Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine began archiving cached web pages in 1996. One of the earliest known pages was archived on May 10, 1996, at 2:08 p.m. (UTC).^[3]

Internet Archive founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat launched the Wayback Machine in San Francisco, California,^[4] in October 2001,^[5][6] primarily to address the problem of web content vanishing whenever it gets changed or when a website is shut down.^[7] The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a "three-dimensional index".^[8] Kahle and Gilliat created the machine hoping to archive the entire Internet and provide "universal access to all knowledge".^[9] The name "Wayback Machine" is a reference to a fictional time-traveling and translation device, the "Wayback Machine", used by the characters Mister Peabody and Sherman in the animated cartoon The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends.^[10][11] In one of the cartoon's segments, "Peabody's Improbable History", the characters used the machine to witness, participate in, and often alter famous events in history.

From 1996 to 2001, the information was kept on digital tape, with Kahle occasionally allowing researchers and scientists to tap into the "clunky" database.^[12] When the archive reached its fifth anniversary in 2001, it was unveiled and opened to the public in a ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley.^[13] By the time the Wayback Machine launched, it already contained over 10 billion archived pages.^[14] The data is stored on the Internet Archive's large cluster of Linux nodes.^[9] It revisits and archives new versions of websites on occasion (see technical details below).^[15] Sites can also be captured manually by entering a website's URL into the search box, provided that the website allows the Wayback Machine to "crawl" it and save the data.^[16]

On October 30, 2020, the Wayback Machine began fact-checking content.^[17] As of January 2022, domains of ad servers are disabled from capturing.^[18]

In May 2021, for Internet Archive's 25th anniversary, the Wayback Machine introduced the "Wayforward Machine" which allows users to "travel to the Internet in 2046, where knowledge is under siege".^[19][20]

Discover more about History related topics

Cache (computing)

Cache (computing)

In computing, a cache is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere. A cache hit occurs when the requested data can be found in a cache, while a cache miss occurs when it cannot. Cache hits are served by reading data from the cache, which is faster than recomputing a result or reading from a slower data store; thus, the more requests that can be served from the cache, the faster the system performs.

Internet Archive

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge." It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds over 36 million books and texts, 11.6 million movies, videos and TV shows and clips, 950 thousand software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.5 million images, 251 thousand concerts, and 780 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine.

Brewster Kahle

Brewster Kahle

Brewster Lurton Kahle is an American digital librarian, a computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, and advocate of universal access to all knowledge. Kahle founded the Internet Archive and Alexa Internet. In 2012, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Bruce Gilliat

Bruce Gilliat

Bruce Gilliat is the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Alexa Internet.

San Francisco

San Francisco

San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California, with 815,201 residents as of 2021, and covers a land area of 46.9 square miles, at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City and the fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include SF, San Fran, The City, Frisco, and Baghdad by the Bay.

California

California

California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2 million residents across a total area of approximately 163,696 square miles (423,970 km2), it is the most populous U.S. state and the third-largest by area. It is also the most populated subnational entity in North America and the 34th most populous in the world. The Greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas are the nation's second and fifth most populous urban regions respectively, with the former having more than 18.7 million residents and the latter having over 9.6 million. Sacramento is the state's capital, while Los Angeles is the most populous city in the state and the second most populous city in the country. San Francisco is the second most densely populated major city in the country. Los Angeles County is the country's most populous, while San Bernardino County is the largest county by area in the country. California borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, the Mexican state of Baja California to the south; and it has a coastline along the Pacific Ocean to the west.

Mister Peabody

Mister Peabody

Hector J. Peabody, simply referred to as Mr. Peabody, is an anthropomorphic cartoon dog who appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s television animated series The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, produced by Jay Ward. Peabody appeared in the "Peabody's Improbable History" segments created by Ted Key, and was voiced by Bill Scott. In 2014, he was featured in a computer-animated film, Mr. Peabody & Sherman. From 2015 to 2017, he appeared in a television series based on the film.

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends is an American animated television series that originally aired from November 19, 1959, to June 27, 1964, on the ABC and NBC television networks.

Database

Database

In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spans formal techniques and practical considerations, including data modeling, efficient data representation and storage, query languages, security and privacy of sensitive data, and distributed computing issues, including supporting concurrent access and fault tolerance.

