Some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash

DRM, walled gardens, and divergence from plain text, open videos and images will destroy most of modern history, copyrights, cancel culture will destroy the rest.

Removing history will cause it to repeat.

Put it in a museum and it will be raided.

V for vendetta foreshadowed the need to secretly store history.

Weird to blame a file format for a poor archiving job. I’m pretty sure if they did their jobs the source/project would still be available. How is restoring paintings from the 1500s any different?

It’s the walled garden they supported. What about Facebook comments on their articles? Think the realization that the internet is hard to keep immutable. These companies chose to use the easiest road instead of the best road and they are now paying the price.

As long they are more concerned with a/b testing their headlines then using more open standards I find it weird that blame flash for it.

Perhaps they should talk to musea instead. How they are preserving digital art.

The Internet Archive has 3000 hours of television news coverage from the week of 9/11/2001 preserved for future viewing: https://archive.org/details/911

Should we blame Adobe or everyone else that conspired to forcibly evict it from tightly controlled platforms like Safari on iOS? In the end we traded a proprietary platform for a set of “open standards” that are mostly steered by a few monopolist tech giants for their own interests. Personally I miss Flash and the Internet it enabled. There isn’t an equivalent today.