“This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted,” Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, “like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online.”
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If you can, donate to them, even just a dollar. The Internet Archive is critical for preserving history! Heck, try to lobby your politicians to donate to them if you’re outside of the U.S. (because that probably wouldn’t work inside the US nowdays)
Ugh some asshole who’s only going to live a century depriving an endless future of historical knowledge. Musk needs to be detained and imprisoned.
Yes, “detained.” And “imprisoned.” ☠️
I wished we hadn’t voted for him. Wait a minute…
If you are USian, you did vote for him, either by voting, by not voting, or by not doing enough to prevent it. We on the outside of the US dystopia do get to suffer the consequences without having voted either way.
He is literally a foreign terrorist. Deport his ass!
Deport? Dude he is still a man of serious means. It won’t stop him. He needs to be put in a supermax prison and in isolation. It is an intensely cruel punishment but the only appropriate one.
ironically hes from a country thats currently being influenced by russia too.
they already faced cyber attacks now this? i mean, what can i say that hasn’t already been said? keep on fighting for democracy!
Modern book burnings create a lot less smoke and noise.
They also have a merch store: https://store.archive.org/
Musk should really be removed from power.
He should join a Mario game as the second player.
Musk should be removed entirely. He has gone completely authoritarian.
no one voted him in power in the first place, doesnt that go directly against democracy too?
Vacation to El Salvador. Permanent.
CECOT or gitmo.
Isn’t he an illegal? Oh he isn’t and you say he has papers? Oops! Sorry, cannot get him back, we don’t have that kind of power, shrug emoji!
I didn’t see any papers 👊 🇺🇸 🔥
he got in on a J-visa, so did his brother, he did something long enough so that him or his brother could permanently stay in the country. he allegedly was going to grad school? but quickly abandoned it once he got his citizenship.
…i believe that, officially, he’s just a consultant: some woman whose name i can’t remembre is the nominal head of the department which nominally-isn’t-DOGE…
Isn’t it weird how “doge” just goes after anything that actually benefits people?
They are just after things that doesn’t benefit them
To be replaced by something privately funded, if at all.
Libertarians must be creaming their jorts.
He’s a loser. As are all his “dark enlightenment” apartheid neo-Nazi bootlickers :-)
They used to burn books. Now they just defund information storage services.
sounds like the same thing.
You know what is so ironic? I remember not that long ago (OK, like 20 years ago…) that once something was on the internet, it is there forever as long as file sharing and multiple hosts do it… but it has become abundantly clearly that, despite the fact that it can be REALLY hard to get shit off the internet, it doesn’t make it impossible. We’ve already seen it happen. The truth is, there is so much stuff that people DON’T widely share, and even then, the interest in their sharing in a torrent style is limited (I once downloaded leaked emails regarding transphobic propagandists talking to one another and while I kept seeding for almost a year, I barely got anyone downloading), that it is actually possible to make large amounts of stuff just vanish.
I think the real point of the adage, “once it’s on the internet it’s there forever” is more about the fact that you, personally, can’t take it back. Someone might of screenshot, downloaded it, reuploaded it elsewhere. The real meaning being that, once it’s on the internet, you no longer control it. Which I think still holds true, but it definitely was heavily implied that it would be there forever.
Pretty much this. Once you put it on the internet it’s out of your control. It might disappear, it might not. Best just to assume it won’t. Unless it’s useful information, then it probably will.
I’ve seen several examples of things wiped before, so I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that adage. I’ve seen several niche forums, or even forums of small newspapers - just go completely offline.
It might be these are still sitting around on backups somewhere and will some day come to light and be hosted by some entity in an open format…
I made forum posts going as far back as 2000. Almost all of them are gone forever due to the reasons you mentioned. Even the wayback machine might have a snapshot of the forum, but not the threads made them, and not the posts made within those threads.
i started joining forums in late 2000s when i was in CC, those were og"reddit" sites before i migrated to Y’Answers, then to reddit after that.
I’m wondering if any BBS posts I made way, way back when are on any drives anywhere. I’m sure it’s possible. I’m pretty sure the USENET posts I made back in the day started to get archived by Google (at least) and I’m pretty they will be around for quite some time.
Proprietary things built and run by private tyrannies using no standard protocol (like NNTP or ActivityPub) I don’t give much of a chance…
I made BBS posts in the early-mid 90s. They don’t exist anymore, because at that time the only BBSes I had any access to were local guys running one off a personal computer (and as such weren’t even available 24/7). The DMs and chats that happened there? If those guys actually kept the logs and kept transferring them from HD to HD, then I’ll be damned… but chances are likely they have disappeared into the ether.
