In 2022, I introduced the project DISCMASTER, which is a unique project to make the internals of tens of thousands of 1990s-2000s CD-ROMs findable in a semantic search.
Today, I'm announcing the team has now made DISCMASTER 2, a ground-up rewrite with so much improvement.
As part of the 20th anniversary of the BBS Documentary's release, I've ripped the 3 DVDs that were included in the project and have them hosted at Internet Archive. These ISO files can be played in the VLC player like DVDs, and include all bonus features, subtitles, director's commentary, etc.
This message brought to you by people on social media and discord writing "I don't know why, but they're throttling me and I didn't do anything wrong".
Correct, you did nothing wrong, but incorrect, you are not being throttled.
I wanted to correct something, because I know the archive's actions/function can encourage tea-leaf reading, but:
There is no throttling on the upload speed/bandwidth. There's no actual "well, only give this person X amount of speed, ha ha, tally ho" in effect.
What IS in effect, post-hack, are re-factoring of the security and networking aspects of the Archive's internals, with a focus on security before speed, and getting speed back to full is taking some time.
"You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books; you should fear someone who has only one book; and he considers it sacred, but he has never read it."
@lxo technically, all websites allow the execution of arbitrary code and a browser. Anyway, there is a command line interface to the archive if you want to use it. It's how I do 99% of my work.
MIT has a set of books labelled "Open Access" but it's a little clunky to find them on the MIT Press site, and so I've gone ahead and mirrored 400+ of them here:
The Internet Archive donation page, with its subscription and various payment options, is back and functioning. If you wanted to help but avoid Paypal, this is the time.
If the archive is down at this point, it is basically that we are fixing more and more things and strengthening for a better future. So, don't worry too much, we have a lot of eyes on this and a lot of people are helping us from a lot of different places.