by Charles Miller

Most tech web sites I consult have a policy of purging information that might be out of date. That is completely understandable because a lot of tech advice has a short shelf life and it is annoying to have to wade through pages of information no longer up to date. Still, there are times I want to find out something about an old software version or just to try to see what changed.

Since 1994 Archive.org has been actively chronicling a "permanent record" of the public internet: "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more." The internet, or rather the web, by its very nature is ephemeral. Web pages come and go; the front page of the New York Times web site changes by the hour, and once a page is gone it is gone... except. It is gone unless Archive.org has "crawled" the site and saved a quick snapshot of what that page looked like at a certain point in time.

I have to laugh every time I read some news report about this celebrity or that politician who posted something online then thought better of it. Many times I have read stories saying so-and-so "posted the following to their Facebook account then deleted it seconds later." There are services that for a price will instantly archive everything someone posts online; Archive.org does the same for the entire public internet on a delayed basis.

Even though it is not up-to-the-second updated, Archive.org, does provide a running public record of what has appeared online, and this has become an essential reference for journalists today. Knowing this, you may now start to recognize news stories that have used web archives to uncover how present narratives may conflict with past narratives. In this way Archive.org has become a check on deceitful historical revisionism of the kind that corporations, politicians, and even the mainstream media itself engage in regularly.

It has been reported that there have been several large-scale, sophisticated, and ongoing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyber-attacks directed at Archive.org in recent weeks. While Archive.org has not completely disappeared, for the first time in 30 years this service had to stop adding new records to its database.

Briefly; a DDoS cyber attack uses many thousands of computers to flood a web site with so many requests as to overwhelm and take down the site. So long as the attack continues, the target of the attack can be crippled and sometimes be kept off the internet completely.

The Archive.org site has been an immensely powerful tool for journalists as well as the rest of us to use for detecting hypocrisy. Prior to October 8 it was simple to go to Archive.org to fact-check news stories, but not now; and even if the DDoS attack abates so that Archive.org can function again there will be a gap for the last month.

So it is with a jaundiced eye to the curious timing that I note that this attack just happens to occur during the last month of the most contentious U.S. election of my lifetime. Surely it would not be some politicians wanting to make it more difficult for us to look up what they said yesterday, last month, or last year, would it?

Absent the ability to easily access the historical record it becomes more difficult to know the truth. George Orwell emphasized the massive power that the ability to re-write history confers on those who have that power.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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