Maybe it’s time to federate the IA.
YaCy self-hostable search engine kind of has this feature and architecture by way of a DHT inter-peer search, in combination with local page caching. Although the caching feature is something that a node operator needs to manually enable.
One of the rare use cases of a blockchain actually being useful. A federated internet archive that uses a blockchain to validate that the saved data has not been altered by a malicious actor trying to tamper with proofs
That would be really cool but horribly inefficient because of the sheer amount of storage required
horribly inefficient
The core feature of all blockchain tech.
To be fair that would not necessarily be because of the blockchain part, more because of the decentralized/federated nature of this theorical network
Sure, but the networking and consent-finding are defining features of a blockchain. Nobody calls a git repo a blockchain.
You mean a "github repo". Git by itself doesn't give a hoot about validating authors what-so-ever (I could sign as "Bill Gates bill@microsoft.com", and git would happily accept the commit), and it's not federated (multiple people manually downloading various states of the repo at various times doesn't count).
Github ensures owners are who they are, as linked to their profile (though email validation only goes as far as "Well, they clicked the link in the email, so this must be their email account"). Github also isn't federated, since that one site going down takes all the repos with it (unless someone had it cloned, but again, random people downloading at random times yields different states of the repo, depending on when the clone/fetch occured, but then you'd end up with tens/hundreds/thousands of sources of various levels of truth).
It's not a minor nitpick. The comment was that "nobody calls a git repo a blockchain". It's because it's not a blockchain, or even remotely similar to one.
You are right, I was just poking fun a little. No hard feelings. You did just kind of um akshually my use of um akshually tho
No worries. I just correct people on it because it's caused problems at work before. It's a pain when people think that git automatically means github, and they start complaining about cost, and Microsoft feeding their AI, and setting up user accounts, and etc etc etc.
I'm like... dude, I just want to sync the code from a central server, we can do it in house for free in 5 minutes...
Github is a website, controlled by no less than Microsoft lol.
A git repo can be spread out like a "blockchain" without the messy validation and coin earnings, maybe that was the intended comparison?
Could it be? Sure, I don't see a technological reason why someone couldn't build a system like that.
Are they now (federated, or blockchained)? No.
True.
I'm working on a decentralised sharing protocol, but it uses reciprocal sharing so you'd have to have large storage anyways.
Hoof, yeah. Collaboration tools always seem to come down to bandwidth, storage, or both.
I mean you don’t need the blockchain for that. The same way that distro mirrors don’t need the blockchain. It can be federated, with each upload being verified through hashes that they are in fact the real upload. I would argue that something like blockchain would remove the authority from them, granting the position of a bad actor spinning up enough servers to be able to poison the blockchain just because they had the computing power, claiming authority
Bro hear me out bro
We put the whole thing on a blockchain. BUT
entry order isn't super important
you don't need to validate the entire archive
So basically a blockchain, but for a bunch of files, not ordered. So instead of a native token, users can just trade bits of information as currency. 🙀
If it goes really well, we could even recruit one of the Bitcoin developers to help.
Take my money! All of it!
lol I fucking hate this because idiots will read this and be like “oh shit is this the new blockchain”
Well done
isn't this what ipfs is?
Yes, this is a great example of where ipfs would work (specifically for file hosting, not necessarily for the actual web interface), and also, no ipfs is not a blockchain, and it shouldn’t be. I thought we were past the whole “can this be a blockchain” thing, but here we are. Blockchain is cool tech. It’s also incredibly inefficient for anything beyond a transaction ledger, or in today’s case, money laundering and trying to avoid taxes and regulation.
Sounds like BitTorrent, too
The thing is sometimed articles must be removed from IA (copyright (I disagree with that one) or when information is leaked that could threaten lives), with a blockchain this would be impossible
this would be impossible
Perfect.
I'd be interested in seeing real examples where lives are threatened. I find it unlikely that the internet archive would be the exclusive arbiter of so-called deadly information
I thought of something but I don’t know if it’s a good example.
Here’s the hypothetical:
A criminal backs up a CSAM archive. Maybe the criminal is caught, heck say they’re executed. Pedos can now share the archive forever over encrypted messengers without fear of it being deleted? Not ideal.
There was an actual example where a journalistic article about afghanistan accidentally leaked names of some sources and people who helped westerners in afghanistan, which did actually endanger those people’s lives.
If they're leaked, they're leaked. The archive doesn't change that one way or the other
You need a useless 51% of good nodes to assure that, making it even more wasteful.
I don't know if that's a good idea.
How would you go about implementing the infrastructure for that?
That’s an excellent question. Unfortunately I do not have an answer. But I believe it’s worth discussing some means of redundancy for the IA; even if it’s as simple as rsync to other hosts.
This absolutely made my morning.
Edit: Never mind, already knew about the Wayback machine. I thought it was the rest of the archive.
Still good news.
It's worth noting that the saved pages are the only thing that are back for now. Their other services have not yet been brought back online.
A commenter on Ars suggested donating, so I did. You can too with this link! https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/internetarchive
🫡
I verified this is indeed the method listed on the Internet Archive website.
Nice. Wouldn’t want money going to |nternetArchive!
I need to do this again. I donated last year, but it's one of my favorite and one pretty important site.
Such good news!
I realize it's like the least important aspect of this, but yay! My podcast is back! I listen to Lawrence Manzo's Mahabharata podcast every night to go to sleep, and I haven't slept well since the attack
If you rely on it that much maybe its time to download it all and keep it.
I honestly don't know how I'd get it until it comes back. I can download through the podcast app, but until then, to my knowledge, it's completely lost anywhere other than archive.org Even the original blog it was posted to back in 2010 doesn't have the audiofiles anymore, just links to the archive.org
It should be possible to download the audio files directly from archive.org, using a browser.
Once it's back, I'll definitely do that. It's still not available as of yet.
Only the way back machine is restarted to me not archive.org
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
