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   Ami Angelwings (ami_angelwings@urusai.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Oct-2024 14:14:09 JST Ami Angelwings

   reminded today of the importance of the internet archive when I wanted to show a friend the Pottermore article arguing that freeing slaves is bad but I couldn't access the Wayback Machine because the IA is down... luckily somebody backed it up on archive.ph (https://archive.ph/drNai) but there's a lot of stuff that isn't, & if the IA ever goes down for good, it'll be hard to prove things existed that were taken down, or be able to read them for yourself/show others so they can see for themselves...

   it's not simply that we won't be able to read deleted things, but we won't be able to verify them or to give other people verification that it said what we claim/remembered it said... and people can claim that articles DID exist saying X but were deleted and we'd have no way of verifying it :\

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     Ami Angelwings (ami_angelwings@urusai.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Oct-2024 14:14:09 JST Ami Angelwings

     in reply to

     if the IA ever dies for good, there's gonna be a temptation to blame them for making mistakes that caused it (not having better infosec, taking off lending restrictions to try to help at the beginning of a global pandemic that shut down the world), but if they go down, they were taken down by deliberate actions by people (book publishers, hackers) not by forces of nature*

     could they have played defense better? yes, could they have been better prepared about how publishers would react during the pandemic, probably, but they were still deliberately targeted and we shouldn't misplace our anger

     *(although there is a tendency to treat malicious hackers and corporations as forces of nature who have no choice but to do what they do, this is not true, these are human beings who make decisions)

     Alexandre Oliva likes this.