Censorship on the Internet Archive by requiring login | Hacker News Reader

Censorship on the Internet Archive by requiring login

blog.kareldonk.com

10 pointsdrummer7 comments

Article doesn’t even delve into the possibility of this being used to track dissenters. Not that I think the Internet Archive is in that business, but the mere existence of such a list is to invite a subpoena.

Unless the search results themselves are hidden without a login, I don't see how this is censorship. The point of the archive is to preserve information for the foreseeable future. Isn't that the opposite of censorship?

It seems more like a way to limit the Internet Archive being used to spread bad and harmful information. The Archive didn't delete the content. To imply that the IA is going to start being politically motivated in removing the content misses the entire purpose of what the IA stands for.

Propaganda and other forms of misinformation is worth preserving and studying. Requiring a login stops no one from access to the videos, it's a free sign up.

Considering that a few seconds in delay of loading a website has an impact on visitors staying, what do you think happens when they are required to jump through registration hoops to get to the content? The thumbnails are also blurred. Why? These are tactics to censor content in a subtle way without outright deleting or hiding it, which would be too obvious.

>It’s a shame that even the Internet Archive, of all websites, is now apparently also listening to Big Tech when it comes to what information should be allowed on the Internet.

I personally think China or the US government are more likely suspects given they can pass laws that effect the Internet Archive.

I highly doubt it; the video of the doctors in question was not censored by the US government. And the Internet Archive is already entirely blocked in China.

How hard is it to copy the internet archive, assuming you have the network bandwidth and storage?

Centralized control of it has always been a single point of failure.

It's big enough you'd need to arrange to go over there with trucks full of data storage and copy it over in person. It's very large and constantly growing, especially subsets like the Wayback Machine, but I'd guess the video archives are growing faster than they'd allow you to copy them out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive

> the archive's over 48 petabytes of digitized materials.

... and they'd likely have to rate-limit your downloads after a certain point so you don't saturate the connection and cut off everyone else.

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