Internet Archive Blogs

Isn’t the web distributed now?  No really, let me illustrate– ever IM your friend that is near you “Hey, wanna see a cool video?  check out this URL”?  Then they download the same video you just downloaded from the original server even though it might be a long way away, rather than from your machine.   This is slow, expensive, wasteful, and well, dumb.

What if, with no browser or server config other than maybe downloading a plug-in:

• all bigger files come from the folks near you or the original server, whatever is faster?
• What if the website gets to keep download counts, and keep their website up-to-date.
•  Website gets get reduced bandwidth bills, and get superstar user satisfaction because of faster speed than YouTube
•  Web users, even in remote countries, get that “I am sitting on a gig-e network in palo alto” feel.
•  Less money goes to monopoly phone companies.

Is a real problem?  Yes:

• Internet Archive servers 2million people each day.   Egyptians and Japanese are two of our most popular user communities.
• They download the same files over and over.    There is someone with the file that is closer to them than us.
• the 20gigabits/sec of bandwidth costs us a fortune.
• others want to serve video, but don’t because of the cost.
• others host on youtube, or amazon, or archive.org but would rather not.

Would be great, right?   What it takes:

•   A browser plug-in, and eventually get the browsers to do it natively.
•   When a user clicks, the browser starts downloading from a site (the site then gets the download credit)
•   Website serves unique hash for the file and the length of the file in the header and then serves the file as normal (archive.org and other sites do this already)
•   Browser looks up the hashcode in a “trackerless p2p” system, I think bittorrent can be used for this.
•   If others have it via p2p, then it gets it from those users as well, so it is not slower than getting it from the website
•   After the browser downloads it, they offer it to others via p2p.

What do we get?

•   Less expense for web site owners operators, but keeps them in control and in the loop
•   Faster and less expensive for users
•   More sites taking control of their own stuff (don’t need to give your files to remote organizations)
•   Being far from the server is not as much of a penalty

Who can help?

•   people that can help debug the idea (and maybe it is already done…)
•   browser plug-in programmers
•   p2p super distributed trackerless hashcode knowledgable folks
•   the Internet Archive will seed all of its files for this system.
•   we need enthusiasm, a cool logo/mascot, and coffee.

Please comment on this post as a first round to see if we can debug the idea and get critical mass.

-brewster

You want it, you got it!  Happy 200th Mr. Charles Dickens.

1,345 books

a few movies:
Oliver Twist
Scrooge
A Christmas Carol

96 audio items

Rick Prelinger will be presenting his latest version of Lost Landscapes of San Francisco at the Internet Archive.

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 6 (2011) is the latest in a series of historical urban explorations, made from home movies, industrial and promotional films and outtakes, and other cinematic ephemera. It sold out the Castro Theatre in December, and this will be its second screening. YOU are the soundtrack. Please come prepared to shout out your identifications, ask questions about what’s on the screen, and share your thoughts with fellow audience members.

Most of the footage in this program has not been shown before. It includes footage of San Francisco’s cemeteries just before their removal, unique drive-thru footage of the Old Produce Market (now Golden Gateway) in the late 1940s, cruising the newly-built Embarcadero Freeway, grungy back streets in North Beach, the sandswept Sunset District in the 1930s, and newly-rediscovered Cinemascope footage of Playland, the Sky Tram and San Francisco scenes, all in Kodachrome.

Suggested admission for the screening: $5 bucks — or 5 books, which will be donated to Internet Archive’s book scanning project. Reservations are required, the event frequently sells out.

What: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 6
When: Jan 24, 2012, 7:30pm
Where: Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118
Contact: rsvp@archive.org

San Francisco, CA – On January 18, 2012, Internet Archive joined the thousands of internet websites that went dark in protest of the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation.
12 Hours Dark: Internet Archive vs. Censorship

Hackers & Founders organized a protest in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza. They joined forces with tech meetup organizers around the country to hold rallies in New York, Washington DC, Seattle and Silicon Valley to put a public face to the online protests and blackouts.

Speaking at the San Francisco event were many local luminaries including Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, Ron Conway, Jonathan Nelson, MC Hammer, Caterina Fake and others.

Brewster Kahle speaks at the PIPA / SOPA Protest in San Francisco

A digital collection on the January 2012 web blackout in protest of the SOPA and PIPA legislation being considered by the US Congress. Internet Archive’s Archive-It created a collection of websites related to this protest including those participating in the blackout as well as commentary and news surrounding the event. Thanks to Library of Congress and other colleagues for their url contributions.

How to operate your brain

This piece, featuring Timothy Leary, is from a series of video shorts produced by Retinalogic in the nineties.

It seems more like the sixties than the nineties (perhaps that was the intention?), and it’s long on form and short on content, but nevertheless makes for amusing viewing.

http://www.archive.org/details/Timothy_Leary_Archives_141.dv

— recommended by Dirk Lavitz

Handy farm devices and how to make them (1912)

I liked last week’s recommendation of Modern Hardware for Your Home, but prefer this book for a look at a long gone agrarian way of life.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924080109832

— recommended by Helen Swanson

Internet Archive Statusboard

How did we amass a library of over three million books? In large part, by carefully scanning one book at a time. If you want to know what the most recent to our library is, visit the status board.

http://statusboard.archive.org/

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

In the Suburbs (1957)

A look at suburbia sponsored by Redbook:

Here is a priceless view of the socio-economic conditions which led to what we now have to live with.

