The new Internet archive

[Pier Carlo Montecucchi]

Do you know the URL address of this new Internet archive?

Pier Carlo

Email: pcmontecucchi at compuserve.com

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in
having new eyes " (Marcel Proust)







----- Original Message -----
From: "Subcommander Bob" <bob at black.org>
To: <cypherpunks at lne.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 11:45 AM
Subject: web.archive.org Internet archive to open ---google + archeology


>
> Hey Mitch  --Another part of your permenant record
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-102501archive.story
> By JOSEPH MENN, Times Staff Writer
>
> SAN FRANCISCO -- An Internet archive containing more text than any
> library in history will open its digital doors today, giving researchers
> and the public access to just about everything posted on the World Wide
> Web over the last five years.
>
> The free archive, created by a San Francisco computer entrepreneur named
> Brewster Kahle, allows academics to conduct the electronic equivalent of
> archeological digs, rooting through reams of material illustrating the
> evolution of the Web and its role in American society.
>
> The Internet Archive, informally called the Wayback Machine, holds more
> than 10 billion Web pages dating to 1996, including millions that had
> vanished as dot-coms collapsed, big companies scaled back or updated
> their offerings, and hobbyist Webmasters lost interest.
>
> Researchers and academics have likened Kahle to a modern-day Andrew
> Carnegie, the steel baron who endowed many of the nation's finest
> libraries.
>
> "Libraries are dedicated to collecting and making available the
> permanent historical record," said Diane Kresh, the Library of Congress'
> director for public service collections. She said trolling the Net is as
> significant as gathering books or periodicals.
>
> Want to see what the Heaven's Gate cult page looked like before the
> group's mass suicide? There it is. Want to see how Yahoo's pages have
> changed since 1996? Step this way. Pages published by everyone from
> Fortune 500 companies to renegade porn merchants are stashed in the
> Internet Archive.
>
> The five-year, multimillion-dollar project has amassed five times as
> much text as the Library of Congress, which helped fund the archive
> along with Compaq Computer Corp., the National Science Foundation and
> the Smithsonian Institution. The more-than 100 terabytes of data are
> housed on 300 modified Hewlett-Packard desktop computers in a basement
> at San Francisco's Presidio.
>
> The effort to record Internet history has been directed and largely
> financed by Kahle, a 41-year-old former supercomputer technologist who
> sold one Web firm to America Online and another to Amazon.com.
>
> "The opportunity of our time is to offer universal access to all of
> human knowledge," Kahle said Wednesday from his office in the Presidio,
> a decommissioned military base near the Golden Gate Bridge. "We're at a
> unique point in time to offer universal access to anyone who walks into
> a library in Uganda."
>
> The Internet Archive uses automated "bots" to scour the Web. They
> capture sites and return what they find to the computers at the
> Presidio. The archive updates every two months. Once captured, the sites
> are organized chronologically. Users type in a Web address, and the
> archive displays versions of that site since 1996.
>
> Sites that require passwords or block bots are not captured. And if
> someone objects to their site being copied, the archive removes it.
>
> As smaller, less accessible versions of the archive were being compiled,
> Kahle's 30 staffers got a few complaints. After the staff explained that
> it wasn't personal, that they were copying everyone's sites, the vast
> majority decided they didn't mind, Kahle said.
>
> "Most people say, 'You're crazy, but go for it,' " Kahle said. "People
> want to be part of history."
>
> Candidates to use the service, at web.archive.org, include academics,
> journalists and researchers.
>
> "It will allow researchers to study the evolution of the Web in a way
> that is unprecedented," said research scientist Ed Chi of the Xerox Palo
> Alto Research Center. He said Xerox PARC scientists already are working
> on new user interfaces based on what the archive showed them about how
> people looked for information.
>
> Early on, "we suspect people will go look for their own pages and see if
> they can get copies of things that they've lost," Kahle said. "We're not
> exactly sure how this is going to be used. We're looking forward to
> being surprised."
>
> Like many Internet pioneers, however, Kahle faces unfamiliar risks along
> with the opportunities. The Internet Archive may be a massive violation
> of copyright law.
>
> "Brewster is taking an extraordinarily personal risk, because this is
> potentially a criminal offense," said Lawrence Lessig, an expert on
> intellectual property in cyberspace at Stanford University.
>
> Kahle doesn't anticipate getting sued, let alone serving jail time. His
> plan is to post whatever he can--and keep the archive growing.
>
> "We're not here to test laws," Kahle said. "We're trying to build a
> world we want to live in. The world without a library is a world without
> a memory, and that would be tragic."
>
> The legal questions may take years to resolve, Kahle and Lessig said.
>
> Consider the Industry Standard. At least some of that defunct magazine's
> articles are back online through Kahle's archive. But shareholder IDG
> paid more than $1 million for the Standard's assets, including rights to
> those stories. An IDG spokeswoman declined to say whether the company
> would ask the archive to drop the articles.
>
> Kahle said he isn't worrying about the hypotheticals. He's more excited
> about finding early www.whitehouse.gov pages from 1996 that dealt with
> airport safety and bioterrorism.
>
> Even better is what's to come.
>
> "The woman who is going to be elected president in 2024 is in high
> school now, and I bet she has a home page," Kahle said. "We have the
> future president's home page!"