this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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After 32 years, one of the ’Net’s oldest software archives is shutting down | Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 69 points 9 months ago (1 children)

IA is quickly becoming a massive, risky single point of failure that is one bad lawsuit away from causing a major problem.

I want to hope they have an exit strategy, but I'm thinking we need to start providing alternatives. A single backup is no backup at all, and all that.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You mean a lawsuit like the one about the "Great 78 Project" by the music companies or maybe the one about the "National Emergency Library" by the book publishers?

I think you're right that we need to start working on alternatives, hopefully something decentralized. The Wayback Machine would be an irreplaceable loss though if the data isn't preserved somehow.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well, it's not the lawsuit that would trigger it, it's the outcome of it. So yes.

Yes on the other things, too. I can't imagine they would be opposed to working with alternatives to provide Wayback Machine fallbacks.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The Wayback Machine in particular is one of the greatest treasures of the Internet. An absolutely invaluable tool and so far entirely irreplaceable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Honestly, it should be a public resource.

I mean, public libraries and archives being a mandatory requirement for copyright enforcement and publishing records is a thing, and the Wayback Machine proves it's technologically feasible to approximate it for the Internet, so...