— recommended by David Cox

http://www.archive.org/details/IntheSub1957

Eiffel Tower

You probably know what the Eiffel Tower looks like; here’s what it sounds like. Since 1889, the world has assumed they knew the famous Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. Artist China Blue has proven them wrong. In October of 2007, China Blue, along with her technical team headed by auditory neuroscientist Seth Horowitz, discovered that it is a living, constantly fluxing iron organism: a living thing with its own song, derived from the structural vibrations as it responds to its environment. The Tower produces a pulsing range of sounds, from the subsonic vibrations of the iron born from footsteps, motors and the wind, to the hum of the steel chariots in the machine room, to the human voices that surround her.

http://www.archive.org/details/EiffelTower

— recommended by Alain Bresson

Modern Hardware for Your Home (ca. 1925)

You may think your home is full of modern technology, and it is. But “modern” is relative; here’s what a modern home might have had almost ninety years ago.

http://www.archive.org/details/ModernHardwareForYourHome

— recommended by Sarah Burke

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

Scrooge (1935)

Ah, who conveys the holiday spirit better than Scrooge?

This is the original English version, some fifteen minutes longer than the version edited for Americans with short attention span.

http://www.archive.org/details/Scrooge1935

— recommended by Leslie Graham

Little Master’s English-Telegu Dictionary

I thought I was one of the few Internet Archive users who’d want an English-Telegu dictionary, but I see it’s been downloaded over 30,000 times … way to go!

http://www.archive.org/details/englishtelugudic020994mbp

— recommended by Indira Hiebert

Hanukkah O Hanukkah

Is there an antidote to too many Christmas carols? Probably not, but, if there is, it might just be Mista Cookie Jar’s rendition of Hanukkah O Hanukkah.

http://www.archive.org/details/HanukkahOHanukkah

— recommended by Yoshi Batlan

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

The animal kingdom, arranged according to its organization, serving as a foundation for the natural history of animals : and an introduction to comparative anatomy (1834)

Once upon a time, a time before learned scientists talked about string theory and living in eleven dimensions, there was an age in which we knew about our world with certainty. And in the case of this book, we could list and illustrate those things, even though the oldest photograph in the world wasn’t even a decade old. The book promises “with pictures designed after nature,” and delivers.

http://www.archive.org/details/animalkingdomarr03cuvi

— recommended by Stefano Olieri

The Conet Project—Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations

If you thought advances in telecommunication, encrypted email, and other new technologies obviated the need for short wave radio, then it’s time to think again. Here are a few lines from the introduction to this remarkable collection.

For more than 30 years, the shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the world’s intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations. Why has the phenomenon of Numbers Stations  gone almost totally unreported? What are the agencies behind the Numbers Stations, and why are the eastern European stations still on the air? Why does the Czech republic operate a Numbers Station 24 hours a day? How is it that Numbers Stations are allowed to interfere with essential radio services like air traffic control and shipping without having to answer to anybody? Why does the Swedish Rhapsody Numbers Station use a small girl’s voice?

http://www.archive.org/details/ird059

— recommended by Sarah Dillman

Mission Mind Control (July 10, 1979)

“This is the story of a thirty-year search by U.S. intelligence agencies to perfect mind control.” That’s how this 1970 ABC News documentary begins, after an unmistakably seventies musical introduction.

The film, part of the Archive’s FedFlix collecyion, hasn’t aged well, which is part of its appeal. With no pun intended, what a trip!

http://www.archive.org/details/FedFlix

— recommended by Alexis Rossi

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

One of the many things I enjoy about being an artist in residence at the Internet Archive is the access to myriad resources. For a recent piece, I downloaded all one hundred and fifty-four of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I then selected the thirty-six poems with prime numbers. After that, I deleted the all the characters in them except for the first seven letters of the alphabet, which correspond to the letters of the musical scale. Here’s what Shakespeare’s seventh sonnet looks like after my editing.

eeeegacg
fbgeadeacdeee
dageeaeagg
egacedae
adagcbdeeeeae
eebggddeage
eaadebea
aedggdegage
befgceaca
efeebeageeeeefeda
eeefedeceedae
facadaea
efgg
ddeegea

I didn’t know how to convert the characters to music, but Aaron Ximm did. He showed me the P22 Music Text Composition Generator, which I used to convert the sonnets into thirty-six little pieces of music. I then assigned four sonnets worth of music to one voice in a nonet: piano, harpsichord, clavichord, celesta, organ, violin, viola, cello, and bass.

The end result was a seven minute piece in four movements that’s every bit as boring as it sounds. Having said that, I liked it. It’s like Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno said, “The tedium is the message.”

