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The most disturbing news story I've read all year
40hz:
I can't see that it does - though I could be missing something here, of course.
What is the issue now?
-IainB (November 18, 2013, 08:27 PM)
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I think it may be more that I hadn't made my concern sufficiently clear.
What I found disturbing was the policy of the Internet Archive to delete information in their archive upon request "as a courtesy."
Not being a UK citizen (and Britain's government not being as meddlesome and intrusive a force on the international stage as a certain other government is) I could frankly care less what the UK Cons or Labor parties do or say.
But what I am concerned about is how willingly something like the Internet Archive goes along with revisionist scrubbing requests from those who do not wish to let their historic political record stand.
Bad practice. Bad policy. Bad move, Internet Archive. Shame! ;)
IainB:
@40hz: Ah! Sorry. I think I see what you mean now.
I had originally thought that the Wayback machine might be a permanent one-way archive, but then I realised that quite a lot of stuff never seemed to make it into the archive in the first place, and then I later discovered that was probably because the rules set up in the robots.txt file (or something) were things that robots/crawlers would have to obey (apparently not because of any statutory obligation, but because of a "professional" obligation). Later, when I was researching a "bad science" investigative website that had shut down because of legal threats from lawyers acting for some of the bad/fraudulent scientists whom it apparently exposed, I discovered that, though most of the website was in the archive, the offending parts of it had apparently been expunged.
What that seemed to indicate was that, not only was http://wayback.archive.org/ a necessarily passive robot custodian of what website owners wanted to permit its crawlers to access by default, but also that they would action any and all subsequent requests for expunging archived content.
I could be wrong in some of the above, because I have deduced a lot of it from experience. I don't know it for a verifiable fact.
What I was unaware of until reading the posts I linked to, was that putting a rule into a website's robots.txt or something, to block the Archive from crawling that website, could/would necessarily be used to force a retrospective expunging of all previous archived material from that website.
My new awareness on this point means that I have just turned from being a strong supporter of Archive.org to being an indifferent non-supporter.
I mean, what's the point? Humanity's creative drive to monetize everything has led to an entirely new and dominant market for ubiquitous e-commerce that has been created and developed in the www. However, according to the Pareto principle, roughly 80% of website content is likely to be puerile rubbish and 20% of it useful facts/truth. The www has moved from the original state of being a repository of, and a communications medium for scientific truth/research, to the point where facts/truth would seem to have become victims of a wave of absurdity/irrationality. For example, you only need to look at the evidence of irrationality/absurdity in comments and information posted in the Science/Peer Review and Thermageddon subject threads in the DC Forum.
Sure, it's great to be able to have a sort of discussion - e.g., like in this particular discussion forum thread I am posting to now - with different people somewhere else in the world whom you've never met and might never meet. That at least is something we couldn't so easily do in pre-Internet times; but is the quality of the discussion really any better than if you were face-to-face? Is there less absurdity/irrationality or more? Take it to an extreme and ask the same questions of Twitter. There is a stochastic tendency in Nature for things to "regress to the mean" (e.g., with IQs). On the Internet, it seems to be regression to mediocrity/orthodoxy of content (e.g., as in Wikipedia).
The reality that "...putting a rule into a website's robots.txt or something, to block the Archive from crawling that website, could/would necessarily be used to force a retrospective expunging of all previous archived material from that website" means that truth (history) will be and is already being deliberately expunged/manipulated, as in the 1984 scenario.
Which I guess is the point you were making. :-[
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, 1984
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IainB:
This discussion reminded me of the case of Prof Richard Parncutt, who revealed himself as an éminence grise Climate Fascist at U-Graz:
per Wikipedia:
Richard Parncutt (born 24 October 1957 in Melbourne) is an Australian-born academic who specializes in the psychology of music. He has been Professor of Systematic Musicology at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz in Austria since 1998. He attracted international media attention in 2012 for his advocacy in favour of the death penalty. (Discussed in the Thermageddon thread in the Basement.)
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Amongst the types of people he considered should be put to death for their perceived sins, Parncutt especially had in mind "climate denialists" for the death penalty - to be adjudged by a suitable panel of climate "scientists" - I kid you not.
His simultaneously revealing and damning "rationale" (if that is the correct term) for this was documented for all to see in a page on his university website from 25 October to 24 December 2012.
Of course, after that date it was taken down from the university website, and expunged from Archive.org when people belatedly, but probably unsurprisingly objected to it, and Parncutt has since apparently been "disciplined" (QED) by the university board. However, the offending page showed up in Google Cache for a while and can still be seen in all its splendiferous context at Webcite: WebCite query result
Unfortunately: WebCite will stop accepting new submissions end of 2013, unless we reach our fundraising goals to modernize and expand this service.
