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The Internet

On The Preservation Of Endangered Web Resources ... 118

An unnamed correspondent asks: "Recently Mathworld, what many would consider one of the more valuable Web resources, fell victim to a copyright lawsuit. We've seen in the past that through sufficient mirroring the community can save such resources (DeCSS for example) from similar legal onslaughts. What Web resources do you consider most valuable and/or most vulnerable to legal attack and is there any effort under way to mirror and preserve these resources?"

"Personally, I'd like to see an official community set up to protect such resources. Call them the Information League perhaps. Set up a mailing list for members and whenever some (perhaps corporate) entity tries to snuff out a Web site a member sends an e-mail to the list and all other concerned members could mirror the site."

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On the Preservation of Endangered Web Resources...

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  • Kinda reminds me of the old emulator days of Asimov.net
  • Most of non binary usenet. any www.*news*.com, slashdot.org and so forth. software arcihves...

    It shoulldn't be anything that ftp.cdrom.com can't handle =)

    ---
  • I'm sure this company, and any company with a page has a backup somewhere on some HD. So it's truly not gone. Oh well...
  • If there was such a thing in place, then the powers that be would have an easy target.
  • Didn't somebody just setup a data haven? Perhaps something like that could be setup for saving these doomed resources, using funds from.. well, i don't know where exactly (i haven't thought this out that much), perhaps popular support..
  • by pezpunk ( 205653 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @09:21AM (#642023) Homepage
    the tabliature / chord archive. it's been around as long as i have, and always seems to be on the verge of shutting down.

    pezpunk
    Internet killed the video star,
  • But what about in practice? I, for one, would sign up guaranteed. But as it would tend to happen when the information "bat signal" was sent out I probably wouldnt A. Have the space B. Have the energy or C. Have the bandwidth to attempt to mirror one site, let alone many. Plus, all the gov has to do is get a warrant and make the sign up list known to them and go after each one of us. Yeah, I know Im being paranoid. And I know that there are probably some people with the time, energy, space and bandwidth to do this. But out of, say, 15000 people I bet only 2 or 3 actually do something. Just my two cents, so dont hate me.

    ----------------------------------
  • And if such an organisation were created, which I find an excellent idea, a first place for them to host their communications could be havenCo [havenco.com].
  • This sounds ideal, but wouldn't such mirroring easily bring legal trouble upon those doing it? This "league" would need to be anonymous in some way, or the offended party may just bring suit agains the league as a whole.
  • Wouldn't you then end up with the lawyers targetting the Information League and putting them out of business (by suing the individual members or the ISPs that provide their access, if nothing else), then going back and targetting the original victim?
  • While I realize that "copyright" is kind of a nasty word these days, any time you talk about doing this sort of thing, you're going to run into copyright laws. If the laws are wrong, then you work to change them either by going through the system, or being prepared to stand up to take your medicine if (when) the authorities come down on you (see any discussion of Civil Disobedience). Otherwise, you earn the distinction of being a scoflaw and get no respect from society at large.


    ...phil
  • Freenet [sourceforge.net] is decentralized, so no single entity has control of it or is needed for it to function. So, Freenet can't be attacked like Napster, et al.

    --

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Copyright is not intrinsically evil. Anyone who uses the GPL to protect their work against carpet-baggers understands that.
  • IMHO you should keep:

    1) OLGA (+ lyrics)
    2) IMDB
    3) Mathworld

    Does anyone know if IMDB would fall prey to a similiar lawsuit?

    Matt
  • Personally, I think any and all information that is on the internet should be considered "protected." From the truly useful to society, to the geek interest sites, to pure trash.

    To do otherwise would be to diminish the beauty of a free exchange of ideas that we currently have.
  • Copyright laws to Internet knowledge bases is as Ceasar to the Library of Alexandria.

    Food for thought
  • Is slashdot getting payed for info about copywright violators?
    OK everyone lets post our favorite illegal site.
    DUH!!!!

  • If a site wants to make sure that whatever they peddle is available even after they're sued into oblivion, they should make available for download everything they keep on their site. Ideally something like an ftp server serving a few large file archives.

    Obviously how well this works depends on how much stuff there is. DeCSS has gone far and wide because you can print it on a t-shirt if you need to. An entire encyclopedia/mathematics DB would be somewhat tougher, but I'm sure it's still doable.

    --

  • by Dredd13 ( 14750 ) <dredd@megacity.org> on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @09:30AM (#642037) Homepage
    I like the idea of having a couple sites in "friendly" countries (HavenCo, .RU, etc.), who you can connect to and say "mirror www.news-site.com", and they do it. silently. They don't actually make the data AVAILABLE to anyone at that point. It requires an administrator of the League server to say, "hey, news-site.com is down, unleash the mirrored copy".

