Geocities To Be Made Available As a 900GB Torrent 215
An anonymous reader writes "Felt a shortage of the blink tag in your life lately? Well, have no fear. One year after Geocities was shut down in a cost-cutting move by Yahoo, a group self-styled as 'The Archive Team' have announced they will be releasing a ~900GB torrent file archive. It doesn't have every single site, but they believe they got most of it. The team believes that it's important to not just delete our digital culture, and as crazy as Geocities may have been, it was an important cultural milestone in the history of showing that anyone could create content online."
might be interesting to host it? (Score:4, Interesting)
if I had the bandwidth for a good price, I'd consider it.
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seed plz !
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Torrents, not just for Linux .iso's any more.
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Considering that I'm already seeding a certain 790 GiB torrent [nyaatorrents.org] this shouldn't be a big deal.
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What's a .tta file?
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True Audio [wikipedia.org]
Lossless, open source, etc.
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It's a series of shooter-type games created by a lone Japanese developer. And because it's Japanese, there are apparently lots of cute Anime-style girls involved somehow. No idea beyond that.
Re:might be interesting to host it? (Score:4, Insightful)
why not host it on the same distributed system you will get the content from? P2P.
I am sure there has already been developed something like this (and if not, there is probably a reason on why its a bad idea), and I suspect there are many drawbacks like high latency, low bandwidth/throughput meaning very slow page loads etc...
I'm too lazy to look it up now, but just putting this thought out:
But why not just make some websites run on the same distributed DHTs such as Vuze or other existing P2P technologies?
We'd all be sharing part of the content and everyone would be able to access the content too (eventually), resulting in (slow) low-cost, ideally SPOF-free web hosting.
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Why reinvent the wheel?
FreeNet does this already. It's mainly marketed towards evading censorship by distributing content in a way that is very hard to shut down and track. However, its architecture is very well suited to doing exactly what you want, having content intelligently hosted by a large number of independent nodes. The anonymity and privacy would just be bonus in this case.
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However, its architecture is very well suited to doing exactly what you want, having content intelligently hosted by a large number of independent nodes.
Seriously, have you tried it? If you don't need anonymity, then Freenet is extremely underperforming and extremely dumb. A much better solution for this use case would simply be to create a special torrent client that would only store say 5% of the torrent, because you have global statistics at the tracker each new peer will download the rarest parts so in total you'd have a full seed. It could be trivially adjusted to work across many torrents, so that it'd continuously choose the least populated torrents
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Ok, so Freenet is not dumb it's blind. It's got plenty intelligence in trying to navigate in the dark, but it doesn't come close to a tracker that keeps an overview over who and how many have each piece. All the guesswork you do on Freenet can basically be replaced with "Part 252 exists in 12 copies. The IPs that have it are: aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd, ...." The performance would be just like a normal torrent because it would make direct connections, not via tons of other nodes. You could download the whole thing wit
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I object.
I was told my website would be deleted, and now I'm learning that didn't happen? There are certain things (like my resume) that I'd like to see disappeared. I wasn't expecting anyone to come along and store it for the next hundred years. Oh well.
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What, that summer spent working as a Chippendale's dancer isn't helping to land the corner office? And it seemed like pure CV win at the time!
Re:might be interesting to host it? (Score:5, Informative)
Already done. http://geociti.es/ [geociti.es]
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They don't have me, http://geociti.es/Heartland/Hills/5791 [geociti.es] but archive.org does. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/5791 [archive.org]
Its just scary that a page I created 15 years ago, and last updated ten years ago, is being archived. I had almost forgotten I had Geocities before this article. Thanks for bringing back memories I would perfer to forget.
This was pretty much how I shared links with friends before Facebook - I was just nieve enough to think that everyone in the world was a
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Now if only I could remember where my ancient geocities site was. I had animated gif with transparency rotating under construction banners and renderings of model spacecraft I made on a pirated copy of 3ds Max 2, even had a VRML of one.
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http://www.geocities.ws/ [geocities.ws] has been doing it for a while already.
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Hey, how about Yahoo?
Well, crap (Score:5, Funny)
And now my early-teen horrible taste and design ability will live forever in it's terrible FrontPage '97 designed glory. Hallelujah!
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If you think a 250GB monthly cap is bad, don't even read about the ones in Canada.
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I use Shaw and while they like to throttle my downloads when I am downloading a ton of stuff it's not a big deal to me. I'm a binge torrenter. :p
I second the GP's post that it needs to be indexed. I don't recall the address of the Geocities page I had, although I do recall it hasn't been touched since just before 9/11. it would be nice to see how messy a site I did have.
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There's a monthly cap? oh damn
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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There are a few geocities sites that I've seen that were quite well done. I was wary when I first clicked on those links, but they turned out half decent informative pages.
