<
https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-memory-wayback-machine-lawsuits/>
"If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after
lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you’ll be greeted by its
founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.
You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of
Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and plopped down at random in San
Francisco’s foggy, mellow Richmond district. Once you pass the entrance’s white
Corinthian columns, Kahle will show you the vintage
Prince of Persia arcade
game and a gramophone that can play century-old phonograph cylinders on display
in the foyer. He’ll lead you into the great room, filled with rows of wooden
pews sloping toward a pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a grand stained
glass dome. Before it was the Archive’s headquarters, the building housed a
Christian Science church.
I made this pilgrimage on a breezy afternoon last May. Along with around a
dozen other visitors, I followed Kahle, 63, clad in a rumpled orange
button-down and round wire-rimmed glasses, as he showed us his life’s work.
When the afternoon light hits the great hall’s dome, it gives everyone a halo.
Especially Kahle, whose silver curls catch the sun and who preaches his gospel
with an amiable evangelism, speaking with his hands and laughing easily. “I
think people are feeling run over by technology these days,” Kahle says. “We
need to rehumanize it.”
In the great room, where the tour ends, hundreds of colorful, handmade clay
statues line the walls. They represent the Internet Archive’s employees,
Kahle’s quirky way of immortalizing his circle. They are beautiful and weird,
but they’re not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where one might find
confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black
servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast
digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and
texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on
each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks
out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic
flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this
display than Kahle.
It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not
exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge
repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as
functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of
web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out,
the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation
organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position
as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet
Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public
resource on internet history."
I have visited and done some work with the Internet Archive in the past. I
fully support them and their goal of preserving works and making them
accessible.
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: October 1, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-1-113126437
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