Linux

Linux

Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

URL

URL

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably. URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages (HTTP) but are also used for file transfer (FTP), email (mailto), database access (JDBC), and many other applications.

Siege

Siege

A siege is a military blockade of a city, or fortress, with the intent of conquering by attrition, or a well-prepared assault. This derives from Latin: sedere, lit. 'to sit'. Siege warfare is a form of constant, low-intensity conflict characterized by one party holding a strong, static, defensive position. Consequently, an opportunity for negotiation between combatants is common, as proximity and fluctuating advantage can encourage diplomacy. The art of conducting and resisting sieges is called siege warfare, siegecraft, or poliorcetics.

The Wayback Machine's software has been developed to "crawl" the Web and download all publicly accessible information and data files on webpages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews (Usenet) bulletin board system, and downloadable software.^[21] The information collected by these "crawlers" does not include all the information available on the Internet, since much of the data is restricted by the publisher or stored in databases that are not accessible. To overcome inconsistencies in partially cached websites, Archive-It.org was developed in 2005 by the Internet Archive as a means of allowing institutions and content creators to voluntarily harvest and preserve collections of digital content, and create digital archives.^[22]

Crawls are contributed from various sources, some imported from third parties and others generated internally by the Archive.^[15] For example, crawls are contributed by the Sloan Foundation and Alexa, crawls run by Internet Archive on behalf of NARA and the Internet Memory Foundation, mirrors of Common Crawl.^[15] The "Worldwide Web Crawls" have been running since 2010 and capture the global Web.^[15][23]

Documents and resources are stored with time stamp URLs such as 20230328174449. Pages' individual resources such as images and style sheets and scripts, as well as outgoing hyperlinks, are linked to with the time stamp of the currently viewed page, so they are redirected automatically to their individual captures that are the closest in time.^[24]

The frequency of snapshot captures varies per website.^[15] Websites in the "Worldwide Web Crawls" are included in a "crawl list", with the site archived once per crawl.^[15] A crawl can take months or even years to complete, depending on size.^[15] For example, "Wide Crawl Number 13" started on January 9, 2015, and completed on July 11, 2016.^[25] However, there may be multiple crawls ongoing at any one time, and a site might be included in more than one crawl list, so how often a site is crawled varies widely.^[15]

Starting in October 2019, users are limited to 15 archival requests and retrievals per minute.^[26]

Storage capacity and growth

As technology has developed over the years, the storage capacity of the Wayback Machine has grown. In 2003, after only two years of public access, the Wayback Machine was growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month. The data is stored on PetaBox rack systems custom designed by Internet Archive staff. The first 100TB rack became fully operational in June 2004, although it soon became clear that they would need much more storage than that.^[27][28]

The Internet Archive migrated its customized storage architecture to Sun Open Storage in 2009, and hosts a new data centre in a Sun Modular Datacenter on Sun Microsystems' California campus.^[29] As of 2009^[update], the Wayback Machine contained approximately three petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 100 terabytes each month.^[30]

A new, improved version of the Wayback Machine, with an updated interface and a fresher index of archived content, was made available for public testing in 2011, where captures appear in a calendar layout with circles whose width visualizes the number of crawls each day, but no marking of duplicates with asterisks or an advanced search page.^[31][32] A top toolbar has been added to facilitate navigating between captures. A bar chart visualizes the frequency of captures per month over the years.^[33] Features like "Changes", "Summary", and a graphical site map were added subsequently.

In March that year, it was said on the Wayback Machine forum that "the Beta of the new Wayback Machine has a more complete and up-to-date index of all crawled materials into 2010, and will continue to be updated regularly. The index driving the classic Wayback Machine only has a little bit of material past 2008, and no further index updates are planned, as it will be phased out this year."^[34] Also in 2011, the Internet Archive installed their sixth pair of PetaBox racks which increased the Wayback Machine's storage capacity by 700 terabytes.^[35]

In January 2013, the company announced a ground-breaking milestone of 240 billion URLs.^[36]

In October 2013, the company introduced the "Save a Page" feature^[37][38] which allows any Internet user to archive the contents of a URL, and quickly generates a permanent link unlike the preceding liveweb feature.