    You don't have nearly the "copyright" issues at that point (e.g., news-site.com might not want you to be a public mirror while they're selling ad-space and trying to live, but when they're getting their ass kicked in court, they may not be nearly as inclined to go after you for preserving their livelihood and image), and you can basically keep the "mirroring" active for a certain period of time and then drop it. (e.g., if I put out an APB today to "mirror slashdot", but in 60 days slashdot is still around, drop the mirror, the crisis is over.") You do that to conserve resources. Obviously if the system has been told (as in the above example) that a site IS down, then it holds on to it for as long as necessary (forever potentially), where interested parties could then mirror it themselves. D

  • by jbischof ( 139557 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @09:31AM (#642038) Journal
    There is something similar called Mojonation [mojonation.net] that sets up a peer to peer network over the internet by using and granting resources to people. If you provide a resource, such as hard drive space, you get "mojo" if you use up a resource, you spend mojo.

    It seems organized well and it promotes people providing resources and not just taking them. Also everything is encrypted and your files dont dissapear with time!

    I havent tried it yet, but if you have then I would like to hear from you.
  • by Private Essayist ( 230922 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @09:31AM (#642039)
    There are so many things we would want preserved, it's hard to know where to begin. Some random thoughts:

    • Bug reports for software. I can imagine MS or AOL or some other big software producer clamping down on practical information about what works and what doesn't work in any given version of software. Remember, many software licenses now demand that you not make a negative review of the product without permission. It's a short leap from that to demanding that you not talk about a product's shortcomings. "Your honor, it is imperative to our nation's security that software holes are not publicized where terrorists can get them."
    • Independent news: China just cracked down again on Chinese web sites wanting to report news, saying that they can only link to official news feeds, not those imperialistic foreign news sources. It seems unlikely that such would ever happen in the West, but it's not inconceivable. As more and more news organizations get swallowed up by mega corporations, their news quality suffers. They are unable to report all the news, for some of it might be embarrassing to the bosses back at HQ. Imagine if all the news were like this, and the only way to find out what is really happening is to go to some independent web sites for news. I can conceive of the day when the AOLs of the world try to discredit any non-Time Warner-approved news, so to speak.

    ________________
  • Isn't the IMDB just a review site? Last time I checked, they hadn't made reviewing things illegal, at least not yet... (although several software EULAs have had a decent shot at it).
  • The problem with mirroring such sites is (obviously) copyright. If you don't tell the site's author that you're mirroring the site, you're (probablly) infringing on their copyright.

    If you do tell the author, you're a target for a lawsuit as well (ala DeCSS and numberous "John Does") because why have a mirror if you keep it secret. If you do that, its not a mirror, its a backup which any intelligent site author should be doing anyway.

    In order for mirroring to be successful, you've got to have an insame number of mirrors. DeCSS was small enough that it was possible for that code but I would assume that a large resource such as Mathworld is larger than the source to DeCSS.
  • The very power of the deCSS mirrors is their association -- they have none. There's no authority or listing of who has what, so would-be litigators are hard-pressed to do anything about it.

    In creating a 'membership', you are creating a mechanism for the dismemberment.
  • That sounds like a good idea. I have a shitload of unused storage, it would be cool to start archiving endangered sites.

    What is the best Linux software for mirroring a site (Something you give the base URL, and it recursively sucks down everything from every local link on the site) - I've been looking but a lot of them don't deal with JSP/ASP/etc type sites.

  • If we all post the entire Who discography (solo projects optional) then those pesky blokes won't be able to charge us for CD's.

    We'll starve 'em into better art.


    If we all steal, then it makes it right........

  • by Anonymous Coward
    You talk of the beauty of information exchange, directly after you make a distinction between "information useful to society" and "pure trash". Surely you'd agree that the value of information is not a property solely of the data, but of the data and the mind that reads it.

    Breakthrough particle physics may be wonderfully beneficial to society, if someone who can understand it reads it. To the layman, it's gibberish. By contrast, most of us would consider child pornography distasteful ("pure trash" as you said), but to perhaps a psychologist seeking to understand someone's mind, it's useful data, and to the pedophile, it is sexually stimulating.

    I think it's critical to remember that you consider the pedophile to be offensive in his tastes, but the information itself is neutral.
  • Try ActiveGuitar.com [activeguitar.com] - they seem to have all that OLGA had.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Assumes facts not yet in evidence.


    ...phil
  • If you are talking about Havenco [havenco.com], they haven't started hosting yet.
    ----------
  • The idea is really cool, but the transfer rate is slow. Dog slow. Which is the opposite of how it's supposed to work. It's supposed to be that an army of modem users can each send a separate piece of the file to a DSL user, (or the reverse, of course). The latest version is supposed to be much faster. It doesn't work on my Linux box.
  • about vulnerable, but the ones I use most are (and I don't have the URLs on my work computer) are sites with information on elements and compounds. This goes beyond the periodic table of elements, but includes common (and not so common) compounds used for a variety of reasons. The information I usually need is along the lines of flash points, melting points, boiling points, reactions with other compounds, etc.

    Yes, I am serious, and no I am not going to tell you what I use them for.

    Eric Gearman
    --
  • Mirroring works, to a certain extent.

