Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service
perma.cc
perma.cc
For HN readers, I'd suggest checking out https://tools.perma.cc/, where we post a bunch of the open source work that backs this. Due to the shift from warc to wacz, (a zipped-web-archive format developed by WebRecorder), it's now possible to pass around fully interactive high fidelity web archives as simple files and host them with client side javascript, which opens up a bunch of new possibilities for web archive designs. You can see some tech demos of that at our page https://warcembed-demo.lil.tools/ , where each page is just a static file on the server and some client side javascript.
It's best to think of Perma.cc itself, the service, as some UX and user support wrapping to help solve linkrot primarily in the law journal, courts, law journals, and journalists area (for example, dashboards for a law journal to collaborate on the links they're archiving for their authors), and our work on this as building from that usecase to try to make it easier for everyone to build similar things.
I saw some mentions of the Internet Archive, which is great, and is also kind enough to keep a copy of our archives and expose them through the Wayback Machine. One thing I've been thinking about recently in archiving is that there's a risk to overstandardizing -- you don't want things too much captured with the same software platforms, funded through the same models, governed by the same people, exposed through the same interfaces, etc. There's supposed to be thousands of libraries, not one library. Unlike "don't roll your own crypto," I'd honestly love to see more people roll their own archives.
Happy to answer any questions!
In which case, why isn't this prominently displayed on the main page? Or why not use a Harvard library URL, which will significantly boost the trust level? Especially vs a CC TLD which are known to be problematic?
As an innovation lab we often minimize Harvard branding with project websites because it's more instructive to win or lose on our own merits than based on how people feel about Harvard, in either direction.
Harvard has been around for hundreds of years, Harvard has inbuilt trust, Harvard has funding. You should negotiate and arrange going behind its brand.
It's in several US states' interest to make sure this service keeps existing.
But I am also wondering , is this sustainable , can I use this to archive this hackernews itself for example
And how can we verify the integrity of the web archive , could you please explain?
Thanks a lot in advance. I wish you all the best in your career & this project!
- Why is it better than internet archive?
I personally see the benefit as potentially having internet archive stopping being the only game in town, but even that comes with certain costs ( which may not be great to the community as a whole -- depending on who you ask ).
I would love to hear your perspective on where you stand as related to other providers of similar services.
If you're an author (say, of a court decision) and you archive example.com/foo, Perma makes a fresh copy of example.com/foo as its own wacz file, with a CPU-intensive headless browser, gives it a unique short URL, and puts it in a folder tree for you. So you get a higher quality capture than most crawls can afford, including a screenshot and pdf; you get a URL that's easy to cite in print; you can find your copy later; you get "temporal integrity" (it's not possible for replays to pull in assets from other crawls, which can result in frankenstein playbacks); and you can independently respond to things like DMCA takedowns. It's all tuned to offer a great experience for that author.
IA is primarily tuned for preserving everything regardless of whether the author cared to preserve it or not, through massive web crawls. Which is often the better strategy -- most authors don't care as much as judges about the longterm integrity of their citations.
This is what I'm getting at about the specific benefits of having multiple archives. It's not just redundancy, it's that you can do better for different users that way.
With the internet archive, the purpose seems to be for public archiving. One could imagine a use-case where you want non-public archives, and are therefore not subject to any take-down requests, especially if they are considered court evidence for example.
By paying directly for your links to be archived, it directly helps fund the service and therefore keep it going. You would want to see some guarantees in the contract about pricing if you were to long-term rely on the service.
Similarly are there any general supply chain integrity measures in place, such as code review of dependencies, reproducible builds, or creating archives reproducibly in independently administrated enclaves?
You note archives could be used for instances like Supreme Court decisions, so any anyone with power to tamper with content would certainly be targeted.
I think the best approach for high stakes archiving is to have a standard for "witness APIs" so that you could fetch archives from independent archiving institutions. That also solves for the web looking different from different places. That hasn't gelled yet, though.
When I've worked on spam prevention in the past, that TLD always comes up disproportionately often. I've never personally built a filter that blocks the entire TLD, but I'm sure from looking at the data that people with stricter compliance requirements have.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group ranked the TLD the second-worst in the ratio of phishing domains to total registrations, with the highest total volume of phishing (page 13):
https://docs.apwg.org//reports/APWG_Global_Phishing_Report_2...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perma.cc
It's unique in that, if you opt out of the paid account route, you need someone like a library to sponsor your access, and then when you archive something, it is akin to giving it to your library to store.