In December 2014, the Wayback Machine contained 435 billion web pages—almost nine petabytes of data, and was growing at about 20 terabytes a week.^[14][39][40]

In March 2015, it was published that security researchers became aware of the threat posed by the service's unintentional hosting of malicious binaries from archived sites.^[41][42]

In July 2016, the Wayback Machine reportedly contained around 15 petabytes of data.^[43]

In September 2018, the Wayback Machine contained over 25 petabytes of data.^[44][45]

As of December 2020, the Wayback Machine contained over 70 petabytes of data.^[46]

Between October 2013 and March 2015, the website's global Alexa rank changed from 163^[49] to 208.^[50] In March 2019 the rank was at 244.^[51]

Wayback Machine APIs

The Wayback Machine service offers three public APIs, SavePageNow, Availability, and CDX.^[52] SavePageNow can be used to archive web pages. Availability API for checking the archive availability status for a web page,^[53] checking whether an archive for the web page exists or not. CDX API is for complex querying, filtering, and analysis of captured data.^[54][55]

Website exclusion policy

Historically, the Wayback Machine has respected the robots exclusion standard (robots.txt) in determining if a website would be crawled – or if already crawled, if its archives would be publicly viewable. Website owners had the option to opt-out of Wayback Machine through the use of robots.txt. It applied robots.txt rules retroactively; if a site blocked the Internet Archive, any previously archived pages from the domain were immediately rendered unavailable as well. In addition, the Internet Archive stated that "Sometimes, a website owner will contact us directly and ask us to stop crawling or archiving a site. We comply with these requests."^[56] In addition, the website says: "The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection."^[57][58]

On April 17, 2017, reports surfaced of sites that had gone defunct and became parked domains that were using robots.txt to exclude themselves from search engines, resulting in them being inadvertently excluded from the Wayback Machine.^[59] The Internet Archive changed the policy to now require an explicit exclusion request to remove it from the Wayback Machine.^[24]

Oakland Archive Policy

Wayback's retroactive exclusion policy is based in part upon Recommendations for Managing Removal Requests and Preserving Archival Integrity published by the School of Information Management and Systems at University of California, Berkeley in 2002, which gives a website owner the right to block access to the site's archives.^[60] Wayback has complied with this policy to help avoid expensive litigation.^[61]

The Wayback retroactive exclusion policy began to relax in 2017, when it stopped honoring robots on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages. As of April 2017, Wayback is ignoring robots.txt more broadly, not just for U.S. government websites.^{[62][63][64][65]}

Discover more about Technical information related topics

Gopher (protocol)

Gopher (protocol)

The Gopher protocol is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to HTTP. The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.

Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.

National Archives and Records Administration

National Archives and Records Administration

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an "independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It is also tasked with increasing public access to those documents which make up the National Archive. NARA is officially responsible for maintaining and publishing the legally authentic and authoritative copies of acts of Congress, presidential directives, and federal regulations. NARA also transmits votes of the Electoral College to Congress. It also examines Electoral College and constitutional amendment ratification documents for prima facie legal sufficiency and an authenticating signature.

Internet Memory Foundation

Internet Memory Foundation

The Internet Memory Foundation was a non-profitable foundation whose purpose was archiving content of the World Wide Web. It supported projects and research that included the preservation and protection of digital media content in various forms to form a digital library of cultural content. As of August 2018, it was defunct.

Common Crawl

Common Crawl

Common Crawl is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that crawls the web and freely provides its archives and datasets to the public. Common Crawl's web archive consists of petabytes of data collected since 2011. It completes crawls generally every month.

Data cap

Data cap

A data cap, often erroneously referred to as a bandwidth cap, is an artificial restriction imposed on the transfer of data over a network. In particular, it refers to policies imposed by an internet service provider in order to limit customers' usage of their services; typically, exceeding a data cap would require the subscriber to pay additional fees based on whether they have exceeded this limit. Implementation of a data cap is sometimes termed a fair access policy, fair usage policy, or usage-based billing by ISPs.

PetaBox

PetaBox

PetaBox is a storage unit from Capricorn Technologies. It was designed by the staff of the Internet Archive and C. R. Saikley to store and process one petabyte of information.

Sun Open Storage

Sun Open Storage

Sun Open Storage was an open source computer data storage platform developed by Sun Microsystems. Sun Open Storage was advertised as avoiding vendor lock-in.

Sun Modular Datacenter

Sun Modular Datacenter

Sun Modular Datacenter is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot intermodal container manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems. An external chiller and power were required for the operation of a Sun MD. A data center of up to 280 servers could be rapidly deployed by shipping the container in a regular way to locations that might not be suitable for a building or another structure, and connecting it to the required infrastructure. Sun stated that the system could be made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center.