    The DeCSS experience shows that corporations and trade groups with vast financial resources and legal clout have no problem firing off unlimited barrages of form "cease-and-desist" letters to ISP's, universities, webmasters ... etc.

    Ultimately, I believe mirroring is a temporary solution to the copyright conundrum. It's high time a membership-based organization was formed -- kinda like the EFF of intellectual property -- to protect valuable online resources from succumbing to the profit-driven proprietarization of the Internet.

    Sincerely,
    Vergil

  • I was always wondering why slashdot never mirrored DeCSS. Afraid of a lawsuit or what? Anyways, I think I like the sound of endangered.slashdot.org

  • In that case, though, all someone would need to do is scan and upload copyright materials, and presto! they are free. This could be somewhat difficult to people who rely on copyrights to protect their income-generating works.

    If copyrights are no good, they should be gotten rid of; if not, kept. But an impotent half-implemented copyright system merely would inconvenience everyone.

    Mathworld is in a different boat, since it was a webpage long before there was a hardcopy.

  • I was just reading the FAQ on Mathworld. It's an interesting little ditty, peek here: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/faq.html This type of corporate raiding always burns my arse, simply because it is greed, greed, greed. Monsters. Anyone want to bet that CRC has a similar version of Mathworld coded up and ready to go?
  • Am I the only one who thinks this sounds as classifying bandwidth as an endangered species?
  • HavenCo [havenco.com] is the ideal place to host this type of information. I can already hear a few of you screaming, so put a sock in it. This is a great idea whose time has come, and needs support.
  • Of course Mathworld is still with us! Of course it is!

    What is the answer? Forget freenet, gnutella, and whatever else you're thinking of. The pages are still out there. What we need is a great big URL filter, where dead pages can be resurrected, Lazarus-like, with this simple function:

    void alive_url(char *dead_url, char *alive)
    {
    strcpy(alive, "http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:");
    strcat(alive, dead_url);
    }


    Thus, when we ask "Where is the mathworld page on polynomials?" we get the response http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://mathwo rld.wolfram.com/PolynomialEquation.html

    Now all we need to do is convert that to cgi, and run everything through this simple filter. Presto, live site ;))

    Lord Google will look after us all.
  • Remember CueCat? That's pretty hard to find right now. If a content provider really decides to go all out, attacking, say, 2600 not just for DeCSS links but also plain text of html locations, and if they win, then the info will have to go way underground to survive. Servers off shore might help for awhile, but looks like the European Cybercrime Treaty is working on wrecking that as well. My opinion? Find servers in Mainland China, host it there, and tell Chinese Authorities you're trying to undermine captialist pigs in the U.S. and please don't shut you down. In a world where the US is this hostile towards free information, the only place to host it might be in countries hostile to the U.S. -
  • IMDB has many things, including reviews. Its primarily, and started out, a large database of cross-referenced movie information.

    Useful when you see someone in a movie and think 'where'd I see that guy before?'. Look up the movie, find the actor, click his link, see a list of other movies he's been in, etc.

    In any case, IMDB should be safe, I've never heard of laws against collecting this sort of information, and they built the database themselves (the database as a whole work would be copyrighted by them, actually).

  • in that case we can sue Slashdot for copyright violation. The page clearly states all comments to be the property of their respective posters...
  • by BluedemonX ( 198949 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @09:49AM (#642062)
    There are agencies that are basically godzilla-sized racks of VCRs and tape recorders (well, it's probably all digital, now) connected to satellite dishes, antennas, and able. And they record EVERYTHING. And I mean EVERY channel, every radio station, everything, so that there is a "backup" of whatever was broadcast.

    I almost worked at one of these places.

    And if you wanted, say, to use a clip from some TV station, you could go and get appropriate copyright permission from the copyright owner, and then get the clip from the billions of tapes in the warehouse.

    I'm surprised that there aren't people archiving every UseNet post. It would certainly be an interesting exercise.
  • by Malc ( 1751 )
    Deja seems to be a pretty unique resource. They've already stopped allowing us access to "older" parts of their archives that I think are relevant. What happens when they decide they no longer want to support the current system at all. IMHO, these usenet archives need to be free and accessible to all. Damn! It bugs me that I can't even find something that I posted at the end of August... I need to find the answer again. It's like there is a black hole for about 10 days.
  • Read the updates on the DeCSS lawsuits here [decssnews.com].
  • Read the updates on the DeCSS lawsuits here [decssnews.com].
  • by blameless ( 203912 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @09:52AM (#642066)
    Fresh from the FAQ [wolfram.com]:

    Q: What's this about a lawsuit?
    A: In March 2000, CRC Press LLC, a subsidiary of Information Holdings Inc., filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida, claiming that the web site mathworld.wolfram.com violates their copyright in Eric Weisstein's CRC Concise Encylopedia of Mathematics published by CRC in November 1998.