And really, those geocities pages are just like what pages used to look like o
scams from spam (Score:2)
Download the internet (Score:5, Funny)
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Could you print that for me?
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Hurrah, I can get my Jumanji fan site back!
I see TFA thinks to ask the same question I did (Score:5, Insightful)
In this insanely litigious society, I wonder what kind of copyright release (from all the grillions of Geocities content copyright holders) these "Archive" chaps got? I hope it doesn't come back to bite them.
On an unrelated note, anyone wanna bet how many megabytes of this 1TB torrent is <blink> tags and "under construction" GIFs?
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I don't think you can be sued for copying a web page to a file... If so, browsers better take out that page view source functionality because it makes it all too easy.
If you were to perhaps actually host a website, with some of the infringing material, then I think you might have grounds. But an archive of it all? I doubt it.
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That depends though - right? I mean Tenenbaum was sued for the downloading AND sharing, wasn't he?
I mean they were essentially distributing their website for free online anyways, and its long been shut down, so its not like they are losing any money, so no damages can be set. At what point do you have a case to bring in front of a judge? It's copyrighted and being distributed therefor I need moneys? Like I said before - I could see someone using their copyrighted designs and that might cause damages to any
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I mean they were essentially distributing their website for free online anyways, and its long been shut down, so its not like they are losing any money, so no damages can be set. At what point do you have a case to bring in front of a judge? It's copyrighted and being distributed therefor I need moneys? Like I said before - I could see someone using their copyrighted designs and that might cause damages to any new sites they might have launched after Geocities came down.
Under the current copyright laws, no damages have to be proven - the law allows the rights holder to sue for statutory damages [wikipedia.org], without a single bit of actual evidence that they were actually harmed in any way by the infringement. This is how the RIAA companies are able to sue people like Jammie Thomas and get damages of $80k per work infringed.
(Note that in the Capitol v. Thomas [wikipedia.org] case it's pretty unlikely that they'll ever get any actual money from her, and even if the outrageous award was actually paid pr
Re:I see TFA thinks to ask the same question I did (Score:5, Funny)
To answer your question: http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/ [textfiles.com]
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And yes, I kno
Re:I see TFA thinks to ask the same question I did (Score:4, Informative)
In this insanely litigious society, I wonder what kind of copyright release (from all the grillions of Geocities content copyright holders) these "Archive" chaps got? I hope it doesn't come back to bite them.
There's already precedent with archive.org [archive.org] and Google's caching of web pages. Google was actually sued and won in this regard.
Well finallly! (Score:3, Funny)
I have a way of getting those old files back. 900 GB. Let's see. Gotta be in there somewhere....
And to think. (Score:3, Insightful)
It all can be stored on a drive that costs less then $100.
Now is that 900GB compressed or not? not compressed it would be a few hundred dollars for a RAID.
Geocities was important (Score:4, Insightful)
It basically told everyone how the internet as the web as a whole would be laid out, from a users perspective, not a technology perspective.
.
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Neat! (Score:3, Funny)
I'm ALWAYS looking for ways to make my ISP hate me!
Or, maybe not me... how about my neighbor with the unsecured wireless?
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Do you hate your neighbor? Are you prepared to pay his bill if he ever finds out?
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Bill for what?
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For going over his monthly download cap.
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Oh, well, that sucks for him. Not everyone has that problem. Or are you just assuming?
Next-generation .torrent needed? (Score:2)
If the torrent file were itself filterable in any reasonably non-labor intensive way, this would be pretty cool for scraping the 0.001% of Geocities that might be worth my while. (I'm not slamming the content authors for Geocities; everyone has a different 0.001% that is worth their while). We can already select individual files with in a torrent and avoid downloading the entire thing, but being able to select those files through keywords or regex or indexed search results rather than manually clicking a
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Shouldn't the files be in folders, meaning you can already at least target a single website?
Re:Next-generation .torrent needed? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure this torrent would be much larger if geocities page authors didn't have so many broken image links included.
I'm sure the file would be much SMALLER if they could consolidate all the animated GIFs of the stick figure guy digging into the ground. In fact, with all the stupid animated GIFs, and about 5 sparkly backgrounds, easily compressible instances of text like "I LIKE CHRIS FARLEY", This could be a 20 meg file.
900 Gigs of Geocities. Awesome. (Score:2)
Or awful. Or both.
This justifies the invention of the internet.
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
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On the contrary, the web must forget (Score:5, Insightful)
There's been a growing counter sentiment that I think is correct. Not only is it wrong that we must preserve everything, we should probably forget most things.
Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.
Human societies have this nice ability to forget. If you say something really horrible to me today, I'll be mad about it for a while, then get over it. Archiving everything means keeping this sort of thing around forever. Should we really? What's the benefit? It's not accountability. I've said stupid things online, at this point almost 20 years ago, that I now recognize to be stupid things. They aren't sentiments held by me today. Reading them today will cause you to think and feel things about me, when they were written by a quite different person. This is going to be all too common in the future when people are online in their childhood, when saying stupid things that will later embarass you is quite common, if not a daily occurrence.
