Kame, who was the official co-creator of the original NGS of nearly 20 years ago, is uploading here. Currently, all Buck-Tick, The Mortal, and Schwein lyrics are up, as well as a number of magazine and interview translations. Check them first.

A mirror site of the original Geocities site, which may be most familiar to fans before the site was lost a couple of years ago, is being built here. Currently, features, articles, and guides are being prioritized to send translation-seekers to Kagidokei's site first.

[noscomunia]

ok but like have y’all read that hacker group’s “explanation” on why they launched a ddos attack on internet archive. bc they said with their whole chest that it’s because:

a) theyre pro-palestine and wanted to flex their big beefy hacker muscles on a website that provides international open access to information as a test before hacking quote, “a list of targets, including israeli entities”

b) the internet archive is secretly in cahoots with the us government and is spying on everybody! eek! scary!! (source cited: brewster khale was on a library of congress digitization initiatives committee. one that is no longer active)

c) these hackers just really REALLY love copyright law okay and they feel oh so bad for the massive corporations sueing the internet archive. “grrr we are activist hackers and we hate piracy grrr”

its the most self-report attempt at being like “i swear guys we aren’t the feds!!” i have EVER seen

[nofollowgame]

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🔶 You can now visit snapshots of Hue's site, Contrast, on the Flashback Trip Machine! 🔶 "It's Contrast {{ hue's // GALLERY }}. Check out the various artworks, or even draw something of your own -- the choice is yours!" 🔶 Or play from the beginning:

[uncanny-tranny]

The thing that gets me about history and humanity is that you never know what is immortalized, and the things that will be immortalized are things you would never think.

I saw a person sharing a new tattoo, and it was one of Onfim's drawings. A boy who lived so long ago he is barely a blip now, but his drawings meant so much to people that somebody is now permanently marked in their skin with one of those drawings. Do you ever look at the things you make and just sit there and wonder if this is the thing that future people look at? Do you ever look at your art, your writing, your schoolwork, or anything that is yours and just wonder who will find it, who will fall in love with a piece of your humanity and become overwhelmed with emotion over? It's not unlikely. It's not totally unlikely that somebody will find a piece of you in the distant future and devoid of any other context of who you were will still love you because you were here. You were here, and you are still here, even hundreds or thousands of years later. Treat yourself with the same love that so many have for dear Onfim.

[arconinternet]

The Centre for the Easily Amused (Website, 1996-2001)

A must for any bored time traveler! You can visit it via the Wayback Machine here. Mouseover buttons to see what they do - the Links section and its subsections' archives are particularly useful.

[threedee-memories]

[roboticoutlaw]

MY FAVOURITE NARUMITSU FIC GOT DELETED WHYY