If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.
original, saw this somewhere else too. ddos stuff. this one blames ru for archive.today mess. sounds about right. didn’ intend it to look like an announcement here. it kind of did. post based on ars story, apparently. who knows
There’s websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can’t bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.
That doesn’t mean an alternative shouldn’t be found, but we also shouldn’t pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.
I do hope this move results in more support for the IA/Wayback Machine and helps them to update some of their crawler tech — thanks to the rise of AI, some sites are effectively (thru captchas etc.) or actively (through straight-up greed [coughRedditcough]) blocked from being archived almost entirely, which is frustrating for legit archivists/contributors.
Good reminder to donate to web.archive.org
While archive.org is good and more trustworthy than archive.is, it isn’t as useful for bypassing paywalls.
But Wikipedia doesn’t need to bypass paywalls, and you can bypass them yourself with a bit of work.
There’s websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can’t bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.
That doesn’t mean an alternative shouldn’t be found, but we also shouldn’t pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.
I do hope this move results in more support for the IA/Wayback Machine and helps them to update some of their crawler tech — thanks to the rise of AI, some sites are effectively (thru captchas etc.) or actively (through straight-up greed [coughRedditcough]) blocked from being archived almost entirely, which is frustrating for legit archivists/contributors.