So it looks as though the apparently more permanent/reliable archive (Webcite) may be about to be shut down, whereas the apparently less permanent/reliable archive (Archive.org) has recently been (apparently) quite well-funded.
Now I find that a little strange, in light of the above discussion.
Parncutt could no doubt be pleased about it though:
One lesson here is probably to be a habitual archivist for the important stuff that catches your attention whilst reading news feeds, etc., and to share those archives publicly.
I have faith in one thing...
there are fanatical archivists all over the world.
-superboyac (November 18, 2013, 05:22 PM)
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mwb1100:
Keep in mind that archive.org sees itself mainly as a librarian, not as an "information watchdog".
archive.org follows the "Oakland Archive Policy":
Online archives and digital libraries collect and preserve publicly available Internet documents for the future use of historians, researchers, scholars, and the general public. These archives and digital libraries strive to operate as trusted repositories for these materials, and work to make their collections as comprehensive as possible.
At times, however, authors and publishers may request that their documents not be included in publicly available archives or web collections. To comply with such requests, archivists may restrict access to or remove that portion of their collections with or without notice as outlined below.
Because issues of integrity and removal are complex, and archivists generally wish to respond in a transparent manner, these policy recommendations have been developed with help and advice of representatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chilling Effects, The Council on Library and Information Resources, the Berkeley Boalt School of Law, and various other commercial and non-commercial organizations through a meeting held by the Archive Policy Special Interest Group (SIG), an ad hoc, informal group of persons interested the practice of digital archiving.
In addition, these guidelines have been informed by the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights http://www.ala.org/work/freedom/lbr.html, the Society of American Archivists Code of Ethics http://www.archivists.org/governance/handbook/app_ethics.asp, the International Federation of Library Association's Internet Manifesto http://www.unesco.org/webworld/news/2002/ifla_manifesto.rtf, as well as applicable law.
-http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/conferences/aps/removal-policy.html
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Clearly the people who drew up this policy put a lot of serious thought into the ethical, legal and historical ramifications of the policy. And they appear to have done so in an inclusive and open manner.
They aren't necessarily evil just because their goals aren't quite what you might have thought.
IainB:
...Clearly the people who drew up this policy put a lot of serious thought into the ethical, legal and historical ramifications of the policy. And they appear to have done so in an inclusive and open manner.
They aren't necessarily evil just because their goals aren't quite what you might have thought.
_____________________
-mwb1100 (November 19, 2013, 09:06 PM)
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I suspect that @40hz might have had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he wrote:
...Bad practice. Bad policy. Bad move, Internet Archive. Shame! ;)
-40hz (November 19, 2013, 05:49 AM)
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Many thanks - the info. you provide helped reduce my level of ignorance about Archive.org and confirms and explains why Archive.org is "...the apparently less permanent/reliable archive" as I described it - that is, it's effectively incorporated in their charter.
By the way, I have since looked further into WebCite: ("...the apparently more permanent/reliable archive")
* Why it is thus is described in their charter as documented in the FAQ.
* They have a funding/donation site at FundRazr. The comments there are worth a read. They apparently plan to migrate to an infrastructure based on Amazon A3. There is a comment:
Thank you! We are on track to reach our initial fundraising goal. Please keep giving to make sure we are able to archive new material in 2014 & beyond!
--- End quote ---
As discussed in their FAQ, WebCite seems to be focussed on an approach to creating more permanent records for academic citation purposes, of general academic information/knowledge/research, rather than the broad-brush "suck it all in" of the Archive.org (and remember the Pareto principle).
I always rather liked the idea of the mythical Hall of Records, said to be buried under the Great Sphinx of Giza,
rumoured to house the knowledge of the Egyptians on papyrus scrolls and the history/knowledge of the lost continent of Atlantis.
I reckon we have the technology and the opportunity to create our own Hall of Records for the future, but Archive.org probably won't be able to cut the mustard if the knowledge is progressively and relentlessly deliberately destroyed/expunged from it by people intent on covering the truth of their shame or criminal/political intent or propaganda, or whatever.
So @40hz could find in WebCite an approach to offer perhaps more than a glimmer of hope for avoiding the dystopian 1984 future that he is concerned about, though whether WebCite will succumb to an onslaught from an emergent 1984-type of Totalitarian fascism, only time will tell.
Some people (not me you understand) might say that the odds for WebCite in that regard don't look too good really, and they might further give the example of the American Constitution as an illustration of something existing that doesn't seem to have held up all that well against such an onslaught, but I couldn't possibly comment.
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