The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)
ascii.textfiles.com
ascii.textfiles.com
and the discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903567
Does this torrent contain the fruits of the collaboration planed in that discussion?
I think preserving digital heritage may become an important issue in the next few years. As the world begins to recognize the historic legacy of the web, it may someday become as important as preserving physical historical landmarks.
Its time to accept that the internet may be the greatest legacy 21st century civilization leaves behind. It likely isn't going anywhere, and is the most complete archive of our lives, that may live on for generations after we're dead.
For all we know, the things we type here could be preserved longer than the pyramids of giza should someone make sure to back it up regularly. I hope that someone does.
Only if they get serious about recycling, history will be at stake.
I for one will make this one torrent that I will perpetually seed until my ISP tries to stop me.
So maybe the "construction" part was a meme, but I think the idea that you needed to warn people that this homepage wasn't "finished" yet was universal.
The interesting thing was that at the time my friends and I (who had ISP-based homepages) looked down on Geocities because it was "lame" comparatively. Now I'm sad that I don't have any records of that original page (possibly on an ancient CD-R though? but most of those early ones have degraded now...)
I also looked down on geocities/angelfire sites and I still think I got the better deal out of it - my first stuff was too embarrassing to live on for eternity in the depths of a torrent.
The early web is a treasure trove of an interesting time in history. It was the first time average people could just write public documents to express themselves.
Naturally the pages were terrible, covered in things that look good the first time you see it, pointless opinions and personal shrines to obscure relics of pop-culture.
The web is still the same, but more everyday. Companies work day and night to have a web presence, and "using the internet" is synonymous with replying to status and 'liking' things.
Geocities, AOL Homepages, and tripod are landmarks of the first time in history someone could just make a page about themselves, or something they liked and _anyone_ could see it. It was society making paintings on caves.
Unfortunately, these sites don't produce revenue, and never will, so from a corporate point of view, they are worthless.
The early era of the web is like trying to find rare music. Of course there is a modern site, a torrent, or some convenient way to find most of what you want. What you find is at best, the same thing everyone else finds. The old web is full of non-technical people earnestly trying to make something, not a startup, not to sell a book, just trying to put something together which is largely lost in the ease of "List your favorite bands"
Not that it was better, or more insightful, simply that it is a huge body of primitive work that is unlikely to be recreated. These things should be stored, if for no other reason than we can see the bloviated opinions of mensans, the C-style poetry of 90's sysadmins, or just the insane ramblings of people who think like Gene Ray, but don't have the perseverence to keep up timecube.
The sites are a labor of love, no matter the revenue, and it annoys me to no end that AOL or Yahoo has the power to simply delete these old sites because they don't make business sense, to businesses that don't even know what they are doing.
Anyway, as someone who mirrored a few old HomePages and Geocities sites, and backs up pieces of the old internet whenever I can find them, this is a breath of fresh air.
Just wanted to address that reocities.com has even more than I do, and more than what's in the torrent. If you want to browse geocities, like ye old days, go visit reocities. This data release is never meant to be "all of geocities" just "a lot of geocities" (and all I have).
I am ALL for a 2.0 from jacquesm. :)
Skeletal Lovers
Two dead people
Embraced even in death
They lie there for eternity
Together forever
Memories turned to dust
Laughter and sin forgotten
Nothing but pale white bone
Nothing to complain about
Only the two of them
Forever together
Granted those 2 gigs were used up in something like 5 minutes, but never the less..you'd think they'd give you a little more to play with.
I'll have to run that against all the deletion requests as well for this content because chances are fairly large that lots of it has already been removed at the request of the owners.
Total disk space usage on the array that holds reocities is about 10.5 T (that includes a master copy though) and runs to 233 million files.
And let's suppose for a second that they were not (as they have not been in the past), reocities has cost a fairly large amount of money to date (instead of made money, as you suggest), not a single person that has asked me to remove the content has ever commented on the presence of the ads, and neither has anybody that has found their stuff again because I backed it up.