    Q: Why do they think the site violates their copyright?
    A: Three and one-half years ago, Eric signed a book deal with CRC in which he agreed to provide printed, camera-ready pages for the encyclopedia. He thought he was selling them a printed snapshot of his existing web site, not the whole web site. CRC now claims that he sold them his whole web site, not just a printed book.

    Q: So, did he sell them the web site or not?
    A: Eric did not believe he was selling them his web site: he thought he was selling them the right to print a book and that he would be able to keep his web site up. If he had had more experience in the publishing industry, he would have insisted on a contract that made this crystal clear, but he didn't. Eric's contract, which is a standard boilerplate book contract that has probably been signed by many other CRC authors, does not give CRC explicit rights to the website. However, the court found that the contract is ambiguous on this point. What Eric intended to sell CRC is at the heart of this lawsuit.

    Q: Doesn't the standard "right to reproduce in all media" clause cover the web site?
    A: The web site is not based on or derived from the printed book: it existed for years beforehand. We believe and argue that the printed book is a derivative work. We don't dispute that CRC would have the right to put up a web site containing, for example, PDF files of the printed book. But we strongly object to the idea that their copyright in the printed book allows them to reach back and gain control of Eric's preexisting, ever-changing, collaborative internet community.

    Q: Did Wolfram Research just cave in and yank the site to avoid trouble?
    A: Absolutely not. We have kept the site up as long as we were able, but unfortunately CRC requested and was granted a preliminary injunction that orders us to take the site down until the case goes to trial. By direct order of the court, we had no choice and no alternative but to take it down.

    Q: Isn't a lot more harm being caused by taking it down than leaving it up?
    A: We respect the judge's well-reasoned opinion that the site should be taken down until the dispute is settled: he considered the evidence available to him in the legal record. He simply did not agree that the harm to the community at large would be enough to justify keeping the site available.
  • I'm surprised that there aren't people archiving every UseNet post. It would certainly be an interesting exercise.
    Um, isn't this what Dejanews [deja.com] does (That is, when they're not being an advertisement-ridden, bloated, commercialized cesspool)?

    I am the Raxis.

  • I would think that the most vulnerable sites would be "academic" sites that are strongly dependent on university Internet resources, but loosely enough tied to the university that the university would feel little reason to "protect" the site from attack.

    In contrast, someone that goes out there and sets up a "Slimey Sex Site" has got to know that they will see some sort of opposition, whether from:

    • Competitors trying to "slime" them,
    • Members of the much-maligned "Religious Right," trying to get them shut down,
    • A model that wants to shut them down

    The "porn" site would seem to me to be more likely to have some funding and concern about such attacks.

    In effect, it may be more likely that the "pornsters" will get attacked, in one way or another; the fact that they can expect such attacks leads to them "hardening" themselves, at least from a legal perspective.

    Thus, the taxonomy may be more like:

    • "Academic" sites that probably don't get attacked much, but which are extremely vulnerable if they do get attacked;
    • "Porn" sites that will be nipped by a bunch of small attacks, and will likely be reasonably resistant;
    • MP3 and DVD sites that can't possibly have enough money to resist the Huge Pockets of the RIAA and MPAA.
  • One of my favorite sites was the Internation Lyrics Server [lyrics.ch]. It contained song lyrics submitted by its visitors, so essentially they were the opinions of what the songs said (who can really tell what Iron Butterfly is singing in "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" anyway?). Nevertheless, the music industry sued, so the site shut down. It's sort-of back, but much of the database has been expunged. I'd love it if someone could get their hands on the original database and mirror it.
  • ...Napster to that list. I, for one, have been carefully backing it up for about a year now...

    -jpowers
  • by guinsu ( 198732 )
    I would have to rate OLGA as one of those sites I'd love to see never go away. Luckily it is mirrored a lot and the mirrors put up whatever they want. Still if OLGA was out of its legal troubles I bet there'd be 10x as much tab submitted. I'm actually suprised in all my time on Slashdot this is the first time OLGA came up, I think it is as bad if not worse than the Napster/DeCSS/etc... cases.

    This does bring up the related note of sites that just go down permanently which had good info on them. Does anyone remeber the Antics and Mayhem site with info on Fresnel lenses, Frozen CO2 and links to all sorts of crazy stuff? It moved a few times but now its gone. Guess I will just have to stick with Backyard Ballistics [frii.com]
  • Antiporn! You do realize that if your ideas were enforced, the mere fact you posted a response to this would get you locked up, right? The mere use of the word 'Hell' could be construed as pornographic, and thus illegal under your facist regime.

    For your daily injection of perversion, visit Stile Project [stileproject.com]. Officially endorsed by AntiPorn!

  • I'm just a crazy goy, but I tell you his web resources are so fantastic you could plotz!
  • Lawsuits and threatening letters are expensive. Massive mirroring schemes work by making so many copies of the "forbidden" data that it would be prohibitively expensive to sue all the archives. If a company thinks that having some abandonware game available for free on the net will cost them $10,000 in lost revenue, and a nastly letter from the legal department costs $100, it makes financial sense to go after 1 or 10 or 50 mirrors. However, if there are more than 100 mirrors shutting them all down would be more expensive than forgoing the revenue lost due to downloading. Mirroring won't stop lawsuits, but it can make them too costly to use in some cases

  • I thought they were a search engine on same. If they burned it all to CD or something even stabler every day, I'm impressed.

