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

Very pleased to finally with some coffee just make it javascript “inline reply” right at the post you are looking at, so you can reference everything you were just thinking about and how you were going to reply.

It gracefully degrades to prior behaviour for those without javascript enabled.

[The prior behaviour:
Ooh, nice post and points.
But I gotta get in there with some comments... OK, I have some ideas ready to type...
[reply button]
Say, is that Jane’s Addiction old stuff coming up on random play, I like this…
oh crap, what was I going to say again?
what post was I looking at again?
Say, is that a lower-than-normal plane flying outside?
…
]

1,345 books

a few movies:
Oliver Twist
Scrooge
A Christmas Carol

96 audio items

Standing room only for Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscape of San Francisco 6 at the Internet Archive last night.   New films including “process plates” from studios brought a new sharpness to many of the films presented.   Suggested donations was 5 bucks or 5 books, and people brought lots of great books for the Archive.

Next is Lost Landscapes of Detroit on February 22, 2012– this is Detroit without the narratives being imposed on it.   Doors open at 6:30, show at 7:30.

Thank you all!

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

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.

Archive.org is going dark for US residents from 8:00 am – 8:00 pm PDT on Wednesday January 18 (14:00 – 02:00 GMT) to drive a message to Washington.   We need your help to do this.

Legislation such as this directly affects libraries (pdf) such as the Internet Archive, which collects, preserves, and offers access to cultural materials.   Furthermore, these laws can negatively affect the ecosystem of web publishing that led to the emergence of the Internet Archive.

These bills would encourage the development of blacklists to censor sites with little recourse or due process.   The Internet Archive is already blacklisted in China—let’s prevent the United States from establishing its own blacklist system.

For United States residents, please take action.

For non-US residents: Sorry for dragging you into this, and if you are willing, sign a petition to the State Department to express your concern.

–Internet Archive

Some coverage: BayCitizen,
Archive at SF protest.

You can see it in action now with our upcoming embed codes to go with this new player.

It will allow for additional much wanted features like:
- off-site playlists
- fullscreen in many cases
- subtitles/captions

as well as the standard arbitrary width/height and “autoplay” options.

You can see some examples here:

http://www.archive.org/help/video.php

The rest is coming soon (if you are eager, you can even “opt in” now by clicking here:

http://www.archive.org/details/movies&newplayer=jw

(then take a look at one of your favorite items).

Now relax, sit back, and enjoy an archive video!

Cheers!
–tracey

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

This exhibit includes content from Internet Archive’s television collections, Mosaic: World News from the Middle East and Scola.

You may also be interested in the Understanding 9/11 Television News Archive.