As A Final Fuck You To Free Speech On Tumblr, Verizon Blocked Archivists

from the seriously-guys? dept

By now, of course, you're aware that the Verizon-owned Tumblr (which was bought by Yahoo, which was bought by Verizon and merged into "Oath" with AOL and other no longer relevant properties) has suddenly decided that nothing sexy is allowed on its servers. This took many by surprise because apparently a huge percentage of Tumblr was used by people to post somewhat racy content. Knowing that a bunch of content was about to disappear, the famed Archive Team sprung into action -- as they've done many times in the past. They set out to archive as much of the content on Tumblr that was set to be disappeared down the memory hole as possible... and it turns out that Verizon decided as a final "fuck you" to cut them off. Jason Scott, the mastermind behind the Archive Team announced over the weekend that Verizon appeared to be blocking their IPs:

On Sunday, Scott announced that the Archive Team has figured out a way to get past the blocks:

Still, this is a pretty fucked up thing for Verizon to do. It's one thing to decide to completely change the kind of content you host. That's their call. But, at the very least, allow the people who focus on archiving the internet for historical purposes the chance to actually do what they do best. Blocking the Archive Team is a truly obnoxious move, cementing Verizon's reputation as really not caring one bit about the damage the company does.

Filed Under: archive team, archives, blocking, tumblr
Companies: tumblr, verizon

IsoHunt Shuts Down Early To Stop Archive Team From Recording Important Historical Information

from the that's-unfortunate dept

With last week's announcement that IsoHunt was shutting down, the famed "Archive Team" apparently sprung into action to try to preserve the information on the site. As you hopefully know, the Archive Team works hard to preserve important information that has historical relevance and importance. For example, it preserved much of GeoCities after that site was shut down. If you don't understand, preserving historical information is extremely important in an age where such information can disappear entirely.

Unfortunately, perhaps because of legal fears, IsoHunt's Gary Fung apparently decided that this archive effort may be legally problematic and shut down the site days early, stating:

I'm told there was this Internet archival team that wants to make historical copy of our .torrent files, I'm honoured that people thinks our site is worthy of historical preservation, but the truth is about 95% of those .torrent files can be found off Google regardless and mostly have been indexed from other BitTorrent sites in the first place.

But, of course, as the Archive Team points out, it was never about saving those .torrent files, but rather all the metadata around them:

I think Gary might have misunderstood the purpose of the archiving project; he basically states that “the .torrent files can be found elsewhere too” – but this completely misses the point, being the archiving of the metadata *around* those torrents, such as user comments. These cannot be replicated from other sources…

The team apparently to get about 242 gigs of data, but there was a lot more that they missed. That's too bad.

Filed Under: archive team, archives, gary fung, history
Companies: isohunt

Historic Archive Of Websites From The January 18th SOPA Blackout

from the the-archive-team-strikes-again dept

We've discussed in the past the importance of preserving our digital history, including the excellent work the famed Archive Team has done rescuing and archiving various sites as they're being shut down. Of course, sites that are shutting down are not all that's worth preserving. There are also timely events that have value as well. For example, the amazing and powerful SOPA blackouts and online protests from January 18th. That was an historic moment, but it was just one day. Plenty of sites, including ours, showed some of the more interesting sites from the blackout, but there were so may that participated. Could you save them all?

It appears that the Archive Team did exactly that, archiving every site they could find that took part in the protests. The team has now released the entire archive as a 13.6 GB zipped download (don't click that unless you want to start downloading the whole thing). If you'd just like to see a listing of what's included in the file, you can see that too (though, that's also a pretty long list, so beware).

Kudos, once again, to the Archive Team for preserving important digital moments in history and making them widely available.

Filed Under: archive team, blackout, sopa