
The Internet Archive truck has been stolen - edward
https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/722094405931397121
======
hinkley
Are you telling me there's a ~station wagon~ delivery van full of tapes
hurtling down the highway right now?

~~~
bigiain
I figure that's only, like, a gigabit per second or so, right?

(Awful latency tho...)

~~~
hinkley
And the retransmission delays...

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zellyn
Can't tell if joking or serious:
[https://twitter.com/Foone/status/722096054968057856](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/722096054968057856)

"@textfiles @internetarchive I just had to move a bunch of floppy disks, I'll
have it back by lunch"

~~~
foone
That was a joke. Sorry, more than one person thought it was serious.

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textfiles
Hello everyone! Jason Scott at the Internet Archive. Today, the truck was
found abandoned by the San Francisco Police Department, having driven at least
once over the Golden Gate bridge during its time away, and is being returned
to the Archive tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for getting the word out - it meant a lot. Hopefully the
truck didn't suffer too much for its time away and can be back to transporting
data and hardware for the archive shortly.

------
wnevets
is The Internet Archive cursed? Didn't they have a massive fire not that long
ago?

~~~
edward
A scanning center attached to the main building and known as the reading room
caught fire in November 2013.

[https://blog.archive.org/2013/11/06/scanning-center-fire-
ple...](https://blog.archive.org/2013/11/06/scanning-center-fire-please-help-
rebuild/)

------
brador
We can real time track the location of every phone in every pocket but
tracking a vehicle is still a rare luxery.

Why has no startup tackled this?

~~~
salgernon
[http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich-
world-s...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich-world-seeing-
less-and-less-crime-even-face-high-unemployment-and-economic)

"But thanks to central locking, alarms and circuitry immune to hot-wiring,
stealing a car is far harder than it was. In New York City the annual number
of car thefts has fallen by 93% over the past 20 years. According to Graham
Farrell, of Simon Fraser University in Canada, reducing car theft may have had
broader knock-on effects than just restricting getaway options. Stealing a car
for a joyride used to be a “gateway crime”, which would lead teenagers on to
other crimes; now such escalation is restricted to Grand Theft Auto games
(which, at least one study suggests, may themselves be reducing crime by
keeping feisty young men occupied)"

So, video games have made criminals into lazy slobs. I don't buy the car alarm
thing - in the 20 years that they've been common, I don't believe anyone has
ever called the police when they heard one go off. I'm willing to bet that car
thieves are able to disable car alarms faster than the car owner, that can't
figure out what button to press on the fob.

~~~
netcan
I think you may be underestimating how easy some old cars were to steal.
Alarms aren't perfect, but they're noisy and paranoia inducing. In some cases
starting an old car could have been a matter of opening the door with a
clothes hanger (these things weren't sealed too tight), pulling out the key
thing, moving it aside and using a coin or something to turn the ignition.

They were also worth something. It just isn't as easy in most places to flog a
stolen car. At least not factoring for inflation or something, I guess. The
economics of crime shift just like everything else.

Sometimes stuff police or politicians or somesuch do helps too. Anything is
possible.

~~~
madaxe_again
And turning the alarm off typically comprised popping the bonnet once in and
just yanking the cables out of the aftermarket crap.

I went through a phase of buying 80's cars, and had to disable more than a few
weirdly installed aftermarket alarms the violent way - even did so once in a
sainsburys car park, and managed to break the window as I slammed the door in
rage at the fucking thing - and nobody batted an eyelid. Could've been
stealing it, no problem. Or maybe it was the suit. Nobody suspects the guy in
the suit.

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harryh
It's OK. I made a backup. Just need to find the right archive tape...

------
smitherfield
That's unfortunate. If it truly has been stolen it's probably being crushed as
I type this (too recognizable to not get rid of immediately).

~~~
sp332
They could just paint over it.

~~~
smitherfield
Even if it didn't have the "cops look at me!" paintjob, no offense to the
Internet Archive people but it doesn't really look like a nice enough truck to
even be worth the effort of dismantling for parts (as opposed to just
scrapping it), much less repainting it and keeping it around.

~~~
dredmorbius
Commonplace vehicles with highly interchangeable parts apparently have large
value on chop-shop markets. They're liquid.

Discussion of this and related concepts on the recent HN discussion of why
soap is so frequently stolen from urban markets.

~~~
justinlardinois
Just liquid soap, or bars too?

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500471)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11501491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11501491)

~~~
justinlardinois
I was making a pun, but thanks, those were interesting reads.

~~~
dredmorbius
What is this "pun" of which you speak?

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zkhalique
Sneakernet thief!

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Animats
License number and VIN?

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gragas
Why?

~~~
hvs
Why do people steal things?

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krapp
I hate to be _that guy_ but why is a stolen truck relevant to Hacker News?
Only because it's the "Internet Archive" truck? Half a million vehicles get
stolen in the US every year.

There's nothing of intellectual interest here, no new phenomenon to comment
on, nothing but the tech version of celebrity gossip.

~~~
nkrisc
And I'm going to be _that that_ guy and say you didn't have to look at this
story, let alone leave a comment. Like I didn't have to read your comment and
leave a comment, but I did nonetheless. Are you and I really so different?

~~~
reality_czech
I remember there was some text on the goatse.cx website that used to read "if
the image above offends you, simply don't look at it." Below the... shock
image. Yeah.