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

Billion

Billion

Billion is a word for a large number, and it has two distinct definitions:1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or 109, as defined on the short scale. This is its only current meaning in English. 1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012, as defined on the long scale. This number, which is one thousand times larger than the short scale billion, is now referred to in English as one trillion. However, this number is the historical meaning in English for the word "billion", a meaning which was still in official use in British English until some time after World War II.

Drive-by download

Drive-by download

Drive-by download is of two types, each concerning the unintended download of computer software from the Internet:Authorized drive-by downloads are downloads which a person has authorized but without understanding the consequences. Unauthorized drive-by downloads are downloads which happen without a person's knowledge, often a computer virus, spyware, malware, or crimeware.

From its public launch in 2001, the Wayback Machine has been studied by scholars both for the ways it stores and collects data as well as for the actual pages contained in its archive. As of 2013, scholars had written about 350 articles on the Wayback Machine, mostly from the information technology, library science, and social science fields. Social science scholars have used the Wayback Machine to analyze how the development of websites from the mid-1990s to the present has affected the company's growth.^[14]

When the Wayback Machine archives a page, it usually includes most of the hyperlinks, keeping those links active when they just as easily could have been broken by the Internet's instability. Researchers in India studied the effectiveness of the Wayback Machine's ability to save hyperlinks in online scholarly publications and found that it saved slightly more than half of them.^[66]

"Journalists use the Wayback Machine to view dead websites, dated news reports, and changes to website contents. Its content has been used to hold politicians accountable and expose battlefield lies."^[67] In 2014, an archived social media page of Igor Girkin, a separatist rebel leader in Ukraine, showed him boasting about his troops having shot down a suspected Ukrainian military airplane before it became known that the plane actually was a civilian Malaysian Airlines jet (Malaysia Airlines Flight 17), after which he deleted the post and blamed Ukraine's military for downing the plane.^[67][68] In 2017, the March for Science originated from a discussion on Reddit that indicated someone had visited Archive.org and discovered that all references to climate change had been deleted from the White House website. In response, a user commented, "There needs to be a Scientists' March on Washington".^[69][70][71]

Furthermore, the site is used heavily for verification, providing access to references and content creation by Wikipedia editors.^[72]

In September 2020, a partnership was announced with Cloudflare to automatically archive websites served via its "Always Online" service, which will also allow it to direct users to its copy of the site if it cannot reach the original host.^[73]

Limitations

In 2014 there was a six-month lag time between when a website was crawled and when it became available for viewing in the Wayback Machine.^[74] Currently, the lag time is 3 to 10 hours.^[24] The Wayback Machine offers only limited search facilities. Its "Site Search" feature allows users to find a site based on words describing the site, rather than words found on the web pages themselves.^[75]

The Wayback Machine does not include every web page ever made due to the limitations of its web crawler. The Wayback Machine cannot completely archive web pages that contain interactive features such as Flash platforms and forms written in JavaScript and progressive web applications, because those functions require interaction with the host website. This means that, since approximately July 9, 2013, the Wayback Machine has been unable to display YouTube comments when saving videos' watch pages, as, according to the Archive Team, comments are no longer "loaded within the page itself."^[76] The Wayback Machine's web crawler has difficulty extracting anything not coded in HTML or one of its variants, which can often result in broken hyperlinks and missing images. Due to this, the web crawler cannot archive "orphan pages" that are not linked to by other pages.^[75][77] The Wayback Machine's crawler only follows a predetermined number of hyperlinks based on a preset depth limit, so it cannot archive every hyperlink on every page.^[23]

In legal evidence

Civil litigation

Netbula LLC v. Chordiant Software Inc.

