Tag Archives: Venture Beat

In the news: Trump Archive, end-of-term preservation, & link rot

News outlets have been getting the word out on Internet Archive efforts to preserve President-elect Donald Trump’s statements; the outgoing Obama Administration’s web page and government data; as well as preventing that nasty experience of encountering a “404” when you click on a link online, aka “link rot.”

Trump Archive 

A number of journalists have been exploring the riches contained within the newly launched Trump Archive, a TV news clips of the president-elect speaking peppered with links to more than 500 fact checks by national fact-checking groups.

Annie Wiener, writing for The New Yorker, immerses herself in Trump statements and discovers 56 mentions of the escalator in Trump tower, and that Trump:

“is a fan of the word “sleaze,” and of the phrase “tough cookie,” which he has used to describe policemen, his opponents’ political donors, Paul LePage, “real-estate guys in New York and elsewhere,” an unnamed friend who is a “great financial guy,” isis, three professional football players, Reince Priebus, Lyndon Johnson, and Trump’s father, Fred. After watching long stretches of video, she writes, “It occurred to me that spending time online in the Trump Archive could be a form of immersion therapy: a means of overcoming shock through prolonged exposure.”

Geoffrey Fowler, tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal, bemoans the lack of easy-to-use tech tools to help people be responsible citizens overall, but also notes the promise–and challenge–of a curated collection like the Trump Archive:

“The Trump Archive shows what’s hard about using tech to hold officials accountable. It’s assembled and hand-curated by humans. Yet even using the transcripts, it can be hard to tell the difference between a spoken name and a person who’s actually speaking. Archive officials say making their database applicable to hundreds or thousands more politicians would require help from tech firms with capabilities in machine learning and voice and facial recognition.”

Fowler also published this video, featuring plenty of Trump, an interview with Roger Macdonald, director of the TV News Archive; and ample footage of the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters.

The Trump Archive also was featured in Marketplace Tech®, The HillForbesNewsweek, Buzzfeed News TechPlzVentureBeat, engadgetand more.

Preserving Obama Administration websites, social media

The Internet Archive’s efforts to help preserve government websites via the Wayback Machine during and after the transition has continued to garner attention. Wired reports on a group of climate scientists working against the clock to archive government websites related to global warming:

One half was setting web crawlers upon NOAA web pages that could be easily copied and sent to the Internet Archive. The other was working their way through the harder-to-crack data sets—the ones that fuel pages like the EPA’s incredibly detailed interactive map of greenhouse gas emissions, zoomable down to each high-emitting factory and power plant.

The New Scientist also writes on efforts to archive climate data:

Fears that data could be misused or altered have prompted crowd-sourcing to back up federal climate and environmental data, including Climate Mirror, a distributed volunteer effort supported by the Internet Archive and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto.

The Los Angeles Times and Quartz offer reports on archiving climate data.

Internet Archive works against link rot

Tech publications were quick to inform their readers about the Internet Archive’s new chrome extension that fights link rot by directing users to archived web pages. Here is Mashable:

Now Internet Archive has built a Wayback Machine Chrome extension. It works like this: If you click on a link that would normally lead to an error page (think 404), the extension will instead give users the option to load an archived version of the page. The link is no longer simply gone.

Also writing on the fight against link rot: NetworkWorldVenture BeatThe Tech PortalBleeping Computer, and ZDNet.

 

 

 

Internet Archive Canada and National Security Letter in the news: roundup

The Internet Archive garnered major media attention over the past week, first, on our plan to create a Canadian copy, and second, on the news we received a National Security Letter (NSL) requesting personal information about a user, the second in our history.

Canadian copy

Brewster Kahle’s post explaining why, in light of the new administration, the Internet Archive is raising money to build a copy of its collections in Canada hit a nerve.  More details were in a FAQ.

On November 29, Rachel Maddow led her MSNBC show with a segment about how the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine helps reporters by preserving a record of what politicians say online, even when they later delete it.

One of her main examples: how soon after winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump’s official federal transition web page included a “rundown ….of all of the ‘world’s top properties that Donald Trump’s owns.”

The website has since been deleted, Maddow noted.

Maddow also called the Internet Archive, a “national treasure…an international treasure.” (We’re blushing.)

Meanwhile, Paul Sawers noted in Venture Beat:

 Given that lies and fake news played a crucial part in the 2016 U.S. presidential election narrative, it is somewhat notable that the Internet Archive had launched the Political TV Ad Archive back in January to help journalists fact-check claims made during political campaigning.

In The Washington Times, Andrew Blake wrote about the Internet Archive’s plans to create a Canadian copy and also reported:

Mr. Trump’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Prior to being elected president, however, the Republican businessman suggested taking action to prevent Americans from becoming radicalized online by the Islamic State terror group’s social media recruitment efforts.

Here’s a link to Trump’s speech referenced by The Washington Times.

Sam Thielman reported in The Guardian on challenges facing libraries generally, including the Internet Archive’s decision to create a Canadian copy of data. The piece also discusses how the New York Public Library has changed its privacy policies to assure readers that it will not keep user data longer than expected.

Other media outlets reporting on the Internet Archive’s news include NBC News, the BBC, the New RepublicRecode Daily, and Newsweek.

Increasing transparency on National Security Letters

Last week the Internet Archive also revealed we received a National Security Letter (NSL), requesting we turn over personal information about a particular user, the second in our history. We worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to challenge the letter and gain the right to release it in redacted form; in the process, we also highlighted an error in the NSL about the right to appeal, which may have affected thousands of other letters.

Kim Zetter, a reporter for The Intercept, reported at length about how the Internet Archive took the unusual step of challenging the NSL–and won:

Now, Kahle and the archive are notching another victory, one that underlines the progress their original fight helped set in motion. The archive, a nonprofit online library, has disclosed that it received another NSL in August, its first since the one it received and fought in 2007. Once again it pushed back, but this time events unfolded differently: The archive was able to challenge the NSL and gag order directly in a letter to the FBI, rather than through a secretive lawsuit. In November, the bureau again backed down and, without a protracted battle, has now allowed the archive to publish the NSL in redacted form.

Dhrumil Mehta of FiveThirtyEight.com reported on the error exposed by the Internet Archive and the EFF–namely, the NSL incorrectly described the means for possible appeals of the gag order preventing an organization that has received such a letter from publicizing it. Mehta has filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) to find out how many letters sent out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) contain this error:

This letter was particularly troublesome to privacy advocates because it contained misinformation about the rights of a letter recipient to challenge the nondisclosure requirement. The letter stated that the Internet Archive could “make an annual challenge to the nondisclosure requirement.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy organization that is legally representing the Internet Archive, pointed out in a press release that the passage of the USA Freedom Act in June of 2015 changed the law to allow letter recipients to challenge the National Security Letter at any time, not just once annually. In response to the EFF’s claim, the FBI withdrew its National Security Letter, allowed the Internet Archive to publish a redacted version of the letter containing the error and promised to correct the mistake by informing everyone else who got the same erroneous language.

It’s not just us

Tim Johnson of McClatchyDC drew all the themes together, linking the Internet Archive’s Canada announcement, the news on the NSL, and actions other library organizations are taking, all in one piece.

It turns out the nonprofit Internet Archive isn’t alone in taking action.

The New York Public Library announced a change this week to its privacy policy, informing users that it would retain less information about their activities.

The American Library Association, headquartered in Chicago, embraced that move and encourages others, including telling public libraries to encrypt all communications and lock up stored data to protect it from a prying government.