    Now all we need are "software agents" going out and sucking all the Web content of a given area day to day, so there's a daily "snapshot" of content on the Internet.

    This may not be a good idea from the perspective of it allowing RIAA and MPAA to go after people, etc.... but it is an idea, nonetheless
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Erowid [erowid.org] and The Lycaeum [lycaeum.org] are in danger every time that bitch from California introduces another unconstitutional law against disseminating drug information.
  • by brad.hill ( 21936 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @09:59AM (#642077)
    AltaVista, Google and Alexa all have archives of basically the entire web. Alexa, at least, explicitly views this as a function of their company, and boasts of having the largest "library" in the history of humanity.

    Many major university computer science departments also have whole-Web archives for the purpose of running siumlations of spiders and other automated information collecting and processing tools.

    The main problem is that this information is not always publicly accessible and is within the long arm of the lawyers. Maybe the best way to implement this would be to arrange to have somebody like HavenCo purchase these snapshots on a monthly basis, keep them in near-line storage and move censored content that is deemed important by the Information League back "into print".

  • But asimov.net hasn't been killed yet. It's right here: asimov.net [asimov.net]
  • ...all that OLGA had.

    Olga isn't dead. RenegadeOlga.com [renegadeolga.com]

    I'll have to look into ActiveGuitar.

  • There's actually this site called afterlife.org [afterlife.org] which offers to mirror important web-sites should the actual webmaster become dead. Whether you believe in spiritual afterlife or not, your webpages can live on!
  • by Dr. Zowie ( 109983 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMdeforest.org> on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @10:12AM (#642081)
    Interesting case (and I'm sorry I missed it the first time around, on the 25th). The issue here seems to be the nature of web publication: once you sell thousands of copies of a book, they're gone -- but web publication requires constant input from you. The problem is that the law is meant to address things that are made and distributed once, but read many times; while web documents are (in common use) distributed once per perusal.

    Weisstein certainly wouldn't be in this predicament if his website were being sold in book form: it predates the contract with CRC, and he says that it is not derived from that work (in fact, it's more likely that the reverse is true). Why should his website be treated any differently than any other former publication?

  • China is a whole different boxen and has been for a very long time. It is a place where the government controls all, usually with an iron fist. Since most of the industrialized nations work on capitalism and not communism, control would never reach that point. We need laws with intelligence and forsight instead of bending to the wills of the big spenders.

    And yes, I voted today.

  • Well, you can't really have a search engine without having an archive, and an archive is pretty useless without having some way of searching it, so....
  • Without the images. And the google cache will expire in time...
  • by Convergence ( 64135 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @10:27AM (#642085) Homepage Journal
    For a VERY long time, Eric absolutely demanded NO mirrors, and would firewall off and permanently deny access to anyone who tried to mirror it.

    This is why I like to mirror. That way, if a wonderful resource get's blocked/denied/taken down, I can still use it. (treasuretroves, digitalblasphemy, ....)

    -- Spoken as a small contributor and as someone who tried to mirror and was firewalled off.

  • This is the type of problem Freenet [slashdot.org] was designed to solve. Freenet is not really ready fro prime-time, but in a year or so, it might be ready for putting endangered information in...
  • Ah, but you forgetting that we can google cache the google cache.

    Although, eventually the URI will be too long to enter into a browser's address box.

  • I agree with you that mirroring information that various political regimes would repress is important. But the difficulties faced by Chinese activists lie in getting the information to a group or group in a first world country with liberal speech laws that will permit access to the information. With Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the the like there are a large number of central locations for archiving this information in a protected manner. While this may someday become an issue for western democracies, it isn't yet.

    The problem described in the original post is assuring the continued availability of information that is illegal to provide in the same liberal/western countries. If you've already decided to violate copyrite and intelectual property laws on a grand scale, where do you do it? Mirroring inside the US is ineffective for any information that isn't this week's cause celebre. DeCSS may be widely available now, but the furor will die, people will become less inclined to mirror, and indexed and accessible mirrors will eventually fold under legal pressure. For larger data sets/code bases this problem will be even greater.

    In this light, is there a non-US/EU country with adequate connectivity, a stable government, and a track record for lax copyrite enforcement? People can shout HavenCo until they're blue in the face, but until Sealand has been hosting content without interference for at least a couple of years we need a stable fall back plan. I'm open to suggestions.

  • by Masem ( 1171 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @10:43AM (#642089)
    Deja's old archives (at least, as far back as 96, from what I can tell) are up, been up for at least 3 weeks now.

    However, considering the pending sale of Deja, the existing usenet archives do need to be recorded (if just for the Big 7 minus alt., just as references) instead of being sent to the bit bucket.

