RE: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/116015180016712361
I have been thinking for quite some time that we need a decentralized network for preserving public domain works. The #InternetArchive is important, but they are one single American organization and thus vulnerable (and the fact that they are playing fast and loose with copyright sometimes doesn't help). We need to spread those works out more.
For this year’s I Love Free Software Day I am co-organising two special events, and I am super excited about them!
#FreeSoftware #SoftwareFreedom #ILoveFS #ILoveFreeSoftware #ILoveFS #IloveFS26 #ournet #KnittingOurInternet #SnackbarFrieda #Rotterdam #Amsterdam #InternetArchive #InternetArchiveEurope #AZbook #Ada #AdaZangemann #reading #event #decentralizaion #InternetHistory #Internet
For this year’s I Love Free Software Day I am co-organising two special events, and I am super excited about them!
#FreeSoftware #SoftwareFreedom #ILoveFS #ILoveFreeSoftware #ILoveFS #IloveFS26 #ournet #KnittingOurInternet #SnackbarFrieda #Rotterdam #Amsterdam #InternetArchive #InternetArchiveEurope #AZbook #Ada #AdaZangemann #reading #event #decentralizaion #InternetHistory #Internet
"#News #publishers limit #InternetArchive access due to #AI scraping concerns."
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-internet-archive-access-due-to-ai-scraping-concerns/
PS: I'm one who thinks AI training on copyrighted content is #FairUse and (separate point) even desirable in the case of academic research.
https://fediscience.org/@petersuber/113443473594224752
But this kind of training will create huge collateral damage --indirectly through publisher action -- if it diminishes the @internetarchive.
There is someone who has taken a lot of old films and used AI to colorize them badly and "boosted" the frame rate from 24 to 60fps and then uploaded this trash to the Internet Archive.
I hate this. Films shot in b&w have an aesthetic that is destroyed by colorizing them. Video games might look better with more frames per second but movies don't. We didn't accidentally settle on 24fps, it was trial and error. A film shot in 60fps looks bad. A movie that has been artificially "boosted" to 60fps is an abomination and should be destroyed.
Working at #InternetArchive is helping my #DefensiveProgramming a lot. Situations like poweroutages, hard-drive failures, network congestion errors, etc that are once in a lifetime in other environments are encountered regularly for our code.
In that regard, the code reviews at the Core Infrastructure Engineering are highlighting the depth of problems that need to be tackled in our environment.
Back in 1993, I went to get another degree to just to get internet access, which was one of the few ways to get it back then. We had VAX and Unix, both fine platforms, hundreds of students would log in to one CPU from a terminal on campus or the house. We were connected to the world and communications were fast. I remember that's when the entire continent of Australia was connected by a pair of 2MB cables at the time. We had many distributed servers for news, email, IRC, gopher, etc, but it was lightning fast. Engineers at companies put tech documents on ftp servers. The internet was a big world library and the world was free. #JavaScript wasn't invented yet to slow us down or bury us in popups and advertisements. The entire internet was ad-free and advertising was a ban offense.
Then one morning I remember what would be known as #EternalSeptember, thanks to #AOL. And the #CanterSiegel spam happened. And the real cranks invaded. Many of us banned every .com address to regain sanity. This is when investors invaded the internet to hype it up into television quality. At least we still have #Wikipedia, #InternetArchive, and #Mastodon. Watching #Bluesky open up the floodgates to fascists was obvious to those of us who remember the past.
Back in 1993, I went to get another degree to just to get internet access, which was one of the few ways to get it back then. We had VAX and Unix, both fine platforms, hundreds of students would log in to one CPU from a terminal on campus or the house. We were connected to the world and communications were fast. I remember that's when the entire continent of Australia was connected by a pair of 2MB cables at the time. We had many distributed servers for news, email, IRC, gopher, etc, but it was lightning fast. Engineers at companies put tech documents on ftp servers. The internet was a big world library and the world was free. #JavaScript wasn't invented yet to slow us down or bury us in popups and advertisements. The entire internet was ad-free and advertising was a ban offense.
Then one morning I remember what would be known as #EternalSeptember, thanks to #AOL. And the #CanterSiegel spam happened. And the real cranks invaded. Many of us banned every .com address to regain sanity. This is when investors invaded the internet to hype it up into television quality. At least we still have #Wikipedia, #InternetArchive, and #Mastodon. Watching #Bluesky open up the floodgates to fascists was obvious to those of us who remember the past.
