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In support of the Internet Archive

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IainB:
This post was originally entitled: 17 days to go to help the Internet Archive reach their donation target.
EDIT - 2013-01-16 1859hrs: I changed the thread title to be more generic about The Internet Archive.)

I have many times said to myself "Thank goodness for the Archive", when I have needed to retrieve some pice of defunct/deleted web material.
I hadn't realised that the Internet Archive are in the midst of a donation request - 17days to go till they finish on Dec. 31 2012, with a target of $150,000. They only have $27,090 as at 2012-12-16 1930hrs (NZT). But look what they are after getting!
"A generous supporter has offered to match every dollar we raise 3-to-1 through December 31st. We are trying to raise $150,000 in donations by the end of the year - with the match, that will give us $600,000, enough to buy 4 more petabytes of storage."

--- End quote ---
As a donation lever, this would be hard to beat - you donate $1.00, they get $4.00.
I'm in, and am also signed up with a library card.

You can check out the details and make a donation via the link: http://archive.org/donate/

IainB:
I came across what I reckoned was a really great idea to actively support the work of TIA by, in effect, becoming a local scanning centre: The Scanning Brigade Comes Home

Hmm I wonder if they have/need a New Zealand node...?

IainB:
Interesting post in Archive.org:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
National Security Agency ❤ ❤ ❤ Internet Archive?
Posted on May 18, 2013 by brewster   

An unclassified document from the National Security Agency from 2007 has some nice words to say about the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, and the Wayback Machine.

“The Wayback Machine is, very simply, one of the greatest deep web tools ever created.” -National Security Agency (2007)

https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/Untangling_the_Web.pdf

A searchable version, and a searchable PDF version.

Main section on us:

The Internet Archive & the Wayback Machine

You have to give Brewster Kahle credit for thinking big. The founder of the Internet Archive has a clear, if not easy, mission: to make all human knowledge universally accessible. And, who knows, he might just succeed. What has made Kahle’s dream seem possible is extremely inexpensive storage technology. As of now, the Internet Archive houses “approximately 1 petabyte of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress. If you tried to place the entire contents of the archive onto floppy disks (we don’t recommend this!) and laid them end to end, it would stretch from New York, past Los Angeles, and halfway to Hawaii.” 102 In December 2006 the Archive announced it had indexed over 85 billion “web objects” and that its database contained over 1.5 petabytes of information. 103

But that’s not all that Kahle and company have archived. The Archive also now contains about 2 million audio works; over 10,000 music concerts; thousands of “moving images,” including 300 feature films; its own and links to others’ digitized texts, including printable and downloadable books; and 3 million hours of television shows (enough to satisfy even the most sedulous couch potato!). Kahle’s long term dream includes scanning and digitizing the entire Library of Congress collection of about 28 million books (something that is technically within reach), but there are UNCLASSIFIED  some nasty impediments such as copyrights and, of course, money. None of this deters Kahle, whose commitment to the preservation of the digital artifacts of our time drives the Internet Archive. As Kahle puts it, “If you don’t have access to the past, you live in a very Orwellian world.”

--- End quote ---

TaoPhoenix:
Sorry, nice post, but anything at all from 2007 is meaningless in 2013!

Basicially, they can/will-try to tap anything.

IainB:
Sorry, nice post, but anything at all from 2007 is meaningless in 2013!
Basicially, they can/will-try to tap anything.
-TaoPhoenix (May 20, 2013, 08:55 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yes, quite so. The apparently unintentional irony and implicit potential hypocrisy were amongst the things that made the post interesting for me.
Some people (not me, you understand) might say that, if the National Security Agency ❤ ❤ ❤ You, then it might be time to be afraid - be very afraid - but I couldn't possibly comment.

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