Internet Archive

It starts off with a stop motion part starring dominoes in front of a little building, and then transitions to a number of scenes featuring some fun camera trickery.

I find it fun that this is essentially the exact same thing we used to make as kids some 60 years later, only we used a digital camera!

It’s a creative act to find and make sense of my own history, one that requires a leap of faith in order to fill in the silences, erasures, omissions, and genuine mysteries that old books and documents, records and artifacts, represent. A lot is left to the imagination. Much of what survives from the past asks more questions than we can answer. This is true for queer and trans archival traces, as it is for other aspects of humanity that are poorly accounted for in public records, or actively discriminated against through surveillance and omission in equal parts.

If you use the Android or Desktop version of Firefox, there are several archival add-ons that you might find useful.

Note that not all of the following add-ons have official Android support, despite likely functioning without issue. To solve this issue for any given add-on for Firefox on Android, a good solution I've found is to switch to Iceraven, a fork that re-enables xpi add-on support.

Web Archives

Useful for viewing the archived version of a page from several archival sources, including the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Wayback Machine

The official Wayback Machine add-on, providing several Wayback Machine utilities for the current browser page, along with context menu integration.

Users specifically interested in page archival may want to use the archive-webextension add-on in addition to or instead of it, as it provides additional archival options, such as keyboard shortcut support. A similar extension for archiving pages to archive.today instead is Archive Page.

Internet Archive Downloader

Haven't tried this extension myself, but it seems useful for retaining access to rented books beyond the limited time period the Internet Archive provides.

It seems to output books in PDF format, with epub conversions not being effective according to a user review. That's likely due to many of the reference materials on the Internet Archive simply being scans of variable quality, and therefore—even with the automatic OCR the Internet Archive does to enable book searches—text accuracy for epub conversions likely varies from book to book.

In late February, members of the DWeb Core Team and the DWeb community were in Taipei to attend the 13th edition of RightsCon, the largest global summit on human rights in the digital age. Namely, we were there to connect with the digital rights community. We wanted to participate in an event where thousands of people travel from around the world to discuss the current and future state of the internet, and to meet others who were involved in building decentralized, distributed, and peer-to-peer network technologies.

We are experiencing a power outage. Engineers are working on it now.

We are experiencing a power outage. Engineers are working on it now.

From their mastodon post: https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/114231193786158441

The internet is a living, breathing space—constantly growing, changing, and, unfortunately, disappearing. Important articles get taken down. Research papers become inaccessible. Historical records vanish. When content disappears, we lose pieces of our shared knowledge.

That’s where the Wayback Machine comes in. With the Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now tool, you have the power to help preserve the web in real time.

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Yesterday, the Internet Archive submitted its response to the record labels’ recent motion, which seeks to add an additional 493 sound recordings to their lawsuit against the Internet Archive for preserving 78rpm sound recordings.

The Internet Archive’s position is clear: the labels have been engaged in a long-running game of “hide-the-ball” and their motion to file a second amended complaint should be denied.