In a 2009 case, Netbula, LLC v. Chordiant Software Inc., defendant Chordiant filed a motion to compel Netbula to disable the robots.txt file on its website that was causing the Wayback Machine to retroactively remove access to previous versions of pages it had archived from Netbula's site, pages that Chordiant believed would support its case.^[78]

Netbula objected to the motion on the ground that defendants were asking to alter Netbula's website and that they should have subpoenaed Internet Archive for the pages directly.^[79] An employee of Internet Archive filed a sworn statement supporting Chordiant's motion, however, stating that it could not produce the web pages by any other means "without considerable burden, expense and disruption to its operations."^[78]

Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd in the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, rejected Netbula's arguments and ordered them to disable the robots.txt blockage temporarily in order to allow Chordiant to retrieve the archived pages that they sought.^[78]

Telewizja Polska USA, Inc. v. Echostar Satellite

In an October 2004 case, Telewizja Polska USA, Inc. v. Echostar Satellite, No. 02 C 3293, 65 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 673 (N.D. Ill. October 15, 2004), a litigant attempted to use the Wayback Machine archives as a source of admissible evidence, perhaps for the first time. Telewizja Polska is the provider of TVP Polonia and EchoStar operates the Dish Network. Prior to the trial proceedings, EchoStar indicated that it intended to offer Wayback Machine snapshots as proof of the past content of Telewizja Polska's website. Telewizja Polska brought a motion in limine to suppress the snapshots on the grounds of hearsay and unauthenticated source, but Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Telewizja Polska's assertion of hearsay and denied TVP's motion in limine to exclude the evidence at trial.^[80][81] At the trial, however, District Court Judge Ronald Guzman, the trial judge, overruled Magistrate Keys' findings, and held that neither the affidavit of the Internet Archive employee nor the underlying pages (i.e., the Telewizja Polska website) were admissible as evidence. Judge Guzman reasoned that the employee's affidavit contained both hearsay and inconclusive supporting statements, and the purported web page, printouts were not self-authenticating.^[82][83]

Patent law

The United States patent office and the European Patent Office will accept date stamps from the Internet Archive as evidence of when a given Web page was accessible to the public. These dates are used to determine if a Web page is available as prior art for instance in examining a patent application.^[84]

Limitations of utility

There are technical limitations to archiving a website, and as a consequence, opposing parties in litigation can misuse the results provided by website archives. This problem can be exacerbated by the practice of submitting screenshots of web pages in complaints, answers, or expert witness reports when the underlying links are not exposed and therefore, can contain errors. For example, archives such as the Wayback Machine do not fill out forms and therefore, do not include the contents of non-RESTful e-commerce databases in their archives.^[85]

Discover more about Uses related topics

Igor Girkin

Igor Girkin

Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin, also known by the alias Igor Ivanovich Strelkov, is a Russian army veteran and former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who played a key role in the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and later the war in Donbas as an organizer of militant groups in the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR).

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17/MAS17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down by Russian-controlled forces on 17 July 2014, while flying over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. Contact with the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was lost when it was about 50 km (31 mi) from the Ukraine–Russia border, and wreckage from the aircraft fell near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40 km (25 mi) from the border. The shoot-down occurred during the war in Donbas over territory controlled by Russian separatist forces.

March for Science

March for Science

The March for Science is an international series of rallies and marches held on Earth Day. The inaugural march was held on April 22, 2017, in Washington, D.C., and more than 600 other cities across the world. According to organizers, the march is a non-partisan movement to celebrate science and the role it plays in everyday lives. The goals of the marches and rallies were to emphasize that science upholds the common good and to call for evidence-based policy in the public's best interest. The March for Science organizers, estimated global attendance at 1.07 million, with 100,000 participants estimated for the main March in Washington, D.C., 70,000 in Boston, 60,000 in Chicago, 50,000 in Los Angeles, 50,000 in San Francisco, 20,000 in Seattle, 14,000 in Phoenix, and 11,000 in Berlin.

Reddit

Reddit

Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "communities" or "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are not Reddit employees.

Climate change

Climate change

In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The current rise in global average temperature is more rapid than previous changes, and is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices increase greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide and methane. Greenhouse gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight. Larger amounts of these gases trap more heat in Earth's lower atmosphere, causing global warming.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, and DDoS mitigation. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California. According to The Hill, Cloudflare is used by more than 20 percent of the entire Internet for its web security services.

EchoStar

EchoStar

EchoStar Corporation is an American company, a worldwide provider of satellite communication and Internet services through its Hughes Network Systems and EchoStar Satellite Services business segments. EchoStar is based out of unincorporated Arapahoe County, Colorado.

Dish Network

Dish Network

DISH Network Corporation is an American television provider and the owner of the direct-broadcast satellite provider Dish, commonly known as Dish Network, and the over-the-top IPTV service, Sling TV. Additionally, Dish offers mobile wireless service, Dish Wireless. On July 1, 2020, Dish acquired prepaid service Boost Mobile and intends to add postpaid service as well in the future. Based out of unincorporated Douglas County, Colorado, the company has approximately 16,000 employees.

