Does any outside service check the integrity of the content on Web Archive? | Hacker News Reader

Does any outside service check the integrity of the content on Web Archive?

6 pointsOnuRC14 comments

or do we just accept as it's? I'm just curious. If nothing checks it, it gives them a bit of a power.

An interesting long play hack would be to compromise a site but only feed false material to the archive’s crawler. Then you could actually pull off what Joy Ann Reid pretended happened[1] when people found some old posts she wanted to disavow.

[1]https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims...

How exactly would you check if a webpage in the Wayback Machine precisely matches a thing that used to be? You would also have to trust whoever checks them.

TinyURL.com was accused of something similar. They offered a "link shortening" service. But if you linked to a page on Amazon, they'd wait a few years and then swap in their own referrer code in place of yours.

When confronted, they claimed this was the nefarious work of a third-party to whom they'd outsourced their link-redirecting...

You could always start your own 'Web Archive' or start a nonprofit that funds the maintenance and operation of one

You mean the Wayback Machine?

I've seen downloads on regular IA with hashes posted.

Yes but I'm more curious about how they archive the content at the first place. It's not tamper-proof so it gives them a power.

> it gives them a power

To what purpose? And why would their integrity be different from other archival services, like libraries and museums?

Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.

It pains me to say it, but that might actually be something that a blockchain can really actually be used for. Just watch out for a 51% attack.

Blockchain with Proof of Authority and distribution of said authority across geographic and (to a degree) professional boundaries might help. If the institutions with authority are, for example, every legal depository, W3C, the IA, a UN agency, and selected non-Western institutions, performing a 51% attack would be very difficult. It'd be more centralized than people think of with blockchain, but it would be decentralized among institutions and geography which means that if there was a war in Canada/the US in 50-100 years, we wouldn't have to worry about losing our digital heritage. It also means that if the US or Canada do turn into authoritarian states in the next ~100-200 years that they can't start scrubbing the archive.

I respect the IA greatly, but it's currently a single point of failure and vulnerable to geopolitical disruptions on a long enough scale. They're also playing a dangerous game in mixing their archival work and political activism. (That I agree with said activism doesn't keep it from being dangerous to the continued existence of the Archive).

The power of the IA is deleting things that should not be remembered, not altering copies.

You are incorrect, its both.

I assume this is in reference to Elon Musk's recent claims that somebody's "uncle owns the Wayback machine & you’re saying he deleted information for nepotism"..

Claims that have been very refuted.

https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/165928339375300608...

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