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This is interesting. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which is a spider that crawls the internet archiving every single page it can find, has been dutifully archiving virtually the entire internet since the 1990s. But for the first time in its existence, it is no longer archiving pages, and hasn't been since they allegedly got hacked over a month ago. As of today, they have still not gotten control of their own systems.
Suspiciously, at almost the exact same time, Google stopped offering users the ability to look at their cached pages. Google Website Cache is not an archiving system like the Wayback Machine, but it does temporarily archive pages as a by-product of the activity of its search-engine crawlers. Before last month, if you ran a Google search, you could examine the Google page caches for pages displayed in the search results if you so desired by clicking on the designated cache link. But Google stripped out this feature right when the Wayback Machine stopped working.
This gets more interesting when you consider that the story behind the hack attack on the Internet Archive is so sketchy and, frankly, ridiculous, that some have speculated that the Internet Archive literally hacked itself. And, based on the facts, it is actually more believable that Internet Archive did, in fact, fake this hack attack on themselves, because their response has been worse than derelict and incompetent--it has been laughably absurd. Incompetence can't explain it because incompetent people will occasionally accidentally do the right thing. Instead, the Internet Archive staff have consistently and reliably acted to make the problems worse, not better.
Here's another story on this if you don't want to watch the videos:
The Internet Is Getting Flushed Down Orwell's Memory Hole
We interrupt today's important election coverage for a story that could have impacts even longer-lasting than President Kamala Harris's first ten-trillion-dollar budget.
I'll wash my keyboard out with soap later for typing the phrase "President Kamala Harris."
When the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine was hacked in early October, it looked at first like just another email-and-password smash-and-grab. But that was followed up by repeated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that crippled the service. The Internet Archive was hit again on Oct. 20, "this time with the threat actors gaining access to their Zendesk support email system."
The Wayback Machine came back but as a read-only service. What that means is, while you can search archived webpages from before the attacks, "you can’t currently capture an existing web page into the archive."
That matters bigly. When the New York Times, Washington Post, or anyone else stealth-edits a news report to hide the truth, you could still find the original on the Wayback Machine. That's no longer true. "For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time," the Brownstone Institute reported this week.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
But it gets worse.
Google killed off its cache feature — similar to the Wayback Machine — right around the time the Internet Archive got hacked. Coincidence? Probably. But I'm making a tinfoil hat, just in case.
The White House just got caught altering Presidentish Joe Biden's "garbage" remarks. "Nothing to see here," Sean Davis quipped, "just the Biden-Harris administration deliberately falsifying federal records."
They got caught this time, and sources like X still have the original video. But what happens next time, when some politician or MSM editor waits until the furor dies down before making their stealth edit — and there's no Wayback Machine to catch them?
Wikipedia is the defacto internet encyclopedia but has proven time and again to be biased at best and subject to stealth edits at worst.
More people are using AI to perform their web searches and summaries for them, but the large language models are scraping data from sources increasingly subject to manipulation.
Reason's Nick Gillespie wrote in 2019:
Is Donald Trump's vision of what is wrong with America and how to fix it true or is Bernie Sanders'? I'd say neither is. But what the internet does (especially platforms like Facebook and Twitter) is enable more of us to directly enter the discussion—the argument over who is right and who is wrong. That's a great and liberating development.
Indeed, it is. But our ability to have that argument — to sift through the raw data, past articles, news photographs, etc. — depends on having sources that are both shared and reliable. We used to settle arguments by pulling out a dictionary or a volume from the nearest encyclopedia. Or maybe the Guinness Book, which has reportedly settled more bar bets than any other resource.
But now everything has moved online and, despite what people believe, the internet is not forever.
"We can fact-check your a**," pioneer blogger Ken Layne reminded Big Media back in 2001. We built an entire alternative media based on "navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship," as Brownstone put it.
Suspiciously, at almost the exact same time, Google stopped offering users the ability to look at their cached pages. Google Website Cache is not an archiving system like the Wayback Machine, but it does temporarily archive pages as a by-product of the activity of its search-engine crawlers. Before last month, if you ran a Google search, you could examine the Google page caches for pages displayed in the search results if you so desired by clicking on the designated cache link. But Google stripped out this feature right when the Wayback Machine stopped working.
This gets more interesting when you consider that the story behind the hack attack on the Internet Archive is so sketchy and, frankly, ridiculous, that some have speculated that the Internet Archive literally hacked itself. And, based on the facts, it is actually more believable that Internet Archive did, in fact, fake this hack attack on themselves, because their response has been worse than derelict and incompetent--it has been laughably absurd. Incompetence can't explain it because incompetent people will occasionally accidentally do the right thing. Instead, the Internet Archive staff have consistently and reliably acted to make the problems worse, not better.
Here's another story on this if you don't want to watch the videos:
The Internet Is Getting Flushed Down Orwell's Memory Hole
We interrupt today's important election coverage for a story that could have impacts even longer-lasting than President Kamala Harris's first ten-trillion-dollar budget.
I'll wash my keyboard out with soap later for typing the phrase "President Kamala Harris."
When the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine was hacked in early October, it looked at first like just another email-and-password smash-and-grab. But that was followed up by repeated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that crippled the service. The Internet Archive was hit again on Oct. 20, "this time with the threat actors gaining access to their Zendesk support email system."
The Wayback Machine came back but as a read-only service. What that means is, while you can search archived webpages from before the attacks, "you can’t currently capture an existing web page into the archive."
That matters bigly. When the New York Times, Washington Post, or anyone else stealth-edits a news report to hide the truth, you could still find the original on the Wayback Machine. That's no longer true. "For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time," the Brownstone Institute reported this week.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
But it gets worse.
Google killed off its cache feature — similar to the Wayback Machine — right around the time the Internet Archive got hacked. Coincidence? Probably. But I'm making a tinfoil hat, just in case.
The White House just got caught altering Presidentish Joe Biden's "garbage" remarks. "Nothing to see here," Sean Davis quipped, "just the Biden-Harris administration deliberately falsifying federal records."
They got caught this time, and sources like X still have the original video. But what happens next time, when some politician or MSM editor waits until the furor dies down before making their stealth edit — and there's no Wayback Machine to catch them?
Wikipedia is the defacto internet encyclopedia but has proven time and again to be biased at best and subject to stealth edits at worst.
More people are using AI to perform their web searches and summaries for them, but the large language models are scraping data from sources increasingly subject to manipulation.
Reason's Nick Gillespie wrote in 2019:
Is Donald Trump's vision of what is wrong with America and how to fix it true or is Bernie Sanders'? I'd say neither is. But what the internet does (especially platforms like Facebook and Twitter) is enable more of us to directly enter the discussion—the argument over who is right and who is wrong. That's a great and liberating development.
Indeed, it is. But our ability to have that argument — to sift through the raw data, past articles, news photographs, etc. — depends on having sources that are both shared and reliable. We used to settle arguments by pulling out a dictionary or a volume from the nearest encyclopedia. Or maybe the Guinness Book, which has reportedly settled more bar bets than any other resource.
But now everything has moved online and, despite what people believe, the internet is not forever.
"We can fact-check your a**," pioneer blogger Ken Layne reminded Big Media back in 2001. We built an entire alternative media based on "navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship," as Brownstone put it.