Hearsay

Hearsay

Hearsay evidence, in a legal forum, is testimony from an under-oath witness who is reciting an out-of-court statement, the content of which is being offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted. In most courts, hearsay evidence is inadmissible unless an exception to the hearsay rule applies.

Internet as a source of prior art

Internet as a source of prior art

In the context of patent law, using the Internet as a source of prior art when assessing whether an invention is novel and inventive, may be problematic if it is difficult to ascertain precisely when information on websites became available to the public.

European Patent Office

European Patent Office

The European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg), the other being the Administrative Council. The EPO acts as executive body for the organisation while the Administrative Council acts as its supervisory body as well as, to a limited extent, its legislative body. The actual legislative power to revise the European Patent Convention lies with the Contracting States themselves when meeting at a Conference of the Contracting States.

Prior art

Prior art

Prior art is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria for patentability. In most systems of patent law, prior art is generally defined as anything that is made available, or disclosed, to the public that might be relevant to a patent's claim before the effective filing date of a patent application for an invention. However, notable differences exist in how prior art is specifically defined under different national, regional, and international patent systems.

In Europe, the Wayback Machine could be interpreted as violating copyright laws. Only the content creator can decide where their content is published or duplicated, so the Archive would have to delete pages from its system upon request of the creator.^[86] The exclusion policies for the Wayback Machine may be found in the FAQ section of the site.^[87]

Some cases have been brought against the Internet Archive specifically for its Wayback Machine archiving efforts.

Scientology

In late 2002, the Internet Archive removed various sites that were critical of Scientology from the Wayback Machine.^[88] An error message stated that this was in response to a "request by the site owner".^[89] Later, it was clarified that lawyers from the Church of Scientology had demanded the removal and that the site owners did not want their material removed.^[90]

Healthcare Advocates, Inc.

In 2003, Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey defended a client from a trademark dispute using the Archive's Wayback Machine. The attorneys were able to demonstrate that the claims made by the plaintiff were invalid, based on the content of their website from several years prior. The plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates, then amended their complaint to include the Internet Archive, accusing the organization of copyright infringement as well as violations of the DMCA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Healthcare Advocates claimed that, since they had installed a robots.txt file on their website, even if after the initial lawsuit was filed, the Archive should have removed all previous copies of the plaintiff website from the Wayback Machine, however, some material continued to be publicly visible on Wayback.^[91] The lawsuit was settled out of court after Wayback fixed the problem.^[92]

Suzanne Shell

Activist Suzanne Shell filed suit in December 2005, demanding Internet Archive pay her US$100,000 for archiving her website profane-justice.org between 1999 and 2004.^[93][94] Internet Archive filed a declaratory judgment action in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on January 20, 2006, seeking a judicial determination that Internet Archive did not violate Shell's copyright. Shell responded and brought a countersuit against Internet Archive for archiving her site, which she alleges is in violation of her terms of service.^[95] On February 13, 2007, a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Colorado dismissed all counterclaims except breach of contract.^[94] The Internet Archive did not move to dismiss copyright infringement claims Shell asserted arising out of its copying activities, which would also go forward.^[96]

On April 25, 2007, Internet Archive and Suzanne Shell jointly announced the settlement of their lawsuit.^[93] The Internet Archive said it "...has no interest in including materials in the Wayback Machine of persons who do not wish to have their Web content archived. We recognize that Ms. Shell has a valid and enforceable copyright in her Web site and we regret that the inclusion of her Web site in the Wayback Machine resulted in this litigation." Shell said, "I respect the historical value of Internet Archive's goal. I never intended to interfere with that goal nor cause it any harm."^[97]

Daniel Davydiuk

Between 2013 and 2016, a pornographic actor named Daniel Davydiuk tried to remove archived images of himself from the Wayback Machine's archive, first by sending multiple DMCA requests to the archive, and then by appealing to the Federal Court of Canada.^{[98][99][100]} The images were then finally removed from the website in 2017.