In short, sure, we should remember our digital culture, but we should also throw out our digital garbage.
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I think everyone can think of a webpage (might not be Geocites) that has valuable information that has since closed. Plus, Geocites was a publishing service, these weren't like grocery lists but rather like little novels. Yeah, the content might be crap but it contains valuable information which shouldn't simply be deleted.
Plus, its becoming increasingly easier to store information. 10 years ago everyone would hav
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Saving Geocites preserves "web 1.0" the time when anyone could make a webpage for the first time. While it might seem like trash to us, it might later provide valuable insight into cultures of the late 20th and early 21st century.
This is the same logic that a packrat friend of mine uses when she doesn't want to throw away ANYTHING. "It is useful and valuable." Yeah? Really? If it's so useful and valuable, why the heck is it sitting in your closet/attic/basement/etc? If you haven't touched something in the past year, you don't need it. I promise you. (The only exception being something like photographs which are designed to preserve memories. The entire point of those is keeping them.)
People keep way too much junk because they are af
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This is the same logic that a packrat friend of mine uses when she doesn't want to throw away ANYTHING. "It is useful and valuable." Yeah? Really? If it's so useful and valuable, why the heck is it sitting in your closet/attic/basement/etc?
I'm sure some ancient Roman packrat had her friends bitching about the empty bottles and amphoras they kept in their basement, yet today archaeologists are thanking her for thereby allowing them to determine much about the diet and patterns of trade in that part of the world in that time.
Obviously the odds of some random piece of junk in your basement being useful to archaeologists in 2000 years are slim, but stashing away old digitial data is far closer to the ancient Roman packrat example.
Re:On the contrary, the web must forget (Score:4, Insightful)
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If you routinely make new things or repair old things, it's a good idea to tech hoard or keep random junk because it will likely come in handy down the road.
Re:On the contrary, the web must forget (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and and for an example in the digital realm: the Apollo Guidance Computer is now flying Apollo spacecraft around the Earth and Moon in simulators, which was possible primarily because packrats kept old software listings in their basement for decades which were scanned, OCR-ed and then hand-fixed where required in order to recreate the original binaries to run in an emulator. The Saturn guidance computer which put the Apollo spacecraft into orbit is not, because there were no packrats to keep the software and IBM appears to have thrown it away or lost it.
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Hard drive space is only getting cheaper. 900 GB isn't all that much anymore.
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I understand what you are saying and I agree their is some value in forgetting. Trouble is we have a wheat and chaff problem here. How do you separate what is worthy of preservation from what is best forgotten.
All those photos and posts on social media sites might seem like garbage today but some of them also might give insight to some distant future historian about some future political leader.
At the core of this as you mentioned is an economics issue. It costs us near zero to preserve and persist this
Re:On the contrary, the web must forget (Score:4, Insightful)
There's been a growing counter sentiment that I think is correct. Not only is it wrong that we must preserve everything, we should probably forget most things.
The problem with this case and the Internet in general, isn't so much that it forgets things, but how it forgets them. Instead of the unused content disappearing, content disappears whenever its host disappears. To put that in classical terms: whenever the author of a book loses interest, it gets deleted from all the libraries in the world, doesn't sound right, but that is pretty much how the current Internet works. In this case its even more sinister, as Yahoo pulled the plug, not the original author.
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The problem with this case and the Internet in general, isn't so much that it forgets things, but how it forgets them. Instead of the unused content disappearing, content disappears whenever its host disappears.
True. I was recently reading through an aviation history thread which had been running for nearly ten years, and there were numerous sites which had been linked to with relevant information which simply no longer exist; in most cases the links just led to some domain squatter site.
Re:On the contrary, the web must forget (Score:4, Insightful)
The lesson we learn from those older cultures is that progress accelerates when people start writing down their own history. That suggests that we should support the work of these archivers.
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Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child.
I agree that such extremes are not good for the individual or society today, but they would be a boon for histories.
Yes, 99.999% of those to do lists would be of zero interest, but what historian wouldn't want access to all of, say, Abraham Lincoln's to do lists and diary entries?
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You might be surprised to learn that not every Geocities page was a shitty teenage home page. Some people actually did neat and useful things, and wanted to share them with the web. Since they were busy doing neat and useful things they used the easiest web host available at the time, Geocities.
In short, sure, we should remember our digital culture, but we should also throw out our digital garbage.
How exactly do you propose we throw out one without the other? People are going to have to comb through the
Sometimes, ugly things are worth keeping around (Score:5, Insightful)
They may not have a huge amount of value to future historians, but I bet this data does have value to the people who originally generated much of that content.
