Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

[Danyl Strype <strypey AT disintermedia.net.nz>]

Kia ora koutou

Most of you will have heard of Archive.org (Internet Archive) and its
"Wayback Machine", which takes snapshots of websites and stores them,
like an archive storing issues of a newspaper on microfiche (I
remember learning to use a microfiche reader at school, and wondering
why anyone would store information in a way which was so ludicrously
difficult to access when it could be stored using computers - I didn't
know the half of it ;) This allows researchers, historians and other
interested people to look back for evidence in the published record,
without having to find a paper version in a physical archive, without
knowing in advance that they will need it (if you think you might want
a snapshot of a website for an academic citation, you can use
www.WebCitation.org).

The problem with the Wayback Machine though, is that it works pretty
much at random. Every now and then its 'robots' crawl your website,
making copies of the pages they can see.
Back in Web 1.0 prehistory, when websites consisted of an index of
flat HTML pages, which didn't change too often, this was fine. On a
web where some sites can change every second, and most sites are
actually complex server-side applications like G-Everything,
iEverything (patent pending), and MS Everything (look but don't
touch), using scripting languages like Javascript, PHP, Python etc),
the Wayback Machine can only collect fragments and samples.

The Archive.org have attempted to solve this problem by offering a
site-specific archiving service for pages which are publicly
displayed. Archive-It allows webmasters to host their own archiving
robots, controlling what they can archive, and feeding the copies into
Archive.org:
http://www.archive-it.org/

Like Wikipedia, Archive.org is a USA-based, publicly-funded,
non-profit organisation. We can probably trust their motives, but we
certainly can't trust the neutrality of their government and its
enforcement machine, as the DotCom raids, and various other
copyright-based extradition attempts have shown (not to mention the
systematic attacks on WikiLeaks which US government "cyber-security"
agencies have either failed to investigate, or participated in). It
occurs to wonder if we have a publicly-funded digital archive doing
the same job for kiwi webpages that Archive.org does for those in the
US, using NZ-based servers which are "mirrored and striped" (across
multiple storage drives in multiple datacentres)? ArchivesNZ? National
Library? Digital NZ? Whose job is this, and is it getting done?

Hei kōnā
Strypey

-- 
Danyl Strype
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates

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speak to the tremendous possibility of our political moment."
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http://www.nationofchange.org/new-radical-alliances-new-era-1337004193

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that free software is the best model."
- Keith C Curtis
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=407