FlexiSpy

In 2018, archives of stalkerware application FlexiSpy's website were removed from the Wayback Machine. The company claimed to have contacted the Internet Archive, presumably to remove the archives of its website.^[101]

Discover more about Archived content legal issues related topics

Scientology and the Internet

Scientology and the Internet

There are a number of disputes concerning the Church of Scientology's attempts to suppress material critical of Scientology and the organization on the Internet, utilizing various methods – primarily lawsuits and legal threats, as well as front organizations. In late 1994, the organization began using various legal tactics to stop distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The organization has often been accused of barratry through the filing of SLAPP suits. The organization's response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.

Scientology

Scientology

Scientology is a set of beliefs and practices invented by the American author L. Ron Hubbard, and an associated movement. It has been variously defined as a cult, a business, or a new religious movement. Its adherents are called Scientologists. The primary exponent of Scientology is the Church of Scientology, a centralized and hierarchical organization based in Florida, although many practitioners exist independently of the Church, in what is called the Free Zone. Estimates put the number of Scientologists at under 40,000 worldwide.

Church of Scientology

Church of Scientology

The Church of Scientology is a group of interconnected corporate entities and other organizations devoted to the practice, administration and dissemination of Scientology, which is variously defined as a cult, a business, or a new religious movement. The movement has been the subject of a number of controversies, and the Church of Scientology has been described by government inquiries, international parliamentary bodies, scholars, law lords, and numerous superior court judgements as both a dangerous cult and a manipulative profit-making business. In 1979, several executives of the organization were convicted and imprisoned for multiple offenses by a U.S. Federal Court. The Church of Scientology itself was convicted of fraud by a French court in 2009, a decision upheld by the supreme Court of Cassation in 2013. The German government classifies Scientology as an unconstitutional sect. In France, it has been classified as a dangerous cult. In some countries, it has attained legal recognition as a religion.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of online services for copyright infringement by their users.

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA) is a United States cybersecurity bill that was enacted in 1986 as an amendment to existing computer fraud law, which had been included in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. The law prohibits accessing a computer without authorization, or in excess of authorization. Prior to computer-specific criminal laws, computer crimes were prosecuted as mail and wire fraud, but the applying law was often insufficient.

Suzanne Shell

Suzanne Shell

Donna Suzanne Shell is an American activist critical of child protective services.

Declaratory judgment

Declaratory judgment

A declaratory judgment, also called a declaration, is the legal determination of a court that resolves legal uncertainty for the litigants. It is a form of legally binding preventive by which a party involved in an actual or possible legal matter can ask a court to conclusively rule on and affirm the rights, duties, or obligations of one or more parties in a civil dispute. The declaratory judgment is generally considered a statutory remedy and not an equitable remedy in the United States, and is thus not subject to equitable requirements, though there are analogies that can be found in the remedies granted by courts of equity. A declaratory judgment does not by itself order any action by a party, or imply damages or an injunction, although it may be accompanied by one or more other remedies.

Copyright

Copyright

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.

Breach of contract

Breach of contract

Breach of contract is a legal cause of action and a type of civil wrong, in which a binding agreement or bargained-for exchange is not honored by one or more of the parties to the contract by non-performance or interference with the other party's performance. Breach occurs when a party to a contract fails to fulfill its obligation(s), whether partially or wholly, as described in the contract, or communicates an intent to fail the obligation or otherwise appears not to be able to perform its obligation under the contract. Where there is breach of contract, the resulting damages have to be paid to the aggrieved party by the party breaching the contract.

Copyright infringement

Copyright infringement

Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works. The copyright holder is typically the work's creator, or a publisher or other business to whom copyright has been assigned. Copyright holders routinely invoke legal and technological measures to prevent and penalize copyright infringement.

Federal Court of Canada

Federal Court of Canada

The Federal Court of Canada, which succeeded the Exchequer Court of Canada in 1971, was a national court of Canada that had limited jurisdiction to hear certain types of disputes arising under the federal government's legislative jurisdiction. Originally composed of two divisions, the Appellate Division and the Trial Division, in 2003 the Court was split into two separate Courts, the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal. The jurisdiction and powers of the two courts remained largely unchanged from the predecessor divisions.

Stalkerware

Stalkerware

Stalkerware is monitoring software or spyware that is used for cyberstalking. The term was coined when people started to widely use commercial spyware to spy on their spouses or intimate partners. Stalkerware has been criticized because of its use by abusers, stalkers, and employers.

Archive.org is currently blocked in China.^[102][103] After the Islamic State terrorist organization was banned, the Internet Archive had been blocked in its entirety in Russia as a host of an outreach video from that organization, for a short time in 2015–16.^{[67][104][105]} Since 2016, the website has been back, available in its entirety, although local commercial lobbyists are suing the Internet Archive in a local court to ban it on copyright grounds.^[106]

Alison Macrina, director of the Library Freedom Project, notes that "while librarians deeply value individual privacy, we also strongly oppose censorship".^[67]

There is at least one case in which an article was removed from the archive shortly after it had been removed from its original website. A Daily Beast reporter had written an article that outed several gay Olympian athletes in 2016 after he had made a fake profile posing as a gay man on a dating app. The Daily Beast removed the article after it was met with widespread furor; not long after, the Internet Archive soon did as well, but emphatically stated that they did so for no other reason than to protect the safety of the outed athletes.^[67]

Other threats include natural disasters,^[107] destruction (remote or physical),^[108] manipulation of the archive's contents (see also: cyberattack, backup), problematic copyright laws^[109] and surveillance of the site's users.^[110]

Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, suspects that in the long term of multiple generations "next to nothing" will survive in a useful way, stating, "If we have continuity in our technological civilization, I suspect a lot of the bare data will remain findable and searchable. But I suspect almost nothing of the format in which it was delivered will be recognizable" because sites "with deep back-ends of content-management systems like Drupal and Ruby and Django" are harder to archive.^[111]

In an article reflecting on the preservation of human knowledge, The Atlantic has commented that the Internet Archive, which describes itself to be built for the long-term,^[112] "is working furiously to capture data before it disappears without any long-term infrastructure to speak of."^[113]

Discover more about Censorship and other threats related topics

Internet censorship in China

Internet censorship in China

China censors both the publishing and viewing of online material. Many controversial events are censored from news coverage, preventing many Chinese citizens from knowing about the actions of their government, and severely restricting freedom of the press. China's censorship includes the complete blockage of various websites, inspiring the policy's nickname, the "Great Firewall of China", which blocks websites. Methods used to block websites and pages include DNS spoofing, blocking access to IP addresses, analyzing and filtering URLs, packet inspection, and resetting connections.

Internet censorship in Russia

Internet censorship in Russia

In Russia, internet censorship is enforced on the basis of several laws and through several mechanisms. Since 2012, Russia maintains a centralized internet blacklist maintained by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor).

Alison Macrina

Alison Macrina

Alison Macrina is a librarian, internet activist, founder and executive director of the Library Freedom Project.

Library Freedom Project

Library Freedom Project

The Library Freedom Project teaches librarians about surveillance threats, privacy rights, and digital tools to thwart surveillance. In 2015 the Project began an endeavour to place relays and, particularly, exit nodes of the Tor anonymity network in public libraries.

The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast is an American news website focused on politics, media, and pop culture. Founded in 2008, the website is owned by IAC Inc.

Cyberattack

Cyberattack

A cyberattack is any offensive maneuver that targets computer information systems, computer networks, infrastructures, personal computer devices, or smartphones. An attacker is a person or process that attempts to access data, functions, or other restricted areas of the system without authorization, potentially with malicious intent. Depending on the context, cyberattacks can be part of cyber warfare or cyberterrorism. A cyberattack can be employed by sovereign states, individuals, groups, societies or organisations and it may originate from an anonymous source. A product that facilitates a cyberattack is sometimes called a cyber weapon. Cyberattacks have increased with an alarming rate for the last few years. A well-known example of a cyberattack is a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).

Backup

Backup

In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", whereas the noun and adjective form is "backup". Backups can be used to recover data after its loss from data deletion or corruption, or to recover data from an earlier time.  Backups provide a simple form of disaster recovery; however not all backup systems are able to reconstitute a computer system or other complex configuration such as a computer cluster, active directory server, or database server.

Long Now Foundation

Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation, established in 1996, is an American non-profit organization based in San Francisco that seeks to start and promote a long-term cultural institution. It aims to provide a counterpoint to what it views as today's "faster/cheaper" mindset and to promote "slower/better" thinking. The Long Now Foundation hopes to "creatively foster responsibility" in the framework of the next 10,000 years. In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem. The organization's logo is X, a capital X with an overline, a representation of 10,000 in Roman numerals.

The Atlantic

The Atlantic

The Atlantic is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.