To plot a line, you need to points of reference. For us, the present provides one point of reference, and the past another. It's much easier to see where we are going as people when we can see how far we've come. Yeah, many of those old pages are embarrassing, but much like reading my own journal entries, it really helps me appreciate how I've developed as a person.
Keeping those old web pages around also shows us about the history of social network. These days, if someone wants to throw some personal information on the web, they'll open up a facebook account. With a minimal investment of time, they'll have a fairly professional place to put their thoughts, photos, comments to friends. Back in the late 90s, little or none of that existed; geocities was the closest equivalent. Without a framework, people with no talent for web design were left to code up ugly websites with copious under construction signs. I'm sure more than a few of them went on to be professionals.
We've come a long way, baby.
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I think there have been several "shopping lists" found from ancient cultures such as rome, which can and do shed light on these societies. Even something such as the rosetta stone, may have been deemed worthless at some point in history (and indeed was as they used it for building material). Are you reall
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The problem is its own solution.
The shit from your past comes back to haunt you, but likewise for your opponent. In 50 years, anyone that doesn't have some dirt will feel fake in a way that will be painfully obvious to everyone (of that time).
This is not, by the way, an endorsement of the surveillance society. I'm pretty strongly against that, and I'd like to prevent it from taking shape, if possible. But if it does, people will adapt. The argument you quote is essentially that while every mistake that
Re:On the contrary, the web must forget (Score:4, Insightful)
Something I'm getting very tired of seeing, is chronically unintelligent, narrow minded people, using pseudo-rational arguments to promote their own bigotry.
Want to know what the one consistent element of such arguments always is? That less should exist. Fewer Linux distributions, fewer political parties, fewer languages, fewer national cultures, fewer different kinds of food.
"Make everything as uniform and as close to entirely monocultural as possible, so that I never feel forced to try to utilise the 45 measly IQ points that I have; and above all, keep freedom in any form as far away from me as possible. More than any other single thing in existence, I'm terrified of that, because I don't want to have to take any responsibility at all, for what I choose, or what I do, or how I think, or who I am."
Here's a clue. It is not going to hurt you in the slightest, if someone else wants to download the Geocities archive. If you do not want it yourself, do not download it. It's very simple. You don't want the Geocities archive yourself; that's fine. I however might want it, and I don't see why my ability to choose whether or not I get it, should be compromised by the fact that you don't want it yourself.
Stop trying to enforce your own rules with regards to other people's behaviour. Make your own choices, and let me make mine.
Its true. its digital history. (Score:3, Interesting)
Link Please!!! (Score:2)
Certainly needs to be asked.
Link Please
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Google? (Score:2)
Google has the pages indexed but would they host them?
hmmm (Score:2)
Internet Archive should pick this up. (Score:4, Interesting)
Good.
The Internet Archive should pick this up, if they haven't already. I'll talk to some people.
Archiving is getting easier. I had a minor part in preserving the archives of the Stanford AI lab. That required weeks of loading 6250bpi 2400 foot open reel tapes.
Certainly Brings Back Memories (Score:5, Insightful)
When I set up my first website (not counting a little "Hey, it's me" page I did while in college), I hosted it on GeoCities. Eventually, I outgrew them and moved to a paid hosting provider. Still, for all of the flack they get for bad design, GeoCities was to the Internet what free blog hosting sites are now: a place to put your stories, photos, etc without paying anything. If Information Wants To Be Free, then Geocities was an important part of making this happen.
Hm.. (Score:2)
I may store this on a ZFS volume. It will shrink to about half a GB with all those copies of animated flaming skulls de-duplicated.
What if I don't want my site archiving? (Score:2)
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Then you can go fuck yourself. I don't care about you and your implicit decision.
If you really, really don't want this stuff out there use the DMCA. That's what it's for.
Now this can live on... (Score:2)
Forgot My Neighborhood (Score:2)
I think it would be fun to find it, but I have no idea how to start looking.
900Gb? (Score:2)
The vast majority of this torrent has got to be (badly optimised) GIFs. They should do a version without those included which would be interesting all the same.
Damn, I'm back to remembering when Adobe Imageready 1.0 came out . . . .
900 GB of blinky text and animated .gifs? (Score:2)
I'd bet if they filtered these things out they wouldn't be able to fill a free Dropbox account with whats left. Same goes for Myspace...
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Most people that have used torrents know you can specify certain files to download first
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Unless they "helpfully" stuck the whole thing into a rar or zip first. :(
PS is there a way to get the 'submit' button back? -- I just have 'preview, quote parent, options, cancel' now when I try to reply. I DO NOT WANT to preview every bloody time I post. :(
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You have to preview, as far as I know.
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As there will be a lot of text/html, compression will actually help, as opposed to when people make zip's of movies.
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Maybe, but some morons keep putting a single RAR or ZIP file inside their torrent...
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