Notices by Jason Scott (textfiles@mastodon.archive.org)

It was only a matter of time - a contracted, approved grant to the Internet Archive was cut with no warning.

https://sfstandard.com/2025/04/17/doge-neh-funding-cuts-sf/

What have we here!

https://www.internetarchive.eu/

It's my 14th year work anniversary at Internet Archive!

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.

http://discmaster.textfiles.com

https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/08/aaron-swartz-marble-statue-unveiled-internet-archive/

An Internet Archive user named
issung has begun uploading lots of photos of LAN parties from the 1990s and 2000s. Grainy, wired hanging-out goodness!

https://archive.org/details/@issung

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.

https://archive.org/details/BBS_Documentary_DVD_Set

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.

So there you go.

People have been transferring tape-based software of the 1970s and 1980s into .WAV files. Keep doing this!

https://archive.org/details/cassettesoftware

Emulation at the Archive has returned.

Emulation at the Archive is broken until a back-end upgrade is fixed. Sorry about that, it'll be back soon. I'll announce here.

"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."

– Nietzsche

@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.

@lxo working here

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:

https://archive.org/details/mit_press_open_access

@PamelaDrew @djsumdog

Down since the archive had to retool, emulation in the browser at @internetarchive is BACK.

A quarter million programs and growing can run free again.

But all anyone cares about is our #1 title:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990

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.

https://archive.org/donate

"Skip out on work and vote" - Brewster at the all-hands Internet Archive meeting today