No, not like that. There's a difference between a site that:
1) provides a snapshot of another site for archival purposes.
2) provides original content.
You're arguing that since encyclopedias change their content, the Library of Congress should be allowed to change the content of the materials in its stacks.
By modifying its archives, archive.today just flushed its credibility as an archival site. So what is it now?
> You're arguing that since encyclopedias change their content, the Library of Congress should be allowed to change the content of the materials in its stacks.
As an end user of Wikipedia there are occasions where content has been scrubbed and/or edits hidden. Admins can see some of those, but end users cannot (with various justifications, some excellent/reasonable and some.. nebulous). That's all I'm saying, nothing about Congress or such other nonsense. It seems like an occasion of the pot calling the kettle names from this side of the fence.
> What I don't see on that page is where they explicitly don't promise to not modify anything in the archive.
I'm quoting all of that because is lacks an explicit promise of non-modification /i
Meanwhile seriously, if you were disappointed not to see e.g. "We explicitly don't promise not to modify", then perhaps you should consider why, regardless, this site was trusted enough to get a gazillion links in Wikipedia... and HN.
> I'm quoting all of that because is lacks an explicit promise of non-modification.
And I'm quoting all of that because it lacks an explicit (or implicit) promise of modification. :)
It was (emphasis on past-tense) so-trusted because it advertises itself as an archival site. (The linked disclaimer is all about it not being a "long-term" archival site. It says it archives pages for latecomers. There is an implication here that it archives them accurately. What use is a site for latecomers if they change the content to be something else?) If they'd said or indicated they would be changing the content to no longer reflect the original site, Wikipedia would not have linked to them because they wouldn't be a credible source.
In any case, now I can't use them to share or use links since we can no longer trust those archives to be untampered. When I share a link to nyt content on archive.today or copy and paste content into email, I'm putting my name on that declaring "nyt printed this". If that's not true, it's my reputation.
> When I share a link to nyt content on archive.today or copy and paste content into email, I'm putting my name on that declaring "nyt printed this". If that's not true, it's my reputation.
What if the nyt article itself is the problem? How does that square?
What exactly is credible about archive.today if they are willing to change the archive to meet some desire of the leadership? That's not credible in the least.
Archive.org snapshots may load javascript from external sites, where the original page had loaded them. That script can change anything on the page. Most often, the domain is expired and hijacked by a parking company, so it just replaces the whole page with ads.
The page "got changed" every second. It is easy to make an archived page which would show different content depending on current time or whether you have Mac or Windows, or your locale, or browser fingerpring, or been tailored for you personally
Much worse indeed. This's why one should be deeply sceptical of the handful of WP users seeking to replace archive.today by archive.org. AT allows tampering by the archive operator; IA allows tampering by half the planet... including WP editors who'd love that replacement.
The operators() of archive.today (and the other domains) are doing shadey things and the links are not working so why keep the site around as for example Internet archives waybackmachine works as alternative to it.
> Fact is, archives are essential to WP integrity and there's no credible alternative to this one.
Yes, they are essentional, and that was the main reason for not blacklisting Archive.today. But Archive.today has shown they do not actually provide such a service:
> “If this is true it essentially forces our hand, archive.today would have to go,” another editor replied. “The argument for allowing it has been verifiability, but that of course rests upon the fact the archives are accurate, and the counter to people saying the website cannot be trusted for that has been that there is no record of archived websites themselves being tampered with. If that is no longer the case then the stated reason for the website being reliable for accurate snapshots of sources would no longer be valid.”
How can you trust that the page that Archive.today serves you is an actual archive at this point?
Did you not read the article? They not only directed a DDOS against a blogger who crossed them, but altered their own archived snapshots to amplify a smear against them. That completely destroys their trustworthiness and credibility as a source of truth.
Follow-up: maybe you're confusing Ars Technica with Wikipedia, whose admins did redact Nora's last name from discussions? If so, that's a weird equivalence to draw, since the change was disclosed and done to protect personal information, not attack someone else in the process. (Also, "Nora [redacted]" itself seems to be a name lifted from an unrelated person who had merely contacted Archive.today with a takedown request.)
1. I can't post links (I've already tried), my comments with links are getting shadowbanned. Check out Jon Brodkin's article on Ars about AT, not today's, but the previous one, 6 days ago. Nora's name was there, but now it's silently gone.
2. We learned about Nora's involvement from Patokallio. We learned about Nora's non-involvement... also from Patokallio. They could have reached a settlement with AT that includes hiding Nora's name.
3. Regardless of who Nora is, it is interesting to see the extent of this censorship: so far only gyrovague.com and arstechnica.com, but not tomshardware.com and not tech.yahoo.com. This shows which sites are working closely with the AT defamation campaign, and which are simply copywriting the news feed.
Silently? It tells you right there in the article: "Nora [last name redacted]". Maybe they could add a more fulsome explanation in an editor's note but it seems pretty obvious in context.
If AT is appropriating some random person's name as an alias, it seems helpful to report on that publicly in order to expose the practice and help clear up the misinformation.
Even if they did, so what? There's nothing wrong with a news article removing personal information as a precaution. It's light-years away from altering the content of an archival snapshot in order to target someone else.
Well, that's the only name they removed, even though it didn't stand out among the other names in the investigation. Secondly, it's ironic to do so in an article tagged "Streisand Effect" so perhaps we're witnessing part of the performance. And thirdly, it's strange to blame AT for removing... the same name, and not blame Ars. Immediately accusing... AT of double standards and hypocrisy.
I am lost here. It is definitively an organized defamation campaign.
Seems more like Ars trying to avoid piling more attention on the name of a person that isn't actually involved.
And again, the accusation against Archive.today isn't just that they removed their "Nora" alias from a snapshot, but that they replaced it with the name of the blogger they were quarreling with. There's no defensible reason to do that outside of petty revenge (which tracks with the emails and public statements from the Archive.today maintainer).
They apparently did a find + replace across their database to change the Nora alias to the blogger's name. So any archives of content referencing her would instead point to him, muddying the waters and blaming him for anything she was accused of. Like I said, petty.
I see WP is not proposing to run its own.