On the contrary, the reactions have been almost 100% positive with a very few exceptions.
I apologize if that's how you read my post; I certainly didn't intend to suggest that or to belittle the amount of work and money that you've put into this project.
Presumably you have no legal right to redistribute any of the Geocities stuff?
The fact you spent time and money on it is neither here nor there, that's not a moral|legal argument. Presumably there have been some exceptions (you intimate that), what sort of percentage does that amount to? If you calculate that as a true reflection of the whole population then how many people's copyright do you suppose you've infringed, knowingly, against their wishes?
If someone takes your published material and slaps ads on it and republishes without your knowledge is that all good with you? (I'm guessing you may say yes here!).
It's not just about economics, it's probably as much about moral rights. People believe that their Geocities content died and was buried.
Of course they are pretty minor "offences" (or at least appears so) across a large population - akin to being a spammer or somesuch. Actually scratch that this is simply like copying others blog posts on a massive scale.
No, this is saving those blog posts from extinction.
Also, why do you get to be the arbiter of whether others content can be allowed to disappear or not? If I own the copyright then it's within my rights to have all copies destroyed, for example, you secretly (as you've not notified copyright holders AFAICT) keeping a copy is infringing my moral right to control that work.
--
I don't know who you are, but I just want say you are an angel. I thought I had laid the very first website I ever built on geocities to rest, and words cannot describe my utter and complete surprise to find it resurrected on reocities.
You say this project is a labor of love -- and that is exactly how I felt about my own website. It was, for at least 10 years of my life, the best expression of who I was, and it means so much to be able to relive that era again.
You are truly doing a public service by preserving early relics of Internet culture. I can only imagine that generations from now, when people are digging into the history of the web, they will be fascinated by what you've saved.
Thank you SO MUCH for doing what you do!
webmistress
reocities.com/avcorner2000
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I'm not going to argue morality here with you any further, you apparently have a bee up your bonnet about this, but as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, there is no reason why this would be an exception.
greetings
I'm arguing the application of copyright law (I'm not for the law as it stands incidentally) and for the moral rights of producers of copyright law. You appear to be arguing that it's fine to break the law because how you do it makes some people happy. The same rationale (at a different scale) makes speeding OK for teenagers if it impresses their mates and they're lucky enough not to have killed anyone yet.
The problem is that if we allow what you've done (which I don't dislike, indeed I'd consider myself an admirer in general of what I've seen of your work) for anyone then we allow copying other's blog posts adding adverts and putting them on one's own website, we allow copying books that are still in copyright and republishing them, etc..
It's a technicality but important to the case in point IMO. The email from webmistress is grateful for you saving her from not having properly backed up her work, not from having infringed copyright. If you now copy her current website and display it as your own with ads, will she be happy? I'd warrant no, not until the point at which she deletes it all by accident and comes to you because she hasn't backed up. Is this an argument against copyright, probably, not a great one but still it is one.
The fact that you're hearing the positive results is going to be largely selection bias.
If you've bothered reading then thanks for your responses and for not going ad hominem on my ass.
Peace,
pbhj
(1) laws have been set aside many times when the net benefit for the common good outweighed the rights of the individual
(you can still disagree that that is a good thing though)
(2) such exemptions apply to libraries and other 'violators' that serve a different goal than piracy (for instance, preservation and access)
(3) in this case those that benefit the most are the original copyright holders
(4) there is a procedure in place to deal with those copyright holders that do not want their information out there
For the record, a fairly knowledgeable lawyer on copyright law in the netherlands here has reviewed the whole thing and think there is absolutely no problem defending my actions (just in case there would have been, I would have done whatever his advice would have been).
It's been up for a year, the one time someone threatened to sue (of course, some hotshot lawyer with a corporate page on geocities :) ), he backed off and became real nice once he realized that no judge was ever going to sign off on him suing for damages and whatnot without first asking politely to remove the stuff.
Laws are there to be respected. In exceptional cases - such as the going out of business of a repository of this size - you can break them if you go about it nicely and try to limit the damage as much as you can.