  • Consumers in those countries are forced to use software created in the US because no one in those markets sees any money in producing software for their countrymen.
    They are forced to use Microsoft software because no one else can make money producing software period. The advantage of one company owning the standards.
  • by Zooko ( 2210 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @10:53AM (#642091) Homepage

    You can post your web sites on Mojo Nation [mojonation.net] (warning: this is in beta! It is not stable, but it works.). Documents posted to Mojo Nation are not deletable. (This is due to some complicated peer to peer architecture and RAID-like splitting of the data into multiple redundant shares, of which you need only a subset to reconstruct the original document. See the web site for docs.)

    Regards,

    Zooko, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow

  • are publishers of many respected technical reference books. Several of my favorite books are CRC titles. I am quite disappointed in this action.

    CRC representatives will be at a number of technical conferences [crcpress.com] this year, including the Computer Security Conference [gocsi.com] in Chicago next week. I intend to visit their booth and talk to their representative about this shameful action. You should, too.

    Assuming they don't just use an attractive freelancing schoolteacher, which other book companies seem to do...

  • In this instance the rights to the copyright were stolen from the author. The book was a collection of information that the author had compiled and made freely available on the internet. When he had the information published in book form, he did not intend to take down his web site.
  • Both you and "disenfranchised" commented on China or other repressive regimes. In fact, I used them only as an example of what I was really talking about. You touched on it when you said, "We need laws with intelligence and forsight instead of bending to the wills of the big spenders."

    That is the trend I am noticing, laws being bent to the wills of the big corps. So my worry, though not really feasible at this time, is that one day MegaNewsCorp will control 95% of the western news outlets, and will try to go after the pesky remaining 5%. Not because of political will, but out of concern for shareholder value. After all, if the clueless consumers begin to read real news, they will realize they have been spoon fed pablum by MegaNewsCorp and become dissatisfied with the product.

    Consider as a current, if orthagonal, example that of AOL and the way they try to prevent their users from leaving the AOL universe and going out to the Web at large. Do they absolutely forbid it? Nope, but they are making it gradually harder. And they do this because they want you to view their material so they can make more money.

    So if MegaNewsCorp decides that they don't want people reading that 5% of independent news outlets, where you find out what's really happening, instead of the anestheticizing news about the latest trend from Hollywood, they might try to get those sites shut down.

    All right, all right, I know...typical /. paranoid rant that will never come true. Probably not. But the trends are there, as in cities where all the daily papers are owned by one corp., and the news web sites that are being folded into each other under the banner of one corp., etc.
    ________________

  • about a hundred bucks [barnesandnoble.com] in this case.

    CRC Checksum Failure.
  • just search bn.com for "crc math". They're still $100 tho.
  • You can add harmonycentral.com is the list of OLGA 'mirrors'. Basicly, it seems that they, activeguitar, etc. just link to the renagade OLGA sites. Before I started working, I downloaded like crazy from OLGA, and submitted a few tabs myself. A good part of the Ween section is my doing.

  • That's what openCOLA's Swarmcast does. It satisfies requests for content by distributing the request to caches. They all send pieces to the requestor. P2P Akamai, if you will.
  • Not to mention that it's impossible to use without reading the manual, doesn't install itself in a standard way (folder shortcut instead of a pullout folder in my start menu? How professional...)), has absolutely useless web pages for when you fail. Oh did I mention that search doesn't work? Shit, shit shit. That's all it is. Without an interface that isn't shit, they don't have a chance.
  • Yes, that is the word I wanted, thanks!
    ________________
  • I appreciate (at least some of) your reasons for being polite about the judge's descision. I trust that you will not be surprised if many others feel otherwise.
    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • You can still get the MathWorld site out of the google cache. Here's a quick and dirty hack to make the google cache "navigatible:" http://net127.com/g c/i ndex.cgi/mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/ [net127.com]
  • What Web resources do you consider most valuable

    this one [slashdot.org], without a doubt.

    wishus
    ---

  • Anything related to universities has got to be _top_ priority in the triage. It's not just that disk space etc. can be hard to scrounge (I once had a small collection of gorgeous tiger pictures from the 'Exotic Feline Virtual Sanctuary [newpaltz.edu]' and allowed them to not be backed up- the site can still be connected to but the pictures are all _gone_ and I've never seen them anywhere else)..

    The real problem isn't that- the real problem is that universities have to be considered an endangered species at this point. Their funding is terrible and corporations are stepping in, buying up these resources and taking control of them, essentially co-opting their purpose. As a result, more and more uni resources on the web and electronic media are going to be withheld and removed- in some cases to the extent of legal assaults on the 'public domain' status of these resources.

    University resources that are public need to be mirrored and backed up by outside interests because the universities cannot or will not protect themselves and their primary mission- I would guess that within ten years there will be no schools as we understand them, it'll be purely corporate propaganda arms, doubling as press-release research facilities with a clear mandate to 'confirm' whatever the parent corporation wants confirmed. It's possible that 'name' schools, such as MIT, might maintain a certain amount of independence, but only at the cost of locking down its IP, consolidating it, and effectively becoming yet another corporation, except based around research and teaching students rather than based around selling products. The product would be the research- Negroponte's shown himself pretty capable at playing off corporations against each other and has been doing that for years.

    Actual education will just have to go underground because it will not exist in recognizable form in the mainstream. I hope home schooling becomes a lot more common. Unfortunately, the newly privatised education sector may move to make home schooling illegal.

    All very speculative to be sure! But I do think this is extremely likely, to a greater or lesser extent.

  • Two thoughts:
    1. It seems that if not everyone who contributed to the site signed the copyright transfer agreement or if those who did sign were not aware that the site would be removed from the web (in part or in whole--who ever heard of rotating exclusion to information access!?), then those people might instigate a class action lawsuit against CRC.

    2. Perhaps a new model of web publishing should be started, in the spirit of Eric's site, but with a legally binding, non-transferable GPL type of contract which is implicitly "signed" by anyone who contributes to the site. It might be structured in such a way that the copyright may never be transferred, in part or in whole. But maybe rights could be assigned non-exclusively in the event that a print form would be useful.

    So, who is going to set up the new be-all-end-all Encyclopedia?!
  • I've been thinking about this for some time. The primary purpose and reason for developing it was to fight oppressing regimes, but rights are being taken away at such a pace these days, we might need it ourselves in not so long....

    People mention Freenet, but Freenet only protects information that is there. You've got to make sure that if police or military forces comes bursting in one night, information must be stored where they can't close it down and distributed from there.

    Also, it is important that people who support a site don't use too much bandwidth and HD space before it gets serious. Othervice, people may not be able give the necessary resources.

    What I have in mind is a network where those providing endagered resources can call for support (CFS). Those who respond to the CFS set up a software to download an image of the site every now and then (say once a month, once a week or something), and at least after controversial information has been published.

    Next, we need something that sets off an alarm that the endagered site is being attacked. This has to include the possibility that the site just goes down without warning (military forces shoot the webmaster and blows everything to pieces, to take an extreme). This could be done by checking every now and then if the server is up, and if it stays down for any extended period of time, the alarm would go off. Naturally, there must not be too many false alarms, or the system will loose credibility. This pretty much rules out Windows as platform.... :-) Also, it should be possible for the administrator to set off the alarm by a single command, so that if somebody comes bursting in, they have to act fast to stop the information from being transmitted. Other features such as the administrator saying "if my site goes down at 12:15 and you don't hear from me, we're under attack". Also, intelligence might try to fool the system to mirror useless or bogus information, we would have to work hard to make sure we are one step ahead.

    If a site is under attack, there are a number of things that could be done. First, put up a mirror of any information that you have stored, dump it on Freenet. Maybe some sort of system could be set up so that nameservers are updated with information about one of the mirrors, so that the web site has very little downtime? Perhaps a global network of name servers similar to the two provided by Granite Canyon's Public DNS service [granitecanyon.com], where authority can be transfered as part of an alarm. One can also attempt to keep e-mail working as well, but that's of little use if the admin has been shot.... If the alarm has been set off by the admin, one should try to download a mirror as a part of the alarm response to get the latest.

    I have also been thinking about how to use the internet to try to keep those suppressed online using minimalist solutions, e.g. TCP/IP over ham radio. It might have low bandwidth, but perhaps sufficient for e-mails...?

  • By saying "If you've already decided to violate copyrite and intelectual property laws on a grand scale, where do you do it?", you have pre-judged the issue. Were I to accept that some particular location had the one true correct definition of what copyright was, then it would be immoral to violate that right anywhere. As I don't give that kind of acceptance to anywhere, then the question becomes instead, where would be be most appropriate for me to construct a mirroring site. This is not an immoral act, no matter what your local laws may say. It is an act based around individual morality.


    In this regard it is worth contemplating the notice that Tolkien printed on the first paperback edition of his works in the US that was authorized by him (i.e., please buy this edition instead of the other one, because that one is legal theft). US copyright law is no bastion of morality. It's just that as we become more world centric, we tend to see the benefits to us of a global standard.


    From a more practical point of view, it would be truly desireable to have mirrors constructed in a variety of differing jurisdictions. Scandinavia, Turkey, Italy, India, and Kenya come to mind, but practicalities would probably mean that each site would need to be locally sponsored and run. (Practicalities: No one legal threat should be able to shut down all of them, no matter what its country of origin was.)



    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • Do you know if OLGA's still growing or if it's just static? I added some songs many years ago and I would do so again. I didn't see any obvious links at the activeguitar.com or renegadeolga that said that they were taking more contributions.
  • Note that I assumed that those proposing mirror sites had decided to violate the law. This is not a judgement on their morality. My understanding that mirroring copyrighted materials without permission from the author/copyright holder is illegal.

    I believe that in many instances civil disobedience is the moral choice in the face of an unjust or incorrect law. Civil rights protesters, tree sitters, and the British blockades against road construction have all chosen direct actions (that often include trespass or illegal gathering, etc.) that are both moral and illegal.

    As far as the morality of mirroring, I have conflicted and unresolved views on this. Distributing the DeCSS source code makes sense to me. Mirroring network security tools to avoid a european treaty that would ban port scanners and the like makes sense to me. I haven't resolved my feelings about mirroring copyrighted music/movies/microcode (to steal a line from Stephenson). But in various jurisdictions these would all still be illegal acts.

    That said, thanks for the suggestions on possible locations. And I agree that local administration is key to the success of any such scheme.

  • Can you say beta?

    --

  • "Web-whacking" software (programs that act like a spider-bot) won't be able to mirror most useful web sites. Most sites have database backends, and the HTML is built on-the-fly by scripts or servlets that the browser can never see. For these reasons, mirroring can't possibly be done with either

    a) exploiting multiple security holes in the web server/database server/firewall/whatever else

    OR

    b) carefully planning and implementing a customized mirroring scheme with the cooperation of the site maintainers/hosters.
  • Bram and Greg and Drue hacked faster download and upload, and the latest version is substantially faster (especially noticeable on larger files). Give it a try and let me know (zooko@mad-scientist.com) if you are still unsatisfied.

    It definitely works on RedHat and Debian. You might have gotten a screwed up RedHat build that I accidentally posted last week. It was only up for 10 minutes... Anyway, e-mail me if it doesn't work. There's no reason for it not to run on any Linux bux.

  • If the resource is popular then it gets mirrored automatically by greedy block servers who are hoping to sell copies in return for Mojo to people that download it. (Note that you earn Mojo by running a Mojo Nation [mojonation.net] client, so it is more like "trading" your bandwidth and your disk space and the blocks you've collected for the blocks that the other guy has collected.)

    So as far as I can tell, mirroring useful web resources that a large community uses is a perfect use for Mojo Nation. I wouldn't recommend depending solely on Mojo Nation at this point (BETA! BETA! It's the letter that comes before Gamma which is the kind of radiation that made Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk!), but I would recommend experimenting: take a web site that you are mirroring, do a `wget -r -k' on it, then run the Mojo Nation utility "cmdpub" on the resulting directory.

    Regards,

    Zooko, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow

  • The most threatened material like decss or cuecat should be preserved, along with various software that my be patented in some counties but not others (Lame, BladeEnc etc) Also, anything useful that has the potential to draw legal threats like reverse engineered device drivers for WinPrinters (Lexmark), WinModems, parallel port win-scanners. Think about it. If Digital Convergence can go after software drivers on linux and claim that there secret protocol is protected IP then every other dumb hardware manufacturer out there could go after all sorts of drivers for Linux or any other OS other than windows. Some companies have been successful in squashing certain software such as cp4break, glide wrappers simply because mirroring didn't happen fast enough.
  • by jbridges ( 70118 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @02:45PM (#642126)
    For me the most valuable resource on the Web that is in risk of disappearing is Dejanews.

    We've already lost everything older than one year, and now what's left is being sold off to some unnamed party.

    How much legal strong arming by some pro-censorship or copyright protection group will be required to remove it forever? Not to mention the COS.

    I use Dejanews daily, and would sorely miss even this now diminished archive.

  • Yah, but what about database generated info where the data doesn't go stale quickly at all.

    Like my MessageBase [bloomnet.com] web discussion code, it's all database driven, but once a message gets posted, it's pretty much there for life. I've noticed that none of the search engines will even touch an ASP (Yah, ASP, once I get my Java skills improved, I'll be changing it to JSP). I've watched the logs when the googlebot comes visiting, and is doesn't even go there. Seems kind of wasteful and incomplete.

    You'd think there was some kind of a way/need/demand for this kind of a thing with most things these days (Slashdot included) being database generated. I take it that the search engines only hit the old archived Slasdot stories, rather than the newest content?

  • I think this whole discussion kind of misses the point. Everyone is talking about legal rights and wrongs, the moral rights and wrongs, who's being a jerk, who's being exploited, etc. None of this matters.

    What does matter is getting mathworld back online. And I see that as easily done. The simple fact is that CRC is not behaving in their own best interest. The web site is not competition for the book -- it's free advertising for the book. Besides which, who will sell them web content after this incident?

    So CRC is just sabotaging their own product. And drying up any further web-originated product. And creating a lot of ill will in the process. They may have the legal right to screw themselves, but if enough people point out that they are screwing themselves, they might well stop.

    Slashdotters have considerable power to communicate this point. There are a lot of them, they know about web economics, and they are precisely the kind of technical audience CRC depends upon. So here's the relevent contact info, taken from their web site:

    CRC Press LLC Headquarters 2000 NW Corporate Blvd Boca Raton,FL, USA 33431

    Phone 1(800)272-7737 x6066 (561)994-0555 Fax - 1(800)374-3401 (561)989-9732

    Please , make this a exercise in lobbying, not a DoS attack. One short fax or phone call per person. Anything else is self-defeating.

    __________________

An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.

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