Hacking against the Ministry of Truth
This is a LazyWeb request.
Many people think the Internet Archive is a reliable tool for keeping governments and other organizations honest. They think that if items are altered or removed on a Web site (so as to maintain apparent consistency between a government’s past statements and current reality, for example), the Wayback Machine can be relied on to retain the previous versions of those items.
Unfortunately this is not true, for three reasons.
- The Internet Archive does not have working copies of items that require interaction with a server. These include streaming audio and video.
- Even for static items, the Internet Archive can be instructed to stop archiving them (and to delete previously archived versions) using
robots.txt
or similar. - The Internet Archive’s coverage of the Web is not thorough, so it may miss some revisions. Furthermore, it is a single Web site and therefore vulnerable to lawsuits and other attacks.
Democracy-minded hackers could develop Web site archiving software that solves most of these problems. Specifically, it would:
- incorporate software for saving QuickTime, Real, Windows Media, and Ogg streams (even if embedded in Flash or Shockwave objects) as playable static files;
- ignore
robots.txt
, and disguise itself perfectly as a random popular Web browser (this includes not requesting items too hurriedly or too predictably); - operate only on individually specified Web sites (like
www.whitehouse.gov
), using a BitTorrent-like protocol to cooperate with other clients in building up an archive of the site and its revisions (so that it cannot be blocked by IP number).
I apologize for making this request now — too late for some uses — rather than when I first thought of it.