—David Glenn Rinehart

Compute Magazine

The first issue of Compute Magazine from 1979 provides an interesting perspective on the birth of the personal computer industry. For example, there’s an ad for an eight-inch floppy drive for $1,295 ($3,800 adjusted for inflation).

http://www.archive.org/stream/1979-Fall-compute-magazine/Compute_Issue_001_1979_Fall#page/n0/mode/2up

— recommended by Milton Jones

Sugar Rice Krinkles advertisement

Ever wonder where coulrophobia comes from?

This creepy clown is just one of the bizarre ads in Duke University’s Adviews collection, hosted at the Internet Archive.

http://www.archive.org/details/dmbb02005

— recommended by Steve Barton

Mission of Burma Live at Maxwell’s on 5 December 2010

This recording from a year ago today features a premiere of a new song and several covers of old favorites in addition to the band’s warhorses.

http://www.archive.org/details/mob2010-12-05.maxwells_acidjack

— recommended by Harriet Hammer

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

Here’s Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand’s summary of Wednesday night’s talk.

Universal access to all knowledge, [Internet Archive founder] Kahle declared, will be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. We are already well on the way. “We’re building the Library of Alexandria, version two. We can one-up the Greeks!”

Start with what the ancient library had—books. The Internet Archive already has three million books digitized. With twenty-nine scanning 29 centers around the world, they’re digitizing a thousand books a day.

As for music, when the Internet Archive offers music makers free, unlimited storage of their works forever, and the music poured in. The Archive audio collection has 100,000 concerts so far (including all the Grateful Dead) and a million recordings, with three new bands uploading every day.

Moving images. The 150,000 commercial movies ever made are tightly controlled, but 2 million other films are readily available and fascinating—600,000 of them are accessible in the Archive already. In the year 2000, without asking anyone’s permission, the Internet Archive started recording 20 channels of TV all day, every day. When 9/11 happened, they were able to assemble an online archive of TV news coverage from around the world (“TV comes with a point of view!”) and make it available just a month after the event on Oct. 11, 2001.

The Web itself. When the Internet Archive began in 1996, there were just 30 million web pages. Now the Wayback Machine copies every page of every website every two months and makes them time-searchable from its six-petabyte database of 150 billion pages. It has 500,000 users a day making 6,000 queries a second.

“What is the Library of Alexandria most famous for?” Kahle asked. “For burning! It’s all gone!” To maintain digital archives, they have to be used and loved, with every byte migrated forward into new media every five years. For backup, the whole Internet Archive is mirrored at the new Bibliotheca Alexadrina in Egypt and in Amsterdam. (“So our earthquake zone archive is backed up in the turbulent Mideast and a flood zone. I won’t sleep well until there are five or six backup sites.”)

Speaking of institutional longevity, Kahle noted during the Q & A that nonprofits demonstrably live much longer than businesses. It might be it’s because they have softer edges, he surmised, or that they’re free of the grow-or-die demands of commercial competition. Whatever the cause, they are proliferating.

—Stewart Brand

Man-Eaters of Kumaon

I was shooting with Eddie Knowles in Malani when I first heard of the tiger which later received the official recognition as the “Chapawat man-eater.”

That’s how Jim Corbett began his 1944 book, Man-Eaters Of Kumaon. On one hand, it’s an interesting, suspenseful page-turner. On the other hand, it’s also a glimpse in the colonialists’ view of Africa that’s alternately amusing and disturbing.

http://www.archive.org/details/maneatersofkumao029903mbp

— recommended by Boulaye Traore

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique”

The inimitable style of Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra more than compensates for the less than optimal audio quality of this 1938 recording. Definitely worth a listen if you think all recordings sound more or less the same.

http://www.archive.org/details/TchaikovskySymphonyNo.6pathtique

— recommended by Byron Hansen

Earth Time-Lapse View from Space

This is so cool.

I had to convince my daughter that the aurora borealis in the video is real and not CGI. Also, the lightning is awesome.

http://www.archive.org/details/EarthTimeLapseViewfromSpace

— recommended by Jeff Kaplan

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

Cluck Ol’ Hen

Another is this first or possibly second known recording of the classic fiddle tune Cluck Ol’ Hen from Fiddlin’ Powers. Simple and repetitive, but is has a bounce that I don’t hear in any other versions since. We’re fortunate this authentic Americana was preserved.

http://www.archive.org/details/FidilinPowers-CluckOldHen1925edison78RpmRecord

— recommended by John Littleton

Five Minutes To Live (1961)

This film is one of my favorites.

I’m a fan of Americana music, so this movie with Johnny Cash and Merle Travis is classic. Travis plays the music that Cash is pretending to play. Throw in Vic Tayback and Ron Howard pre-Opie as Johnny Cash’s hostage and well, does it get any better or weirder than that.

http://www.archive.org/details/Five_Minutes_To_Live.avi

— recommended by Jeff Kaplan

Goody Two Shoes

Ever wonder where the phrase “Goody Two Shoes” came from? Goody Two Shoes was first published in 1765. This 1888 edition is only twenty pages long with lots of illustrations; it’s a perfect read for anyone with a short attention span and/or curious about one of the footnotes of popular culture.

http://www.archive.org/details/goodytwoshoes00newyiala

— recommended by Marcus Lucero

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart