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The Internet

Where Is The Wiretap Archive? 95

Posted by Cliff from the vanished-into-thin-air? dept.
cfusion asks: "Veterans of the Internet should remember the Wiretap Electronic Text Archive, at one point hosted by wiretap.spies.com and later by wiretap.area.com. It was a gopher/Web site that covered EVERYTHING under the sun, a digital library of sorts, with incredibly rich content. (A quick search of Yahoo for "Wiretap" will reveal the breadth and depth of their archives - everything from U.S. historical documents to texts about UFOs) Anyway, I recently went back to ">wiretap.area.com and found a message saying "No, we don't know where it went." It's gone. My question is really threefold: Where did it go and why? Are there any other Internet-based libraries that host as large a wealth of textual content? Couldn't someone write to the former curator of the site and offer to host it on their own site? Then turn it into a collaborative effort that maintains the sharpest digital library online. Perhaps my question is not so much about Wiretap, but about digital libraries in general. Although I do want to know where Wiretap went, and why someone else can't host it." This is a cool concept. Hopefully it, or something like it, will turn up again on the Net. Update: 04/25 8:45 by J : "It's back up for good," says its maintainer. Hooray! http://wiretap.area.com/
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Where Is The Wiretap Archive? More

Where Is The Wiretap Archive?

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  • www.everything2.com is a similar site - it's got tons of great stuff. Please read the FAW before making any nodes - E2 has an experience system, and it would suck for you if your first efforts at noding were, say, voted into the ground by vengeful elder noders :)

  • Gutenberg Project (Score:3)

    by VSc ( 30374 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @05:12AM (#1111752) Homepage
    Gutenberg Project comes to mind. As far as I understand it, it's the largest electronic text archive (vanilla ASCII) consisting of text in public domain (no copyright or copyright expired), active since 1971.
  • if someone gets this off the ground, i'll put up some resources and whatever else I can.

    -neil

  • FreeNet (Score:1)

    by jrs ( 27486 )
    Isn't that what FreeNet is going to be all about?

  • Goods at: (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    www.cryptome.org

    Good stuff.

  • A good alternative (Score:3)

    by TunaPhish ( 81577 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @05:17AM (#1111756) Homepage
    Unfortunately, I never really saw the wiretap archive (I haven't been around THAT long!), but there does exist a large archive of old text files from the 70's, 80's, AND 90's.

    www.textfiles.com [textfiles.com] is a great archive when you are looking for anything text related these days. They all those old BBS text files, ranging from all that H/P/V/A/C stuff to ASCII porn. Check it out!

  • Seriously though, perhaps the maintainer lost interest, and gradually forgot about it.

    It's happened already to many sites on the internet...
  • Currently, there is an effort to set up something along these lines at aftermath.net [aftermath.net]. Last I checked, the site was down, but I'm told that they're expecting to be up and running by the end of July. It might be worth paying attention to.

  • Me too! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @05:19AM (#1111759)
    I noticed wiretapped gone about two months ago, and I wrote the DNS contacts.. I eventually ended up with that curators email address and I wrote in offering to host it.

    I never got a reply.

    Does anyone have a copy of wiretapped lieing around?

    greg@linuxpower.cx
  • Yes, I'll help host it as well. I -do- have a geocities.com account, you know.

    ha.

    sorry.

    Sixpack
  • There is www.textfiles.com [textfiles.com] which has some of the more purely digital text from BBSing days. Probably not nearly as comprehensive as wiretap, though.
  • Check out http://www.textfiles.com/ -- it's got lots of stuff I remember from the BBSing days of yore (and lots more I'd never seen before).
  • Maybe we could stick it on freenet? My only concern is that little used documents could get pushed off the system...
  • er, read the FAQ. That's what I meant. Oh and beware - it's addictive as hell.
  • Here's a link to Project Gutenberg [promo.net]. It's an excellent site. They've got lots of Shakespeare, for instance (his complete works, I would guess!). Also check out their note on what books you will find in Project Gutenberg [promo.net].

  • I'll tell ya where it went! (Score:3)

    by The Dodger ( 10689 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @05:26AM (#1111766) Homepage

    I stole it. It now resides under my bed, in a ZX-81, hooked up to an automatic audio tape changer. A big tape changer... ;-)

    D.

  • Re:A similar site (Score:5)

    by Saige ( 53303 ) <evil.angela@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @05:26AM (#1111767) Journal
    www.everything2.com is a similar site - it's got tons of great stuff. Please read the FAW before making any nodes - E2 has an experience system, and it would suck for you if your first efforts at noding were, say, voted into the ground by vengeful elder noders :)

    I think E2 is probably the best bet we've got for something like this in the future. The ability for all the users to add content makes it easier and faster to get information in there, since you don't have to wait for some group to get around to it. The system of nodes and writeups allows commentary to be put up with the text, and makes it much easier to find.

    Besides, it's run right alongside Slashdot - what do you think those [?] symbols are in the stories? They're links to the term on everything2, because Slashdot is using Everything as a dictionary [everything2.new].

    There are already a number of public domain texts that are there, and more are being added constantly. I think this should be the best location for any information...
    ---
  • I would think that there a lot of these sites, for specialized niche audiences...

    A friend, for instance, runs infidels.org [infidels.org], a secular website with about 6000 documents in its library.

  • Anthology (Score:5)

    by turg ( 19864 ) <turg@winston.CHEETAHorg minus cat> on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @05:27AM (#1111769) Journal
    Were there no mirror sites?

    Anyway, I'm working on a site (anthology.org [anthology.org] -- not much to it yet) that will be a directory of online texts. Though, more and more it seems that some sort of active involvement is necessary to support this type of thing -- rather than just cataloging. Shouldn't be horribly expensive as far as major philanthropic activities go $2000 for a RAQ server and $300-500 a month to host it.

    BTW, let me know if there are archives missing from my anthology.org list.

    ========

  • h2g2 (Score:3)

    by Keyan ( 115515 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @05:29AM (#1111770) Homepage
    I'm not familiar with the wiretap archive that started this topic. However, on a similar theme, Douglas Adams has started a site to create an "Earth Edition" of his Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy http://www.h2g2.com/ [h2g2.com]. I found the information there to be fairly informative and usually amusing :)

  • Wiretap Mirror (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have a complete copy of the wiretap archive dated from shortly after Columbine, when I feared a crackdown on net sites that disseminated real information. I will provide it to people who are interested. Mail me at wiretapmirror@hotmail.com [mailto] and I will reply with a URL you can obtain the back-up from.
  • I remember wiretap was one of the first things I found on the net. Back when a "internet service provider" was nothing more than a place that gave out unix shells (on 14.4's). In fact, I think I found the comedy section the first night I was on the net. I used lynx to read it... the funny thing is, about 90% of the forwards people send around to each now, were on there. My favorite was the "50 things to do on a final you're going to fail."

    ---
  • E2 has a teeny tiny font that's hard-wired into the system and cannot be changed. It is useless for me.

    That was just the default theme, and it appears to have been fixed - I had the same problem for a long time, but now I can use that theme.

    If you still have the problem, all you have to do is wade through it long enough to get yourself registered as a user and change the theme to something more readable.
    ---
  • The downfall with E2, is that there's a lot of bullshit and crap on it. People tend to write teeny write-ups in vain attempts to be funny instead of actually writing any information worth having. Something along the lines of E2 but with more information-dedicated writers would be perfect. Add in a repository of interesting text/media and perhaps some kind of moderators/moderator system and it would rock.

    Rob w/ grunts: will we have E3 before saturday? =)
  • However, on a similar theme, Douglas Adams has started a site to create an "Earth Edition" of his Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy http://www.h2g2.com/.

    I've actually tried it, but I found www.everything2.com to be much more interesting, user-friendly, and just all-around better. Heck, they've started adding Project Gutenberg stuff to it - last I checked, there was a lot of freely-available texts that had been entered, from the KJV Bible, to like a third to half of Shakespeare's works, to a lot of Edgar Allen Poe, and even Alice in Wonderland (I forget the actual exact title) - and tons of little stuff besides.
    ---

  • I maintain a website called Omphalos [omphalos.net] which contains some 18Mb or so of text files relating to modern Wicca, Paganism and the occult. The files are divided into 26 categories and are accessible from the menu on the bottom left of the main page. There are also humour files, SCA stuff, etc.

    This is all stuff from the old BBS days preserved from when I closed down my Fidonet/PODS BBS and moved to the internet. The materials used to be maintained in a website called Atho's Pagan Files Collection but I have since consolidated the two websites.

  • Yeah, everything is neat, but the main problem with it is that there is no editing. Do a search for Mr T Ate My Balls [everything2.com] and then tell me what you think of Everything as a legitimate cataloging/archival site.

