What, you asked for MORE porn? Well, these guys listened!
James Kibo Parry
of every Web page, ever (well, from the past three years) available
to the public.
(They're at web.archive.org.)
They've been open about a day. Since the first few hours, every time
you try to use the archive you have about a 90% chance of getting:
-> Currently Experiencing Higher Than Expected Volume
->
-> We're sorry, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is experiencing
-> a higher than expected number of requests. Access to our past will
-> be available in the near future (perhaps an hour). We apologize for
-> any inconvenience and suggest you try your request again shortly.
What WERE they thinking? If they had any clue what normal people
want from the Internet, they would have realized that their one
site would have to handle, oh, about a BAZILLION times the traffic
than CNN and Google and Yahoo and eBay get.
Think about it this way:
You, a random private person, put up a page of porn somewhere.
Your hosting provider terminates your account (or you close it because
your hosting provider is charging you thousands of dollars a month)
because having a page of porn will get you lots of visitors.
Your porn page goes away.
The Internet Archive opens up.
It includes your porn collection. It is the only place where people
can get to your porn collection.
It includes all the other porn there is on the Web.
It also includes all the porn there ever was on the Web.
Including those tens of thousands of Geocities porn sites that got yanked
down because Geocities couldn't afford the bandwidth to give away
all that porn, including all those NBCi/Xoom porn sites that went away
when they went out of business from giving away free porn bandwidth,
and so on.
They literally have a site which includes all the dirty pictures
that exist (I figure every dirty picture that's been printed on
actual paper has been scanned in) in one place. And suddenly
they're surprised that their site, within 24 hours of its debut,
is not noticed by a handful of scholars doing research on
"What did CNN look like during the last election?" but was immediately
stomped on by hundreds of thousands of people who said "Wow! Now I
can get at all that porn I used to like before they took it away!
I better get it from The Internet Archive right now because there's
no way this site can give away ALL THE PORN IN THE WORLD for free
for long!"
I'm not saying everyone who is overloading the Internet Archive
is just looking for dirty pictures, but hey, a picture is worth
a thousand words, size-wise. Plus a page of text about your pet frog
isn't likely to have every attracted enough visitors to warrant getting
yanked off the Web in the first place, so I figure their primary
attraction is in giving people stuff that got taken down.
Porn, warez, and so on. And if you run a pay-to-view site of
some sort and you ever accidentally had a link that allowed people
to get the good stuff for free, all that stuff is now in the
Internet Archive. If you have a corporate firewall that's supposed
to block your employees from porn sites, if they can get to the
Internet Archive they can get anything they want from any site.
I wonder how complete their collection of every other Web site is.
Do they include a complete copy of Google, given that Google includes
the text of almost every other Web site? (Probably not, as you can
only get to that stuff by submitting a form that requires data entry.
On the other hand, the Internet Archive site has direct links from
its front page to highlights from its collection, and the links in
the archived Web pages have been rejiggered to point at archived
copies of other Web sites in their collection, so some ill-behaved
robot could try to crawl all of the Internet Archive and wind up
trying to download the entire Web, depending on its attitudes
concerning 'robots.txt' files and dynamically-generated links.)
In any case, the Internet Archive's collection doesn't appear to
actually represent every page and every picture on the Web (it seems
to prefer to archive pictures which are embedded in pages, not just
linked from thumbnails) but it does appear to be a pretty thorough
canvassing of almost everything that's been on the Web in the past
two or three years. (Stuff from 1991 would be more interesting, but
they didn't think of having an Internet Archive back then.)
Anyway, what were they thinking? They put all the stuff in the world
in one pile and they're surprised lots of people jumped at the chance
to use it for free?
On the other hand, I could reduce the bandwidth demands on my own
site a lot by just taking it all away and telling people they can
get all my stuff from these nice people at the Internet Archive
who are hosting a complete copy of every edition of my site for free.
The Internet Archive is one of those ideas which is simultaneously
really useful, and really nutty.
What the hell is their business model supposed to be? They've got
to be spending massive amounts of money hosting such a giant site
just to give away stuff for free. I assume they were just deluded
and thought "We're performing a public service which will be of
interest to a few researchers" and not "Hey everyone, come 'n get
the free pile o' porn!"