There are other people out there that have also made copies of all this data that have turned the whole thing in to an adsense fest complete with SEO spam tactics. That might be a better target for your anger.
Lastly, how much would you give for a copy of the library of Alexandria ?
I'm sure that geocities can not on average be compared with the quality of what was stored there but you'd be surprised by some of the stuff that I've found amongst the wreckage and we'd all be culturally poorer if it had gone to waste.
That's not how the law works here. You break the law whether you're held to account for it or not. Copyright law in Europe is stricter in many ways than in the US (WRT personal use for example).
>That might be a better target for your anger.
Grrr, I'm soooo anngggrrry. Really, I'm quite calm. /rageface
>Lastly, how much would you give for a copy of the library of Alexandria ?
A lot. Probably not my first born though. This hits at the correct route for attacking poor law. Obviously in Alexandria there was no copyright, it was all PD.
People are welcome to mark their pages PD (or some other liberal license; this is the legal procedure for your #4) and HTML5 should (does? via microformats?) allow a license (CC, PD, C, CL, FDL, whatever) to be applied and readily parsed so that you could stay within the law and still do your white knight deal-y.
Moreover those who wish for people to be able to copy without restriction should petition for a change in the law.
The law is an ass but you're stuck with it. I don't consider the value of the stuff you've saved (as much as I've seen, certainly not an in depth study) to be that high that civil disobedience should be practised in order to preserve it.
And that's where we disagree. Talk to a researcher in 500 years or so to get the better reasons why compared to the ones that I can give to you today.
But what I would not give to have the nasa pages about the spaceshuttle flights that I helped put out on the net back.
Those are gone forever, I wished someone had broken copyright law to preserve them.
I'm sure there are plenty of examples of the type of page preserved by the likes of archive.org.
>Those are gone forever, I wished someone had broken copyright law to preserve them.
Issue all your stuff PD and then people won't need to break the law to do what you appear to want them to do.
If he makes a small profit, great! Hopefully that will encourage archivists of the future.
His new site looks much better actually: http://www.awesomenessreminders.com/
I think you're being disingenuous here. You've argued that you have a right to the content and to put your ads on it so why bother trying to spin that action as a minor benefit.
If it's no benefit then save yourself and everyone else the bandwidth and remove the adframe. If it is a benefit then keep it and stand by your conviction that that is justified.
PS: for your mate, the .logo {padding-left: } looks to be about 7px too much so it doesn't align with "Bring happiness [...]" strapline and the body text. I'm using FF3.6.11 on Kubuntu.
I wonder if it is this Simon Liu:
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MITP.200...
"Surviving Distributed Denial of Service Attacks"
See? This is why reocities is awesome. The Simon Lius of the world should have access to their old Descent scores.
From your site it sounds like you wrote a script using wget to harvest the files and another to check them against versions that were still up. What do you do on the server end now to ensure that the files are still working correctly? Are you running periodic checksums on them or the like? Finally, are you looking for any help from an interested novice?
Some bitrot is inevitable but I think it's under control for now.
As for help, yes, but right now I'm pretty swamped in other stuff, the next round of work on reocities will likely come after the new year.
Let me know if you're interested in this or have any questions -- I've dealt a good bit with systems like this in the past, and would love to give you a hand.
And yes, of course I'm interested. But right now no time.
It was a situation where the common good outweighed the benefits of respecting copyright law handily, besides that the only thing that changed is the machine where the content was hosted.
I do not pass it off as my own, have a very clearly established procedure for removing the data at the request of the copyright holder.
Think of it as a hosting provider going out of business and a new one taking over the corpse of the old one. That it happened without contacting the owners is simply because the vast majority of the owners does not have contact information to begin with.
See the reocities faq for some more info on this:
Now if only Yahoo donated the geocities.com domain to whoever has the guts to keep this archive online...
How would you like your bacon cooked?
That was in Sydney though, last year.
If you want sites removed from this torrent... better ask now, before the torrent's up.