    • The ability for all the users to add content makes it easier and faster to get information in there

    Yes, this is a definite plus, under certain circumstances. You can avoid the tyranny of The Editor as he prunes away the dross [everything2.com].

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
  • Just as there is a warez subculture, there is a text subculture; The goal is to collect as much information as possible. I have found numerous ftp and Hotline sites devoted exclusively to texts -- you just have to look around for them. Once you find a few, they'll point you to others, and next thing you know you'll have information overload.

    Search for texts, textz, text archive, etc.

  • That would be something worth doing, what we need is more good old plain ASCII files instead of smarmy commercial flash videos

  • books.mirror.org has many (most/all?) (Score:5)

    by Cy Guy ( 56083 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @06:03AM (#1111780) Homepage Journal
    The GREAT BOOKS INDEX [mirror.org] at books.mirror.org [mirror.org] mirrors many of the texts that were on Wiretap. I think it was their intention to at least mirror all of the literature on the site (as well as provide links to the original archive and the .txt and HTML versions on the net such as at Project Gutenberg ftp sites [uiuc.edu]

    There also was a Wiretap mirror at wiretap.spies.com [spies.com], but I can't tell if it is still there since it seems to be SlashDotted.

  • Greeting Fellow PODSperson!

    Nice to see a few of us still around! We have revived some of the PODSnet Echos as Onelist mailing lists...just go to the site and search for PODSnet...

    ttyl
    Farrell McGovern
    Solsbury Hill BBS
  • I pulled down everything on wiretap's gopher a LONG time ago. I guess it's time to dig out the floppies.
  • Is that bad? (not that I've made any money yet, much less "each time someone clicks the link"). I think the link is certainly of interest to slashdotters (backed up by the fact that 170 of them have used the link in my sig to sign up), and using a link in a sig to promote a site which may earn money for the poster is not an unusual practice. I'd probably have a link to them even if they didn't have an affiliate program -- and why give a for-profit company promotion for free when they're willing to pay for it? Anyway, the posibility of earning any money with them is still months away, at least. And the payout amount still remains to be determined -- if I were really looking to make a lot of money from an affiliate link, I think I could find better terms than that.

    ========
  • I definitely remember wiretap, but I have never thought of it for sometime. What is very disturbing is to how easy it is for digital libraries to disappear like wiretap. What is even more worrying is that we are accumlating so much info that things can easily go bye bye without people noticing, and even when they notice... I heard someone say everything is a solution to this, I disagree. and I don't think freenet is a solution to this either. What bugs me now tho, is what the solution is?

  • Although the Wiretap archives mirrored a lot of the Project Gutenberg texts, it was not the same thing - Wiretap had much much more information, and on many more topics. As the original post said, they had everything from Bush jokes to bomb making information to e-zines. I remember FTPing to the archive in the early 90s, and later I had to gopher to the site. But now, I don't know.
  • I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned http://www.literature.org [literature.org]. They have quite a few of the 'classics' on line. It seems to bea slightly different selection of authors than other sites out there.
  • ...about a month or more ago. I'm still waiting to hear something. Have gotten no response (unless you count the /. article; wish I'd thought of that).

    Screw the dot-coms and the whole psuedo-information movement. Wiretap is an internet classic. It should have community support. The more of these types of sites that disapear, the poorer the internet becomes. If this keeps up, it'll just be interactive T.V. all advertising, all the time; no content.

  • Hi Farrell,

    I used to run The Cauldron BBS just north of you in Pembroke Ontario. Then it moved to Saltspring Island, BC (my hometown). I remember you from the old days...

  • Archiving Universal Search Engines (Score:5)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @06:43AM (#1111789) Homepage Journal
    "He who controls the past controls the future." -- George Orwell

    The main problem with history editing is disappearing history. This has been true from www.deja.com's bit-decaying Usenet archive all the way back to the Library at Alexandria.

    The only real way to address the disappearing history problem is a shift away from:

    1. Centralized archives with specialized search engines AND
    2. A variety of universal web search engines that don't archive
    to a variety of universal web search engines that archive.

    Storage capacity just isn't expensive enough to justify anything but redundantly archived versions of everything ever published on the Web and Usenet. The indexes of such versioning archives are quite similar to the data structures needed for compression anyway, so this is a natural marriage.

    I know the Xanadu cover story on Wired a few years ago ended by saying "somethings are best forgotten" but then that article was written by the kind of guys it is generally best to disobey at every opportunity.

