We need to preserve data. The FBI is trying to kill data.
We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge).
Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.)
Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.
Probably a bit of a 'baby with the bathwater' situation here. At almost no point has that institution been a net positive - at times snooping on 'political dissidents' (like MLK Jr.), and at others bungling cases so bad they become moments of national shame (Ruby Ridge).
You're never going to get a system with a clandestine domestic service running ethically for long, esp. not with qualified immunity. It's simply too attractive to dumb psychopaths with delusions of grandeur and concurrently not of interest to people with a strong sense of community or morals.
> At almost no point has that institution been a net positive
Hard to measure, isn't it. In the eyes of the millions of americans who have at some point in their life been victims or related to or friends of victims of some kind of serious crime, the FBI has often times been helpful and/or the prospect of being caught has been a deterrent for crimes.
You contrast that with all the bad that has come from there, of which there is surely plenty, but how come you claim thay the bad obviously must outweigh the good?
You're right that I'm taking a bit of a shortcut - my assessment is based on what I know to be true in both directions, the things they've done right versus the things they've done wrong. The CARD program, stopping the times square bomber, Don C. Miller, Zazi versus COINTELPRO, Stingray, MLK, Ruby Ridge, basically everything J Edgar Hoover ever touched (like the Palmer Raids), Steven Hatfill and Brandon Mayfield.
If you ask me, I'd trade the good for enduring the bad.
My shortcut is admittedly a sloppy heuristic (because what else do you have for unknowns like this); for the unmeasurable effects, my bet is that they skew roughly the same as the measurables. For every serial killer who thought twice, there have probably been many political activists who have also thought twice. The deterrent effect cuts both ways if your actions cut both ways. We also know about enough falsely accused / imprisoned that we can assume we ain't figured them all out. For every family that feels safer with the FBI around, there are families that feel less safe, because people "like them" have been framed, murdered, snooped on, suppressed, and criminalized.
So yeah, it is hard to measure - but not impossible to come to a conclusion, as far as I'm concerned.
Another way to look at it is this; if you're going to hand the mandate of violence and skullduggery to an institution, you should be damn sure that they have standards and practices that solidly enforce competence and ethics - and even considering the good, we know pretty conclusively that they have failed in this regard. I don't want to play russian roulette with law enforcement - they should get it right almost all of the time or step aside so someone who knows what they're doing can handle it.
If you choose to engage law enforcement personnel, it's "thank god, some extra protection" (hopefully!), but if there is a situation where law enforcement personnel engage you, it's either "huh?" or "oh fuck". This isn't different for the FBI than for local or state-level police.
If some law enforcement personnel show up that you didn't invite, they could be there for a large number of reasons. How worried you'll be depends on how likely you think they are to do what they're supposed to do instead of what they're not.
If they're canvassing for witnesses, are they going to charge through your yard and shoot your dog? If they're investigating someone else, how likely are they to try to come up with something unreasonable to charge you with for leverage and then make you plead it down to a penalty that still isn't zero in exchange for giving them information you might not even have and would then be forced to choose between fabricating to get the deal and "not cooperating" and getting a serious prison sentence?
If someone is attempting to SWAT you, how likely are they to ascertain the situation instead of shooting first and asking questions later?
If their investigation has led them to you for some reason even though you're innocent, do you expect them to care about the truth or just railroad you?
If you hear the name of a particular law enforcement agency unexpectedly when you don't have any reason to think you've done anything wrong and your instinct still has to be "oh fuck" then they're bad at their jobs.
I think most people would have essentially the same reaction to either FBI or state/local police showing up at their door with "[Police|FBI], open up!", and it depends more on whether they believe they've done something illegal than the reputation of the agency. This was my disagreement with GP(stavros).
Depending on how you expect the reader to answer all your questions, we could still be in full agreement, but my sense is that you're asking them rhetorically?
You can ask the same questions about a local law enforcement agency but the answers won't be the same for every one of them.
And then in terms of literal sentiment, most people aren't familiar with any given local law enforcement agency because there are so many of them, so they wouldn't know what to think, and some of them are quite bad. But the knowledge of the average person it isn't really the point.
Suppose you actually were familiar with the record of whatever specific agency just showed up. If you would still have to think "oh fuck" then they suck.