And maybe they thought that "perhaps an hour" claim would cause
everyone to stop using the site for a full hour whenever it gets
clogged, instead of making everyone hit the "Reload" button every
two seconds until they get through.
It'll be interesting to see how many corporations sue them for
redistributing old content without permission, too. I figure they'll
have to evolve some sort of system to allow people to remove their
own stuff from the archive, but how would they authenticate who
is responsible for what Web page?
-- K.
I think they should expand to
include a copy of every Web
page that never existed.
Also to raise funds they should
sell a complete copy of their
archive on a single floppy disk.
David Pacheco
> -> We're sorry, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is experiencing
> -> a higher than expected number of requests. Access to our past will
> -> be available in the near future (perhaps an hour). We apologize for
> -> any inconvenience and suggest you try your request again shortly.
try in the future."
- david pacheco
Glenn Knickerbocker
> I think they should expand to
> include a copy of every Web
> page that never existed.
I think they should include a page of links to all web pages that don't
have links to themselves. And one that says "This web page is false."
ŹR
Otto Bahn
> The Internet Archive is one of those ideas which is simultaneously
> really useful, and really nutty.
I was so all-over-this until I realized I don't remember
the URL's of any porn pages. That's what bookmarks are for.
So I go to the Pioneers section, of which porn is the numero
uno mucho macho grande, but there are ZERO pioneering porn
sites there.
PLEASE TO POSTING ALL OF YOU'RE OLDEST URL PORNS.
> What the hell is their business model supposed to be?
Something along the lines of selling off the equipment
from defunct .com startups. This is so doomed to failure...
--oTTo--
James Kibo Parry
Also one which has a dancing pipe icon captioned "This is not a grainy
little animated GIF of a pipe."
A further thought on the issue of The Internet Archive including all
the porn there ever was:
Most of the current porn on the Internet migrated to Yahoo Clubs several
months ago, as the various other "put porn here for free" sites either
got smart enough to stop giving away services for free, or decided to be
really Draconian about just yanking down any pages anyone thinks might
have been reported to contain porn. So the people who were tired of
having their pages deleted from GeoCities over and over, and the people
who used to have pages on NBCi/Xoom, mostly migrated to Yahoo Clubs.
Yahoo likes the Clubs because you have to give them an E-mail address
to get in, and thus they known your E-mail address and they know what
sort of things you're interested in. So they can sell spammers a
list that says "john...@hotmail.com is in the Steam-Powered Spanking
Machine club!" and indeed if you use Yahoo Clubs your throwaway Hotmail
account will receive massive spam.
But Yahoo doesn't like being known as the primary provider of free
porn on the Internet. When they tried _selling_ porn tapes in their
on-line store people raised such a ruckus that they declared they
would never sell porn again, so as a result they try to conceal the
fact that the Clubs are mostly a porn-swapping festival. Because
you have to supply an E-mail address and password to get in, robots
like the Internet Archive 'bot can't crawl in and find the porn,
and Yahoo even went so far as to turn off their _own_ search facility.
This way kids can't go to Yahoo and type in "pet rock" and find
583 clubs named "Heavy Petting Rock & Roll Bondage". To visit a
Yahoo Club, you have to know the specific name of the club, in order
to keep you from pulling up a list of search results and saying,
"Wow! No matter what I search for on Yahoo Clubs, it gives me free porn!"
(Of course, the technique to find lots of the porn Clubs is to get
into any one Club, then look at the profiles of the other members --
many members have marked the list of what clubs they're in as public,
so then you get links to those clubs, and in those clubs you can
find dozens more members with links to their favorite clubs.
But the Internet Archive can't grab stuff from those clubs.)
You can tell that Yahoo Clubs is really influential in the free-porn
economy because often when you see pictures on other sites, they'll
have already had their names hashed by the Yahoo Clubs servers
(any picture which came from Yahoo Clubs will have a filename like
"8E752A04.JPG".)