  • As one of those vengeful elder noders, I second the suggestion to read the FAQ. Muwahahahaha!

    -j
  • It's refreshing to be put in touch with this link and reminded that freedom of information still comes as a priority amongst some people. After reading about the LOC's little issue, this gives me hope.
  • Ideal solution. And if you run your own freenet node, you can set up the wiretap archives to always remain resident on your local node (I can't imagine them being that large in today's stoarge-capacity. it's just text. Worse comes to worse you could zip it down)

    This is a significant part of the kind of stuff is what FreeNet is meant to provide access to. And of course, the popular files will propagate around the freenet quickly.
  • Gutenberg is a great resource for books, but everyone should check out attrition.org [attrition.org]

    Attrition hosts the defaced web page archive seen on HNN [hackernews.com], in addition to having zillions of text files. They also have a huge movie archive [attrition.org] which includes every funny/disturbing movie that ever landed in your inbox.

    Check it out, its a great resource.

    peas,
    -Nick

  • wiretap (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What's the problem?

    ftp://wiretap.area.com
  • In terms of large & venerable Web-based collections of just about anything, Metalab [unc.edu] (formerly Sunsite) is still going strong.

  • Re:wiretap (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I went to the website, and everything seems to be up and running.
  • My two cents on The Solution: make your own backup copy.

    I've got about a gig's worth of archived sites on my hard drive. My interest is the weird stuff: UFOs ate my dog, I am schizophrenic, Jesus moved to Asia, whatever. If someone puts out a weird pamphlet, the odds are relatively good that someone somewhere will archive it. But with a website -- well, one bad Visa day and it's gone, right? So what I figure is that someday, my hard drive will be worth something (for interest' sake, not $) to researchers -- whether university types or just freaks like me.

    Now sure, this was all done when I had a cable modem and I could suck down a site in ten minutes. But since the subject here is text, you won't need a whole lotta bandwidth for image maps, MIDI files and the like -- just a half hour of your time. Take matters into your own hands! Make your own mirror! Just look at all the posts marked "informative": half or more are from people who kept their own copies.

    No offense to the poster who said a centralized library was the solution, but nuts to that: multiple, redundant backups -- if for no other reason than to avoid copyright issues. (I still haven't figured out how to avoid that question in my plan to eventually donate my hard drive to a university for archival.)

  • We are all becoming dependant upon data spread out all over the world, data over which we have no control and which could disappear at any moment. What do we do when sites die? This has to be a huge problem.

    I once had a favorite site that I used for all kinds of references. One day the maintainer died. Since he stopped paying his bills, his ISP closed his account and erased his files. I've never again seen a copy of these files :( Since then I suck down entire web sites that are valuable to me and archive them to CD, if they fit. This seems like overkill, but what else is there to do?

    This simple method doesn't work for sites like Slashdot that have their data in a database, rather than in separate web pages that can be sucked down by a web bot. If Slashdot suddenly went away, how could we resurrect it? I wonder if we could.

  • I'd say about 90% of the archive is missing from the FTP site, which is obviously problematic...

    -s
  • Why the secrecy? Why not just post the URL? Even if you are worried about the /. effect, that's no excuse to harvest e-mail addresses. The fact that you are posting anonymously dosn't instill any confidance that this is legitimate and not a spam scam.

    Of course, I might just be paranoid


    "The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

  • Hey-

    It's not there anymore because there's a new version 2.0 of wiretape. It's called the World Wide Web. :)

    Seriously, isn't this pretty much what the web is about, with a little more organized index? And a lot smaller.

    Just some thoughts.

    Jason
  • It's a very good read, and gives me all sorts of nostalgic warm fuzzies, but most of the text files are grossly inaccurate or outdated. It doesn't come close to wiretap -- that's not its focus. Its focus is as a shrine, of sorts, to the BBS days.
    -Patrick

  • Am I on crack... (Score:5)

    by pod ( 1103 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @07:39AM (#1111803) Homepage
    or is this not it: gopher://wiretap.area.com/ [area.com]?
  • gopher://wiretap.area.com/ [area.com] It's just not running a web server is all. Gopher still works just fine, although since I've never been there till now, I wouldn't know if that's a trimmed down archive or not.
  • I just visited wiretap.area.com [area.com] (216.218.248.180) and it appears to be online and intact. Perhaps it was only offline temporarily?

    If it goes offline again, perhaps this old address could reach someone:
    Internet Wiretap

    P.O. Box 4436
    Mountain View, CA 94040-0436
    I found that address in the comments at http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Libr ary/Classic/ [area.com], dated June 24, 1994 -- the P.O. box may or may not still be valid...
  • I just went to the site linked to in the initial article, ie, http://wiretap.area.com/
    and everything seems to be up and running (perhaps some of the content is missing, I didn't have time to look around too much). I know this could be considered redundant; there was a reply to another message that mentioned something similar and several people have mentioned that it's still working through gopher, but I figured it might be useful to point out that the web server seems to be fine in the main thread. Moderate as you will.

    - Wombat
    or, old school BBS style, WôMBÄT
  • Nice to hear from you! I'll send you some email with my better email address! BTW, looked at your site, nice!

    ttyl
    Farrell

  • TOTSE (Score:1)

    by ^_^x ( 178540 )
    I just tried going to the spies site and it was there. (to my surprise, since it's been down for a while now.)

    Anyhow, one of the "80's BBSes that wouldn't die" is Temple of the Screaming Electron at http://www.totse.com/ They have a fair amount of textfiles.

  • Thanks, I've been looking for this..
    Used to be "text.com", then it disapeared.

    I hope they have ascii cows,
    I love ascii cows for some reason... And "Deep thoughts by jack handy.."

    Then green on black brings me back to VT-100 memories....

  • I can't BELIEVE the moderators +1'd this to 5! No wonder Slashdot's content is going downhill. Are the moderators selected these days purely by how frequently they post? Must be, because I haven't posted too much lately and I can't recall the last time I was selected.. (not that that's important to me... what's important is the MECHANISM for selecting moderators).

    This is as stupid as those "please forward this to everyone you know" virux hoaxes. These moderators need a bitch slap.

  • I would suggest that if you were seriously thinking about a Digital Library project, you should familiarize yourself with the "state of the art" and what others are doing in real-world projects in this area.

    I find that a lot of the work out there is very research oriented, and conducted by library science folks really, really concerned with "getting it right". It's a little *too* anal for my purposes, but you have to admit, all the 'i's are dotted and the 't's crossed.

    I just wrapped up design on an object-oriented framework for a Digital Library project (modeled on my earlier work for Early English Books Online http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo [umi.com]), and I found the work being done at Cornell very valuable as an inspiration. The Making of America II project is also an excellent overview of a well-thought-out Digital Library project.

    So, for those interested in a little theory and practice, check these links out:

    Digital Library Links and Resources:
    http://www.ifla.org/II/diglib.htm [ifla.org]

    Cornell Digital Library Research Group
    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/ [cornell.edu]

    Making of America II
    http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/MOA2/ [berkeley.edu]

    FEDORA (an architecture for information storage and retrieval, *very* nice).

    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/FEDORA. html [cornell.edu]
  • On a related note, the NASA COSMIC [uga.edu] software library has been missing for well over a year. Anyone know of an archive or what happened to that? The NTTC hasn't been successful yet with whatever they have.

    (Readers of "Lucifer's Hammer" may remember that a copy of COSMIC was one of the treasures which was mentioned)

  • I'm not familiar with Wiretap, but I have read Project Gutenberg texts in the past, and I believe that many, if not all, of the Wiretap texts have been 'subsumed' by Project Gutenberg. I've certainly noticed the phrase "Originally a Wiretap Etext Edition" in Gutenberg texts I've downloaded in the past.

    Take a look at this classic title [unc.edu] to see what I mean (it's in the paragraph beginning "October, 1993 [Etext #85]").

  • The system has been moved to Area Systems but remains affiliated with Spies. Referencing URL's should point to the wiretap.area.com address, though we will attempt to keep the old address active.

    The above is a paragraph from the home page. My guess is that ""No, we don't know where it went." is their 404 Error... due to a temporary outage or something like that.

    Check it yourself.
    y2k info - http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/y2k.html

  • Re:wiretap (Score:3)

    by mcrandello ( 90837 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @08:47AM (#1111817) Homepage
    don't forget
    Gopher! [area.com]

    My proxy at work has that service blocked but from the looks of it it ought to work...
  • Well, This is an even better sign:
    pasteur:~ > nslookup wiretap.spies.com
    Server: *************
    Address: 192.26.80.2

    *** can't find wiretap.spies.com: Non-existent host/domain

  • Per the faulty bug report:

    Works for me. The link was fine, and entering the site, it looked like everything was there.

    Is there a problem?

  • h2g2 is more than an online digital library, it is a community editable online digital library. Anyone can add entries.

    In theory, it is the most complete library imagineable. In practice, well, not everyone contributes so its reach is finite.

    However, they plan to develop handheld, wireless devices to access the h2g2... with Don't Panic written soothingly on the cover. Maybe they'll make a springboard device.

    So instead of complaining that there are no good digital libraries, just contribute everything you know to h2g2 and it will be more complete than any other.
  • Not to crush your dreams of having some valuable resource to academics in the future, but with all the information out there, about the only thing your little archive will be is a snap shot of (at least one aspect of) your personality, and what you considered important enough to take up HD space.

    Oh, absolutely. I have no illusions about having the One True Archive that allows mankind to rebuild civilization after nuclear war. Rather, I'm taking inspiration from a book called Extremism in America: A Reader (Lynn Sargent, ed). It's based on one university's archive (can't rem. which), which was in turn started when one grad student turned over to the library a cardboard box full of stuff he'd collected on his own time: mostly fringe far-right stuff that hadn't been archived elsewhere. Now it's one of the premier collections of its kind. That's the sort of thing I'm interested in anyway, and I suspect there's few enough people archiving this stuff that it would be (more or less) valuable to either academics or amateurs like me.

    And as for IP...yeah, that's the kicker. The only thing I've thought of so far is putting it in a box with instructions to open a century after my death, say -- long enough that any IP issues should be moot (I'm not archiving The New York Times, after all). But then, how do I make sure it can be read? Bit rot, obscelence -- hell, I'll have trouble making sure its readable in ten years unless I constantly back it up onto newer media.

    Perhaps part of the solution is to find/start a company that will do exactly that: preserve stuff by constantly copying it onto new media. But how in hell could you make a profit -- and thus ensure that the company would be around in a century? And who besides me would need or want that service?

    Sigh. More than a little off-topic here anyway...

  • You just have to check it out via Gopher. [area.com] You do remember Gopher, don't you? You can also access it through FTP [area.com].
  • I miss gopher. ;(

    remember when schools had gopher sites, and no web sites?

    remember ftp-by-mail?



    Keyboard not found.
  • e2 seems to have been slashdotted. Anybody see the humor in this? Mirror anyone?

  • Try actually looking for the index.html (Score:3)

    by Zulfiya ( 44302 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2000 @10:51AM (#1111825) Homepage

    The first time I tried, I got the 404, then I messed around a bit. It seems to be some kind of web foible. FTP works, Gopher Works, and ...

    I'm glad it's not gone.

  • Project Gutenberg will probably get close to nothing written in 1923 or after. Every time the year comes close to when copyrights will start expiring again, Disney pays the legislators lots of $$$ to renew all works still under copyright for another twenty years. First it was 56 years, then it was 75 or life + 50, now (as of the Sonny Bonehe^H^H^Ho Act of 1999) it's 95 or life + 70. Isn't retroactive copyright extension a violation of the "limited times" clause in the part of the Constitution that authorizes Congress to establish copyright?
  • scene.textfiles.com [textfiles.com] contains links to many active and inactive textfile groups. This site also regularly posts updates when groups release. So if you run a t-file group, submit your news there!

  • Thanks for the compliment on the site. As you can see it also offers a slashdot-like message interface (entirely original PHP3 and [php.net]mysql [mysql.net] code BTW), a directory of links to over 375 Wiccan and Pagan websites, and - most recently - a true search engine that indexes the content of the websites listed in the directory (currently we have indexed over 21000 pages of material).

    Omphalos [omphalos.net] was probably the first Pagan directory when it was originally created back in 1997 or so, and as far as I can tell its now the first true search engine (most sites index only their own sites contents).

    Now if I can just get the word out to folks to let them know the site exists....

  • if you are interested in etext/ebooks for reading or archiving can be found here [refdesk.com]. The list there is almost as comprehensive as my bookmarks, and much better organized!
  • If you check http://wiretap.area.com/ you will notice it is still up (to an extent, to an extent) also, last time I checked, phearios.org was getting pretty nice. Course they have been down for a little while, but should be up soon.
  • wiretap was down for the last few months because tom is lazy. (tom knows this.)

    jerkcity [jerkcity.com]
    brutal [brutal.com]

  • As we know, Google is storing local copies of most of the pages its spider comes across. I know I'll be flamed to oblivion for saying this, but I think this approach is *very* problematic from a copyright point of view (no, I don't think fair use applies to copying and archiving whole sites).

    The Internet content economy as it exists today revolves completely around traffic and advertising/sponsorship revenue generated from that traffic. Search engines that store pages locally are already affecting the number of visitors on a site, eating away the sustainability of free, commercial content on the Internet.
  • By George, I think he's got it...
  • www.wiretapped.net - Well, it isnt wiretap but its pretty damn good.
  • Stupidity.org has a bunch of things like that, including (unless there are two of them) the very joke you mentioned.
  • ok..you host it. download from here :
    http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/ clicky here [area.com]
  • really. dammit. I decided to have another look at everything because of what you wrote and now it's hours later and I still haven't slept. And I have to get up in a hour or two. This totally sucks.

    But I've sent the cookie to my workplace so I can continue there...

  • It is possible to read Gopher-sites with Netscape
    and Lynx, too.
  • Um. You're accusing them of illegal activity? A pyramid scheme is an investment scam that uses the investment of later investors to pay earlier ones. Process Tree is more like MLM, which is legal -- but it's not quite MLM because you're signing up supliers, not customers or sales reps (that is, none of the people in this MLM-type structure are putting any money in). If the whole thing falls apart tomorrow, that's too bad but nobody got hurt. Nothing is required of you other than what other distributed computing projects require -- if you're willing to participate in such a project for for free, then you've got nothing to lose. That was my reasoning, anyway.

    ========
  • Not all sites on the Internet are commerical, not all sites are up all of the time, and most of the oens that do are faster than google itself! The benefits of caching far outweigh the disadvantages --- I can't count the number of times I found what I was looking for in Google's cache because the original site had been destroyed.
  • The general mission statement of Everything is to contain... Everything. There's always a struggle going on in what to allow on the site, with some leaning towards extreme accuracy and pure facts, others using it as a nonlinear autobiography, or a joke database, or as a soapbox with a near-captive audience, or X, or Y...

    Everything embraces everybody.

    Or close to it. Some nodes will be killed with extreme prejudice. The general rule? If a node contains absolutely no information or stylistic flair, the Everything editors will strike it down. But, quite frankly, it's edited with a very light touch. We'll allow most anything on. Because it's part of Everything, you dig? (Or, at least, most of us edit with a light touch. Dem Bones, he gets his panties in a wad, and suddenly he's Charles Bronson fron Death Wish. 'Stick 'em all in a concentration camp...')

    The end result? Jump randomly to the story about H.L. Mencken's bathtub hoax to a node of feminist/light-bulb jokes to a node about how a girl lost her imaginary cat when she was 6, with a detour where a guy is going after the 'ultra-liberal media'. It's Everything. At least, it will be, if you join and start adding all your worldly knowledge.

    Sorry. I'll shut up now. Other Everythingers know I'm longwinded by nature.

    discofever, Everything2 Editor

  • Re:What about copyright? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But WHERE HAS GOOGLE'S CACHE GONE? Am I smoking crack, or has it totally disappeared sometime in the last week?
  • The Greenstone Digital Library software
    distributed by the New Zealand Digital
    Library project may suit your needs.

    see http://www.nzdl.org
    though it may be down - power cut.

    In short, it works. You feed it input text and
    a configuration file; it builds you collections
    that you can serve on-line or on CDROM. If you
    have specialised docment formats, you can write
    plug-ins (in perl) to handle them. You get all
    sortsof extra functionality for free.

    Disclaimer: I work there.
  • ive lost all sense.......is there anything hotter than britney???? i dont think it involved beowulf or Strong Armmmm.......
  • Ok, you've insulted me. And that's Not Nice. I guess I'll defend myself.

    It is not the case that everyone knows about E2. Maybe everyone who was on /. back when E1 was advertized knows about E1 - but I only learned (or re-learned) about E2 a month ago. And I love it.

    Also, THE SLASHDOT OWNERS DO NOT GIVE OUT KARMA. It's slashdot users. Someone must have thought my post was insightful.

    Maybe it was someone who had been to E2 in the last little while - someone who knows about the vast variety of public domain stories and poems that are on E2. See something missing? Node it.

    Please do not insult me again. Also, anyone who calls for moderation of a post, while posting as AC, is an asshole - if you don't like a post, make a reply to it - the moderation categories are there for a reason.

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