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3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2014–2016
44:19 · 29K views · Sep 5, 2011
Jason Scott of Archive Team describes how a loose band of volunteers rushes to copy sites like Geocities, Friendster and Yahoo Video before their owners delete them. The talk covers the tactics they use and the argument that this data is history worth saving.
HN points to it whenever a company shuts down a service and wipes user content, as an entertaining case for digital preservation.
3 comments from Hacker News
I love the ArchiveTeam. Jason Scott, the leader of the project, gave a fantastically entertaining talk about how they saved Geocities, Yahoo! Video, and Friendster — using a Distributed Preservation of Service Attack. Definitely worth a watch. this video
Often, this supposedly redundant data is useful in ways current society can't fathom. Millions of photos of the Mona Lisa taken over decades won't tell you much new about the Mona Lisa. But it will tell you a lot about changes in camera technology over that time. Also, the long tail is long . There are whole cultures and subcultures that would be completely forgotten if not for archives. At Defcon 19, Jason Scott gave a talk titled Archive Team: A Distributed Presentation of Service Attack[1]. In it, he explains why this data is important. As you rightly point out, the vast majority of it is boring and useless. It matters to no one but the author and their friends. But some of it is weird or funny, and a tiny bit of it is pure historical gold. The early days of usenet, for example, contain tons of interesting conversations involving people who are now prominent. Thanks to these archives, we can get a better picture of these people's lives than in earlier times. 1. this video
A few Defcons ago, Jason Scott gave an excellent talk about this failure mode[1]. Basically, companies host user-generated content for free. Then years later, they destroy it with little or even no notice. Sturgeon's law applies; most of the deleted content is crap. But a lot of it matters to the people who made it. More importantly, a small fraction of it is stuff that future historians would kill for. Collectively, companies that engage in this behavior are burning historical evidence. 1. Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack this video