If this was true, the Miranda rights would read something like “anything you say will be used to obtain justice” rather than “anything you say can and WILL be used AGAINST you.” The police and justice system are never your friend. They are always your adversary, and should be treated as such. Under a different regime, they could be your ally if you’re innocent, (and this is the case in many countries) but in the US, they are always hostile to everyone, including innocent people. Even if individuals in that system don’t fancy themselves in that light.
I engaged law enforcement personnel as the victim of a violent (unarmed) home invasion robbery by people I knew. What did they do? Debate whether I should have been arrested instead on a technicality. That would look good for their stats, right? At least the criminals had to repay 90% of my lawyer's fees.
I assume that’s why the original argument is that it’s not been a net positive. I.e. the assumption is that lots of work can be good and necessary, while even more that is evil and excessive can end up with a net negative.
Anticorruption work is good and necessary. If the FBI's work was any good, they would be investigating the funding of the destruction of the White House, or AIPAC and Qatari influence in DC, not Comey and Obama. Right now, they are working for Evil.
Or the Trump coin crypto rugpull and money laundering scheme. Or the open insider trading. Or the $400 million jet "gifted" from Qatar. This year has been one grift after another.
I already live there because the only enforcement that happens is trying to extract money from poor people to fund the local court and cops. Pulling over every car coming down a particular road and trying to charge them with DUIs for smoking weed 8 hours beforehand does not make me safer, it just makes me late for work and is used to justify tax increases on me to further fund the bogus drug war.
This thread is about the FBI, yet you're referencing strawman arguments about DUI checkpoints from local police. Do you have any experience with crimes against children?
US law enforcement "clears" about 1 in 4 robberies and more than 1 in 3 aggravated assaults/batteries, and similar numbers for other crimes. On average, a criminal's career is 3 serious crimes. You can imagine how much awesomer your life would have been if they were able to run uncaught for years and years. But you won't because you have "net negative" bullshit blocking your vision.
Now compare that to that to US peer countries like throughout most of Europe or Australia and see that the US has piss poor clearance rates for crimes. Along with the US having far higher crime rates in general on par with countries that lack stable governance.
Despite topping the world with incarcerations and arrests and law enforcement funding, the US is not a particularly safe place, so obviously US law enforcement isn't focused on safety and justice, which leaves the monetary factor.
If you arrest someone for a drug crime and get a plea deal out of them they get jail fees, processing fees, court minimum fees plus any additional court costs, probation costs and fees, multiple "X state specialty tax fee", plus kickbacks from the mandatory court ordered drug/anger/traffic class, cost of drug test fees, etc. If you arrest someone from murder and imprison them for life, sure you can claim to charge them those fees, but they will never be free of prison to ever pay them. So it should be no surprise that cops are incentivized to go for easy drug charges from non-dangerous citizens that puts money in their pockets over actual dangerous criminals who will only reduce department revenue.
typical bootlicker mentality; all criticism of state violence is rejected out of hand because the idea that power can and should be held to a higher standard is anathema to the authoritarian mindset.
I'm sure police (when they aren't fighting over jurisdictional issues) find it helpful, that doesn't mean that it's helpful for the population, especially when it (and police generally) are used as a tool for domestic influence operations and to basically shunt some people aside in the name of business and landowners.
i could absolutely be wrong since your post was kinda vague, so forgive me if i’m wrong, but are you implying we shouldn’t attempt mitigation of bad things because other bad things are happening elsewhere?
If you read the chain of posts I directly responded to, then there's nothing vague about what I said. Here, I'll help you out:
That chain was in response to:
>> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here
> Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.
Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.
So in that context, there's nothing "vague" about my somewhat tongue-in-cheek response. Neither, you'll find, is there any attempt by me to say that one SHOULDNT stop the FBI from doing anything bad.
The pushback, by other chap & me, is about quantifying this particular misdeed as "evil", showing a remarkable lack of acknowledgement about the many, many, many other things the FBI has done (from its inception as a personal blackmailing operation by Hoover against US politicians - ring any bells?) and is doing, which are far, far worse than this "bad thing".
If you're in public denial about the FBI not being the righteous force for "peace, justice & the american way (whatever the heck that is)", despite the copious publically available evidence & reporting (by independent journalists) to the contrary, then ... no, you really don't want to know.
(all this, over what was mostly a tongue in cheek response anyway ...)
