this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
1391 points (99.4% liked)

News

28850 readers
4026 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

"This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted," Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, "like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Jason2357 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yes, the trouble with archiving is knowing what will be important in the future, rather than just popular now. We saved a lot of games from the 80’s through 2000’s through piracy, because they were popular to pass around, but we lost a most of the early web because no one thought it would disappear until the internet archive came along.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Not just games. Full operating systems from the 60s and 70s are being kept alive by hobbyists. Unfortunately there is no law or rule about proprietary/company specific software. In 50 years (or less) historians will know more about how the Romans did banking than how it was done in the early days of computing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Piracy is the reason why video games survived what I call 'the early creation purge'. Basically if you look at the 20th century and see various media that was created, most of the early stuff is gone. Like in the silent film era, 90% of all the films made (if we are using Hollywood movies as a metric) are lost, and probably also the film of other countries, too. Even 75% of all early sound film is lost, and for TV, the earliest broadcasts were never recorded, and many from the 1940s to 60s were also never recorded and are lost forever.

Video games? They're the sole exception. Thanks to piracy and emulation, we can play computer and arcade and console games from the 1970s without issue. This has never happened before, and we have emulation devs and software pirates to thank. Ironically the overwhelming majority of abandonware video games online were not the originals... they were copies of copies that someone not only pirated back in the day, but also cracked. As a 90s kid, I smile whenever I see the RawCopy screen when I load up an old MS-DOS game.

Archive.org is doing God's work for a lot of stuff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It's a crying shame what happened to early Doctor Who episodes, to be honest.