Same. Some of my friends ran BBSes back in the 80s in the fashion you talk about - at least one friend had parents who were comparatively rich/doting and had a second phone line (!) so one of them was up quite often. I think he ran his from a C64.
Sadly, I could not afford a modem at the time - and my parents were not too keen on the idea anyway, because they assumed I’d be running up big bills. I didn’t have any access to a HD until late 1989 and that was all of 20MB (Mac SE). I didn’t get into BBSes until 1991 because I finally had a modem and a phone line…
Yes, the trouble with archiving is knowing what will be important in the future, rather than just popular now. We saved a lot of games from the 80’s through 2000’s through piracy, because they were popular to pass around, but we lost a most of the early web because no one thought it would disappear until the internet archive came along.
Not just games. Full operating systems from the 60s and 70s are being kept alive by hobbyists. Unfortunately there is no law or rule about proprietary/company specific software. In 50 years (or less) historians will know more about how the Romans did banking than how it was done in the early days of computing.
Piracy is the reason why video games survived what I call ‘the early creation purge’. Basically if you look at the 20th century and see various media that was created, most of the early stuff is gone. Like in the silent film era, 90% of all the films made (if we are using Hollywood movies as a metric) are lost, and probably also the film of other countries, too. Even 75% of all early sound film is lost, and for TV, the earliest broadcasts were never recorded, and many from the 1940s to 60s were also never recorded and are lost forever.
Video games? They’re the sole exception. Thanks to piracy and emulation, we can play computer and arcade and console games from the 1970s without issue. This has never happened before, and we have emulation devs and software pirates to thank. Ironically the overwhelming majority of abandonware video games online were not the originals… they were copies of copies that someone not only pirated back in the day, but also cracked. As a 90s kid, I smile whenever I see the RawCopy screen when I load up an old MS-DOS game.
Archive.org is doing God’s work for a lot of stuff.
It’s a crying shame what happened to early Doctor Who episodes, to be honest.
What a time to be alive. It’s like Ancient Rome has entered the peaceful minecraft nature server.
Time to donate again :)
$345,000?
That’s like, 2 devs and an 8 CPU VM.
Holy shit, that’s like not even a rounding error to the US Government. So obvious what he is doing.
It’s trully disgusting and inexcusable.
That’s 1/100th the price Trump paid to send innocent people to CECOT.
This publicity will probably bring in more money for the internet archive than what was cut.
Still a dick move by musk, but I’m glad it’s not an existential threat to the project.
For a bit.
Public institutions need and deserve public funding.
Extremists always destroy history so they can write their own.
I doubt the Library of Alexandria had permission from all rights holders to hold copies of many books. /s
Recent inconvinient history. They love to dig up ancient “glory days” (e.g., Ancient Rome, Teutonic knights…) and attach them to their image.
They’re not meticulous historians though. LGBTQ people were more accepted in the Roman Republic (and in ancient Greek) than today.
“Caius Julius Caesar: husband to all the wives, wife to all the husbands.” was a saying that my Latin professor taught us in school.
They don’t care. Just like with religious texts, they’ll shop around for the things they like and ignore those they don’t.
They’re not meticulous historians though. LGBTQ people were more accepted in the Roman Republic (and in ancient Greek) than today.
“Caius Julius Caesar: husband to all the wives, wife to all the husbands.” was a saying that my Latin professor taught us in school.
Being AMAB and bottom was stigmatized to the point their swearing system revolved around emasculation threats, so that’s different from what the queer movement of today aims for…
Our swearing system in modern English revolves around sex, violence and infidelity, but our society is also kinda into those things. Societies are complicated.
Edit: also sometimes people still say shit about bottoms when they curse.
Being bottom was really only stigmatized if you were bottoming for a social inferior.
Giving a woman head was more “gay”/stigmatized than taking it up the bum, unless maybe it was a slave penetrating you.
There’s no room or recognition for lesbians really. Trans issues are a tangled web, as they always are.
I agree that it should not be the goal for any modern civilization to copy Rome. They were not a just society, they had slavery for starters, but Roman citizens enjoyed a lot of personal liberty. If you were dirt poor you would not even have the time for a “nonproductive” relationship, if you’ll excuse my expression. Kids were a resource more than a cost.
I’m not an expert but I think “stigmatized” is too strong a word in this context, I’m sure they did joke around if a rumour or a hunch was spread about a person’s romantic affairs by the people who hated them for their success or by their enemies, I’m not sure they really cared that much otherwise. Of course before the christian emperors came along.