I think neither "righteous" nor "evil" are appropriate words in this context. It's a real-world institution with the expected biases, missteps of authority, episodes of getting embroiled in political machination, etc. Demonizing it is just as naive as idealizing it. And there's probably much more of the former than the latter today, when a lot of unearned, easy cynicism is either unconsciously performative, or even worse, the outcome of a caricatural conspirative worldview.
Deletion of data is the most permanent thing most people will ever do. The burning of the library of Alexandria and the razing of Baghdad left a long, long shadow on history.
Most of the time when I see this snark, and look it up, it turns out that the "original" inventor did only the most basic step or vague foundations and never refined it further or explored any potential applications.
Most often it happens with China since they spend a lot of propganda to present themselves as the true inventor of everything.
you jest but it is wild how often people declare “if it was ‘advanced’ and outside of Europe, it was probably aliens. not the people, it was aliens, obviously.”
Well, being ranked #275 on the list of 5 things I'm going to care about today means that I'm going to go "hmm that's interesting" and then move on with life.
We as a society. If everyone just thought about their own pod because they can't be bothered about govt corruption then that's how dictatorship wins. MLK had a family too. We can't all be MLK but it doesn't mean we need to be okay with shitty things happening just because they're not as shitty as other things we let happen.
If one is naive to the fire in the house, the egg on the counter, as something worthy of concern, might get them to look around and see that their house is not actually suitable for use as shelter. People who are trying to put out the fire (or who are simply concerned about it while watching from a distance) might decide to point to the spoiled egg to spread awareness of the fire to the people inside.
I think you have to change or abandon the metaphor to make your point. These are not true statements of spoiled eggs and house fires, and so much so as to make a reasonable claim about institutions and malfeasance look absurd.
> These are not true statements of spoiled eggs and house fires, and so much so as to make a reasonable claim about institutions and malfeasance look absurd.
True, but I disagree with the conclusion. When I try to map it back to reality and it doesn't make sense, it is indeed an indictment of the analogy. But the fact I have to abuse the analogy to make that mapping coherent is not my problem; it's not my analogy.
However, within the context of the analogy, and if one can imagine that absolutely insane scenario, the logic holds.
An egg gone bad and a house fire are not the same sort of concern. A government agency doing two types of evil thing is more akin to ranking whether the small fire in the living room is more important than the slightly larger fire in the media room. It’s all fire in your house.
the phrasing makes it sound like historically the FBI does not work for evil. which is somewhat annoying to someone who believes the FBI has been primarily a tool of evil.
I just wish the default way people used archive.is was to generate their long form link instead of their short link, as, if the site ever goes down, all of the links people have posted where they don't change the setting and thereby paste the default inscrutable code link will be destroyed... building a service with a pernicious behavior like that is ALSO not okay in its own way.
This actually seems like a big design flaw in resource locators. Perhaps someone here can make an alt DNS that resolves to new homes for content when the Canary dies.
IMO the natural right is for humans to share what they've learned up to and including verbatim reproductions of works by others. I also think that abridging this right to grant some exclusivity for artists (the broader "art" meaning scientists/writers/authors/musicians/coders/etc) is suitable. Copyright is/was a good idea. Its fair use clause is a good idea. The duration of exclusivity under current laws, however, seems excessive and beyond mere encouraging art.
There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.
Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".
> There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.
Why can't you just be happy for those few who are lucky enough to be able to violate copyright with no consequences? Yes, I know you'd want everyone to be able to violate copyright, but we're not there yet.
"Why can't we just be happy" that individuals and smaller companies get sued into oblivion over copyright violations, while large AI companies can scrape everyone's data and use it for training and completely ignore copyright while generating code and images and text and music based on all that that displaces the demand for the originals? Is that what you're asking?
Because we’d like the powerful to feel the crunch from bad law rather than get a backdoor, so they have to use their power to change things for everyone instead of just getting it changed for themselves.
More often than not the rich just codify the "backdoor" for themselves in such case. A rich man can buy the $30,000 registered machinegun and pay the $200 NFA stamp and be 100% legal, the poor man who 3d prints a $0.50 of plastic to do the same thing goes to jail for 15 years.
The entities training AI are not anti-copyright, or anti-intellectual-property. If I were to steal their AI models they would sue me into the ground and probably win. Furthermore, even if you are anti-copyright, you probably still don't want your shit scraped by AI trainers since the bots are extremely aggressive, almost like a bona fide DDoS attack.
AI is not an attack on copyright, it is an attempt to replace it with something worse.
You're assuming way too much with "not there yet". The point is the corpos will violate copyright with impunity today, and then in a few years sign a bunch of settlement agreements and pull the ladder up behind them.
I'd love to see copyright slowly become irrelevant, but even with that goal we should expect to see large corpos being the last to stop respecting it.
Pirating an old movie to sell is not considered ethically problematic everywhere. In many, many countries on earth pirated DVDs were sold at the marketplace, and no one – buyer or seller – had qualms about it. When the authorities shut down such sales, it was almost entirely because they were being pressured by the USA and a handful of other Western governments, not because the local ethical perspective on this changed.
This genre of comment is so tedious. We aren't talking about everywhere, the FBI is a US agency, the big companies we're discussing have won in US court. This thread is about the US.
The FBI and courts are enforcing the law that exists solely because the Founding Fathers enshrined it, but that says nothing about the ethical views that might exist among Americans. There are plenty of Americans who don’t find selling pirated media ethically problematic and would like to see the kind of marketplace sales and wide use of Bittorrent boxes that people in other countries have enjoyed.
While it's true people are upset at AI companies profiting off of artist creations with no compensation, I know a lot of people are also reacting to how the recent AI companies have been scraping the web. The reason folks are using Anubis and other methods is because unlike Google which did have archiving of sites for a long time (which was actually a great service), these new companies do not respect robots.txt, do not crawl at a reasonable rate (for us, thousands of hits a minute from their botnets - usually baidu/tencent, but also plenty of US IPs), hit the same resource repeatedly, ignoring headers intended to give cache hints, stupidly hitting thousands of variations of a page when crawling search results with no detection that they are getting basically the same thing... And when you ban them, they then switch to residential ranges. It really is malicious.
If you boil it down to the AI companies are making money (subscriptions, etc.) based on content they did not pay to produce, then they are profiting from someone else's hard work.
Thats not entirely true. Google might or might not hide your pages from index. They'll definitely going to scrape it anyway. They also display summarized info from your page (famous "what is scrapping" joke showing wikipedias summary). Finally, you might just get your answer without visiting - just by skimming result description.
Well, don't we have enough Acme Corporations in the world that were unprofitable and existed purely on VC life support before they killed off all the competition by dumping the prices, and then made them skyrocket to recoup investments and become profitable after becoming monopolists?
People at these companies are receiving a salary to do these things that the person you're responding to is opposed to.
While not all the companies in question may or may not be profiting from these things some of them are, and most if not all of their employees certainly are as well.
I wish the companies would just pay a few technically-competent companies to do the scraping. Pay two so you can check their work, maybe, but let's get past the point in time when dozens (or more?) of companies are all simultaneously hammering the web.
My pie in the sky pitch is the US Government (and others) should solve this, the legality and the compensation problems in a single swoop. Make submission of your work to a federal model data set a requirement for obtaining copyright protection. License the data set (and heck maybe even charge for making custom models) for nominal fees to anyone who want it, with indemnification against copyright lawsuits for works deriving from the licensed model. Pay copyright owners a limited time royalty from these licensing fees. Everyone wins and we can stop needing a billion bots scraping a billion sites billion times a day.
While I would like to see it abolished entirely (including patents) I do have to compliment how you've described a formula that is actually possible to implement.
To deny people access to things is one thing, wanting to do it by impossible means is quite something else. Who even has time to scavage the universe looking for possible infringement on their works and also the money to deal with it?
A lot of the outrage isn't at scraping, it is at the disruptive techniques used to do so. Like web-scraping whole websites that already provide convenient images of their content for download.
Feels like now we're just redefining our rules so that the people we don't like are out and the people we like are in. Does the content creator have the right to determine how their work is used or not?
This is a false equivalency I'm surprised no one else has brought up. An archive of a site preserves attribution inherently, the scraping and training are not.
Is it? I thought it was ridiculous at first, but the more I think of it... both are scenarios where a corporation is scraping billions of webpages. We like the reason archive.is does it, but unless it's some kind of charity, I think it's a reasonable comparison.
archive.is is a charity no? Or at least they take donations, it seems the legal entity behind it is nebulous, but they don't have ads and have no paid product or offering.
They sure as shit do have ads. Have you ever accidentally followed a link using a browser profile that has no ad blocking enabled?
I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions.
Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures.
I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.
It's not that they're scraping the internet, it's that they're scraping the internet, profiting off the data they take, and still using the copyright regime to go after others who do unto them.
Corporations large and small don't do anything. It's always a person. The question you are answering, even if you don't think you are, is whether a few people can get together and act in concert and still retain their rights.
Only in a couple of very specific and narrow ways. They are not considered persons generally under US law. They are legal fictions that have been granted a subset of rights that people have.
I imagine there's a whole lot of snarky epitaphs which the remnants of the humankind could place on this civilization's gravestone, but citing this exact law might make for the best one.
Where US law applies varies by which law it is; there are US laws that apply only outside of the US [0], as well as US laws which have application both inside and outside the US.
[0] e.g., the federal torture statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2340A(a), “Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”
I mean, its not like it was just Biden. His extradition proceedings took place during three different US presidential administrations. You might as well include Trump and Obama in there as well.
It would solve a lot if that was taken to the extreme. Sorry Amazon, but your working conditions killed five people. Your business licens is going to jail for 40 years, good luck getting contracts with other companies with murder on your records when you get out.
Hot take here, I know, but some of us believe the law should treat large corporations differently than it treats individuals when it comes to their rights and privileges.
This seems like an incredible disingenuous take. There's a marked difference between collecting information to freely share with the rest of humanity, and collecting information to feed into algorithms under the guise of "artificial intelligence" with the pretense of enriching their finances and putting others out of work.
That's a bad take, just like open source code is available to all, it's not the case you can always resell it or repackage it for your own profit.
Information can be made available to all, and at the same time, we can make it so others cannot resell or repackage it for profit like what AI companies are doing.
It's not up to us to tell the FBI what to do, that's a fatal misunderstanding about how power works. You can demand to see the FBI's manager, but I doubt it will get you anywhere. You can choose between two candidates offered by the privately owned and run political parties for whom the FBI works, but I don't think that will help either.
> Knowledge itself should become a human right.
Human rights are created by legislation. Unless you own a legislator (or rather, many legislators), you will not be involved in this. The people who own (and parcel out) knowledge itself, however, will be involved.
It would be better if we stopped making pronouncements about what people more powerful than us should be doing. It's like prisoners talking about what the jail should be doing. You should talk about what you should be doing. And don't mistake demanding for doing, or walking in the street with your friends for activism (unless you're violating curfew and are prepared to defend yourselves.)
Be brave. Put forward a program that might fail. Ask people to help you with it, ask them to follow you, tell them where to show up. Join someone else and help with their program. Don't demand, then whine when they say "of course not." The FBI is not your daddy, and the people running it are not running it on your behalf.
I don't mean to be personal, but this type of talk is empty. The way how to do things is decided is through power; and the way weak people exercise power is collectively, through discussion and coordinated action. Anybody can talk about what they would do if they were dictator of the world.
> I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such
How do you suggest we fund the difficult work needed to investigate, research, and produce such data?
Remember that facts are not copyrightable, and as such, can't be restricted by copyright. Creative expression of those facts, on the other hand, can be.
> Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it.
Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys. Of course, they still have archive.org sources everywhere, so the objection is not actually to archiving page content.
Tons of claims also seem to be sourced ultimately to thinly-disguised promotional material (e.g. claims of the prevalence of a problem backed up by the sites of companies offering products to combat the problem) and opinion pieces that happen to mention an objective (but not verified) claim in passing.
The difference is that we know who's running archive.org. We don't know who's running archive.is. That's perfectly fine for private use but unacceptable for a site like Wikipedia.
This type of possibility really worries me. Archive.is is much closer to actual history in many ways. If the data there starts getting corrupted or biased, there’s no way to know if what was truly there.
The idea that the permanent record of the internet could hinge on the ethics of one stranger behind a server rack is deeply unsettling.
I never said there are examples. However, "who you are" matters, even if you don't care. At least when the who is known, we can guage the trustworthiness and what bias exists, because there's always a bias. When who is not known, you don't know what bias to account for. That's not trustworthy and not reliable. And when the site is closed source and you have no idea how it's being run, nor by whom, you don't know "what you do" either.
I never concluded that but this actually allows someone, the anonymous here to change the history/info backwards if needed. For russians as an example this would be powerfull tool to manipulate narrative, which is cultural there at this point. Pretty smart and dangerous if it is really operated by them.