That might be worth the trade-off, and it might well be that the service is well-known enough that even networks that block the entire TLD make an exception for Perma.cc. But I wouldn't assume that to be the case without validating it first.
I also think it's worth just calling out bad TLDs when we see them so that people don't think it's okay to copy. Even if Perma.cc is well known enough to avoid the problem, your new app won't be.
I hate to push blockchain stuff, but something like IPFS might actually be a good idea here.
Like any service, it might shut down due to lack of interest, but I doubt Harvard Law is at risk of “going out of business”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_uniform_resource_lo...
Regardless of institutional gravitas, projects without wide uptake are mostly doomed on a 20-year horizon.
Harvard has a much larger population than the Cocos islands, I don't know why this project decided to rely on a country code tld
Wait until they publicly criticise Musk.
Having said that, there are a variety of different archives that Wikipedia uses for backups - Perma.cc is included on that list. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_web_archiv...
There's also projects like Archive Box that allows for self hosted backups of websites https://archivebox.io/
These folks send copies of all their archives to IA, so it's no less permanent than IA. And being focused on a specific niche (with deep-pocketed backers) means it's less likely to blow up for unrelated reasons.
So, yeah, nothing is different than anyone else, other than they have a "cunning plan" that can easily get shitcanned at anyone's whim
They can only promise to do their best.
> New users are able to create ten free links on a trial basis. After using the trial, individuals must either be affiliated with a registrar or sign up for a paid subscription.
Conventional business models as currently implemented are fundamentally misaligned to the timescales associated with this product category. Products like these need a level of stability that can only be accomplished at the charter level of the corporation -- it needs to be fundamentally incapable of reneging on promises made.
Without that kind of reassurance, why should anyone trust this service with their links? The exchange is incredibly unequal. They receive full, permanent control of the content, access, and monetization of all things which I cite. I receive... a promise that my links will do what they already do, but maybe last longer.
Indeed memoranda in the UK, created when registering a company, require it. You state the intended services. Companies weasel around it by making broad milquetoast claims.
A statement binding the organisation to release their data and cede all copyright should the site be terminated, for example, would demonstrate good faith and go a long way to reassuring people that it wasn't wasted effort.
It used to be hosted at purl.org and run by the OCLC but in 2016 it was transferred to the Internet Archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161002094639/https://www.oclc....
I used the same unique online alias from age ten to eighteen.
I used to be able to google it and see hundreds of results. Dozens of forums I posted on. Dozens of games I played. In my twenties, I'd do this for the nostalgia of reading posts I'd written in my preteen era.
Now, there are just seven results.
I would be surprised if this will survive past 2035.
I've literally embedded these into PDFs and all sorts, all of which still open today. It doesn't really increase the document size notably, but does make them more robust.
DOI is pretty much a giant, curated, hash table. DOI does not store any data, it's only a map of numbers to strings.
"Perma.cc’s Supporting Partners"
... one of those partners is not like the others ...
Them being run by a library that is older than you and everyone else here is worth a lot more than a random company's 10-year funding plan.
did they not understand that at all? did they just not do any work on it? or did they understand it and do great work but just fail to but it in 100pt text as item 0 on the list? who knows.
Being literal librarians, I am fairly sure the creators of this service have thought through how it will remain accessible in the long term.
The site copywriters seem to have very carefully made associations with Harvard whilst maintaining perma.cc as a separate entity to which they, Harvard, owe no obligations.
"Perma.cc was built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and is backed by the power of libraries."
They built it, they organise it, but what they don't seem to do is provide any guarantees with/through/towards it.
Sure, who wants to take on obligations, make promises. Much easier to hide behind vague expressions of how great librarians are (it's a noble calling). 'Trust me bro' is pretty hard to go with for commercial enterprises regardless of who started them.
They clearly thought through the future, hence the 'we don't owe you anything when we sell the service to X/Alphabet/Meta or whoever' language.
How much budget have Harvard set aside for long-term maintenance?
It looks useful.