I think they get a little of their revenue from selling banner ads at
the top of the Clubs, and a lot of it from selling your demographic
information to spammers. Also it helps them promote their Yahoo brand
by encouraging you to use Yahoo Messenger to chat with other perverts
("Yahoo Messenger is the instant messenger preferred 2-to-1 by members
of the Bald Redheads With Flowbees club!")
I'm not so sure that's the world's greatest business model (hint:
If you want to actually MAKE A PROFIT, try SELLING AN ACTUAL PRODUCT
TO THE PEOPLE WHO VISIT YOUR SITE) but you gotta admit at least
they think they're trying to make money. The Internet Archive, on
the other hand, seems to be intended as a public service, that is,
THEY FORGOT TO EVEN TRY TO THINK OF A WAY TO MAKE MONEY. Unless
they're just happy to have the logo of their parent company (Alexa)
in the corner of the screen. I suppose this will drive Alexa.com's
ranking waaaaaay up in Google now that they have this wildly popular
Internet Archive linking to Alexa.com.
Alexa gives away a little toolbar that attaches to the bottom of
your Web browser's window, to display some pointless information
about the page you're visiting -- "23% of other Alexa users gave
this site two and a half stars" -- the real purpose being that they
are giving users this FREE thing that clips onto their Web browser
and tells Alexa.com about every single page they visit. Imagine
the demographics they can collect: "This guy's visiting a lot of
sites about Women Bathing In Gatorade and a lot of sites about guns.
Spam him with the Macho Studly Gun Shop Catalog, don't waste your
time spamming him with the Gay Gun Shop Catalog."
-- K.
I'm glad I have a non-standard
Web browser I can't enhance,
preventing me from ever being
stupid enough to install a
free enhancement from Alexa.
Special K
wrote:
>IHNJH, IJLS "Sorry, you can't see the past right now. Please
>try in the future."
Sadly, their archives are nowhere near complete, as they have nothing
for www.atari.com (during the Jaguar days), www.sega.com (I wanted to
see the Saturn site), www.suteki-enterprises.com, or www.nemonet.com,
where Requiem's Realm, the precursor to Suteki Enterprises, existed.
Kenton "The Great Requiem" Cernea
President Emeritus, Tri-State Anime Club
http://members.sockets.net/~requiem
WILL THE GODDESS OF FATE SMILE DOWN UPON HIM?
Etienne Rouette
>On Wed, 31 Oct 2001 11:52:41 GMT, David Pacheco <dpac...@iname.com>
>wrote:
>
>>IHNJH, IJLS "Sorry, you can't see the past right now. Please
>>try in the future."
>
>Sadly, their archives are nowhere near complete, as they have nothing
>for www.atari.com (during the Jaguar days), www.sega.com (I wanted to
>see the Saturn site), www.suteki-enterprises.com, or www.nemonet.com,
>where Requiem's Realm, the precursor to Suteki Enterprises, existed.
>
I was skeptical at first and thought maybe Kibo was playing a joke on us
("Haha! We'll create a web site which claims to archive all the internet,
but everytime you'll try to get somewhere it'll display error pages, except
for a couple of really well-known Pioneer web pages that are already
archived elsewhere! And then we'll sell it on a DVD for $29.99!), until I
found my own web page. That hasn't been in existence (except on my own hard
drive), since 1999.
I think it might be hard to find stuff, because you have to know the exact
name of the page. The directory name is not enough. So if you don't know,
you have to guess. I guessed www.sega.com/index.html. I got a few links. I
tried www.atari.com/index.html and didn't find anything that had to do with
atari.
To find my own old home page, I had to go to Carlos' Kibology page and then
"click" on the "link" with the "mouse", because it seems my index.htm page
was not linked to anywhere on the "version" of the web they archived, not
even in my own web pages which are otherwise almost complete. I haven't
figured out how the program decides what image to archive, though. Some are
there, some are not (gif but no jpg?). My links to Dejanews work but they
somehow get changed to today's date of google.
Also, Yahoo 1996 doesn't seem to work too well. It's the first Pioneer site
I tried, and that actually made it all the more suspect.
I find it's not very useful to have had a web page on geocities, because
many people would have shared the same space along the years, and the one in
particular you are looking for might not have been there when they archived
the space.
Etienne