Archiving the alternative press threatened by wealthy buyers | Hacker News Reader

Archiving the alternative press threatened by wealthy buyers

freedom.press

94 pointsthisisparker14 comments

For years, I've used the Firefox extension Scrapbook to quickly grab and store copies of articles of particular interest to me.

This has worked well, including effectively en masse over the course my browsing, and has stored copies locally, under my control.

With Firefox 57 and web extensions, Scrapbook was effectively killed. Even the possible continuation under ScrapbookX or another fork, if that happens, appears as if it will have to write everything to browser-managed and constrained storage.

Now, I find my ability to conveniently and effectively maintain my own "record of events" becoming significantly constrained.

Aside from the technical side of my life, this makes it more difficult to keep track of all the political lies and backtracking I encounter, for the purpose of keeping straight what's happened and also potentially calling out such lies when I need to.

In a time where the Web seems to be more and more controlled by vested and reactionary interests, I find it all the more important that my user agent does what I want and need it to, including facilitating collecting and maintaining the records of interest and importance to me.

Security and protecting my private data are important to me. But so is not being dependent upon a Web that is increasingly fluid and manipulated, to maintain my access to its public record.

P.S. This also extends to my concern over the recently "baked-in" functionality for secured content management (DRM), and how this may be increasingly used in future to further lock up Web content.

What happens when our history is per forced maintained solely on commercial servers subject to commercial interests and manipulation?

I'm sorry if I sound like a pessimist, but in my experience, in general, "if they can, they will" -- sooner or later.

P.P.S. Yes, I can still "Save as...", or see whether the site "prints" as a usable PDF. And, in the short term, use a legacy version or fork of Firefox.

For the time being. But this is more cumbersome and time consuming than Scrapbook. And, per DRM and also what I feel to be a continuing trend, one step in a continuing trend towards user and public constraint.

It's frustrating when information disappears from the web. I suspect things like this and the Internet Archive will become very useful for historians as time goes on.

And the NSA. They are creating one of the most in depth and far reaching collections of human interaction, all the way down to the most private and intimate level. Long after we're all dead, and presumably technology is developed to trivially crack current encryption, that data will provide a level of information and detail unlike anything before.

I have no love for what they're doing in the present, but at the same time the 'time capsule' they're creating is going to be an unimaginably valuable gift to the future, if it is not deleted. At some point we may even reach a point where you could feed the information into an AI with the goal of it producing simulations that would strongly resemble the times which could be used for teaching, education, and more. And what a key time now is as in one human lifetime we develop the internet, automation, likely become a multiplanetary species, and so much more. Funny coincidence we happen to live in this time...

I'm not sure how interested the NSA would be in archiving information that's 100 or more years old, especially as the cost of doing so might become very significant for that volume of data. It's also far from clear that they'd ever give this information to any other agency or corporation for safekeeping, even if they no longer have a use for it themselves. They might not ever even give researchers access to it.

Check out the Utah Data Center [1]. They are already creating storage on the order of exabytes in a single facility. As storage technology improves, we can expect to see that capacity grow rapidly. Assuming they retain the data, over time it would be declassified and made legally available. The big question is whether or not they retain it. At the minimum, I doubt they'd even consider deleting anything until current encryption is cracked to enable them to decrypt the bulk 'line tap' style collections.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

> Freedom of the Press Foundation is launching an online archives collection in partnership with Archive-It, a service developed by the Internet Archive

It looks like this project uses this Internet Archive.

I agree that https://archive.org is one of the treasures of the internet. Up there with Wikipedia and Khan Academy.

Don’t forget Archive Team!

And it's frustrating when a domain can retro-actively "robots.txt" such content out of accessibility on archive.org .

This policy is changing.

Yay! I hope effectively, and with legal backing where necessary to make it stick.

"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future" - Orwell

Wow, this is such a great idea! I wonder though how long it will take before the Freedom of the Press foundation will be labeled as a terrorist organization, or a tool of a foreign power, or something like that? Probably as soon as they archive something that turns out to be politically inconvenient for someone powerful.

use decentralized p2p technology to archive your information, like https://datproject.org

It really freaks me out that no one ever talks about Bezos owning the Washington Post. Shouldn't that be a huge deal?

I realize this is more aimed at DNAInfo style sites being shutdown, and based on the rest of the content has an agenda, but man, that's a big issue that's never mentioned.

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