Ignoring the fact that one of this service's primary reason for existing is that corporations and governments are already abusing their ability to retroactively change history.
If this is truly a concern then the answer is to have more than one publicly-accessible independent archive service. Archivebro has never taken any steps towards securing a monopoly on archiving things. The FBI are the only ones doing that.
Also not everybody in Russia is on the FSB payroll. News media always stops investigating as soon as there is credible information that somebody or their server is located in Russia because if they learn too much then it becomes difficult to discredit them as "possibly being linked to the kremlin". If you used any other nationality to imply that somebody is acting in bad faith on behalf of a hostile foreign government without additional evidence those same journos would call you a racist and try to get you canceled.
I heard stories about a potential Oracle data breach (I think mainly affecting their customers) being removed from Archive.org too. It’s because in general, they comply with requests to remove stuff, which is understandable from an ethical perspective. But do they at least try to explain the reason for the takedown? Is it just not feasible to do that?
This is no longer true. They changed their policy to ignore robots.txt in 2017. I seem to recall that they still respected robots.txt later, though I can’t find any more information on it and may be misremembering. Currently, they do not.
My main use for archive.is is for sites that somehow cannot be archived (a message will show up mentioning this site cannot be archive or something along these lines).
archive.is is generally pretty good in forcibly attempting to get an archive, if the HTML doesn't work, the screenshot will work fine. Although archive.is doesn't seem to handle gifs/videos.
> Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys.
Or they're worried about the paywall by-passing functionality (which is probably what a good portion of people use it for) and copyright claims against archive.today potentially having it taken down and thus breaking a lot of links.
If the last 9 months have shown us anything, it's that long-running government institutions are a lot easier to kill than we thought. And the idea of archive.org being under the control an administration like the current one in the US is pretty frightening. They would have absolutely zero qualms about deleting and changing that data.
Frankly, I envy people who still have sides and that don't see the world as cynically as I do. For me, Clinton, Obama, Bush, Trump, don't matter, just different slave masters for the same system.
"Knowledge", for the most part is. What I see archive.is get used for most frequently is circumventing paywalls on paid-for media websites, which is journalism. And while freedom of the press is a constitutional right in functioning democracies, freedom of access isn't enshrined as much. But most of the things are background articles, the actual news is freely available to all still.
I'm all for archiving open webpages though. And I'm honestly surprised the Internet Archive is still standing. Their decision to opening up their book library was a dangerous mistake.
Archive dot org deleted a lot of stuff during their "hack" a while back. I'm convinced it's already been compromised. The US/EU/every government wants the ability to rewrite history.
Look up the article "Who Archives the Archivist?" (it's difficult to find. Use quotes. Don't link it; the site is banned here).
We tried making knowledge free and available to every online. Capitalists came and gobbled it up to sell back to us as "AI". Unfortunately we can't have nice things with people taking advantage of it.
All you are guarding against here is some bits in a machine. Knowledge can be embedded in other substrate, other medium. Acquired by more actions than reading social media.
IMO what you really mean is "I should be free to sit and surf the web secure in my belief others are acting properly, while subsisting on externalized labor that props up my biology".
Asimov and countless others highlight this difference between being a passive reader of others ideas as orthogonal to knowledge acquisition. If you aren't conducting the experiments you acquired nothing but memory of someone else telling a story.
4% in the US hunt now. So to get people living rather than acquiescing, all you office drones are going to have to learn your way out of helplessness. Go acquire knowledge of how to grow a potato.
You won't because you don't want to acquire knowledge. You want the world to gift you knowledge and experience through as little effort of your own as possible. Typical American capitalist. 8 billion across the globe aren't that impressed by 300 millions obvious grift.
> We need to preserve data. ... I actually think there should be a human right to data.
I'm not going to simp for the FBI here, but come on: do you have a human right to preserve my private photos leaked by a stalker or a hacker? Because archive.is is famously unwilling to play nice here.
I don't know if this case is about that, or about pirated content, or about the administration trying to scrub something embarrassing off the internet. But the fact that archive.is cheerfully enables all three "use cases" should probably give you a pause.
It's a delicate line to walk because takedown processes can be abused to do things we don't like. But "lol, tough luck, information wants to be free" is not a sensible blanket response in a polite society.
We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge).
Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.)
Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.