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Archivists Make Sure the Internet Doesn't Forget Russia's War on Ukraine (vice.com) 43

Posted by msmash from the maintaining-receipts dept.
From news reports and social media posts to Ukraine University and government websites, archivists are in a mad dash to preserve the country's online history. From a report: As the Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerates, professional and hobbyist archivists alike are rushing to preserve Ukraine's online history, cataloging and storing everything from Ukrainian government and university websites, to the torrent of news and social media posts related to the accelerating conflict. The Internet Archive has been archiving the broader conflict in Ukraine since 2014. But as Ukraine government websites face prolonged outages due to sustained cyber attack -- as well as the looming risk of defacement or deletion -- the organization has taken on another monumental task: backing up the entirety of the Ukrainian Internet.

Using the crowdsourced auto-archiving software running on a virtual machine they've dubbed Archive Team Warrior, the organization has leveraged volunteers around the world, many of whom have donated countless terabytes of storage capacity for the project. These volunteers have been steadily backing up the Ukrainian Internet since before the war began. All told, 68 million items (web pages, documents, and other files) comprising more than 2.5 TB of data have already been hoovered up from various websites across the .ua top level Ukrainian domain. A second project dubbed Ukr-net aims to preserve tens of millions of additional items and terabytes of additional data across the Ukrainian Internet. Elsewhere, organizations like the Center For Information Resilience have built a crowdsourced map attempting to document every single war-related post to social media made in the region, ranging from civilian photos of the movement of heavy Russian weaponry, to Ukranian government claims of alleged bombing raids on kindergardens.
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Archivists Make Sure the Internet Doesn't Forget Russia's War on Ukraine More

Archivists Make Sure the Internet Doesn't Forget Russia's War on Ukraine

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  • also need no copyright or dmca takedonws or even any take downs due to new robots.txt rules.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      As FPs go, pretty obscure. Care to clarify, Mr Dragon? Now you're free of the time pressure to FP. We already know the Internet never forgets. Elephants don't have it as good.

      But I already know what I'm looking for in the discussion. And not expecting to find. Consideration of recording the credibility of the sources, both for the original sources and for the propagators. But especially the sock-puppet propagators who try to obscure or distort the facts as they spread stuff. The motivations are crucial in c

      • As FPs go, pretty obscure.

        Presumably they're referring to the Internet Archive's tendency to shoot first and ask questions later when it comes to removing content on the Wayback Machine. For example:

        take downs due to new robots.txt rules.

        This is a major issue with the Wayback Machine. If someone buys a domain previously owned by someone else and uses a robots.txt that disallows crawling, the entire history of crawls for that site disappears from Wayback (and is presumably deleted).

        Of course they're just doing this as a CYA stance, but it's ripe for abuse.

        • It's not deleted, just marked as inaccessible. If the site owner removes the robots.txt rule, the historical data pops up again.

          That was the case a few years ago. I assume that it's still the same now.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by shanen ( 462549 )

            I still don't know what Mr Dragon was talking about, but my tweet of the day is related to the media war:

            I think it's a real story about letting Russian mothers retrieve their POW sons in Ukraine. Unfortunately Twitter is NOT the best channel to tell them.

            But you know Putin REALLY hates this idea. If it raises Putin's BP, I say yay!

            https://wt.social/post/russiau... [wt.social]

  • In case of nuclear war; we need to backup Wikipedia and the whole patent archive to something that has a long shelf life. The problem is all our storage media is SSD or magnetic media nowadays .. both of which degrade in the time scale of a few years. Rebuilding civilization after a nuclear war will be a pain.

    • When I say we, I mean random individuals worldwide.

    • Rebuilding .... that is if factories would survive and we were able to get the raw material supply chains back up
    • I guess that survivors will have to do something more urgent than reading Wikipedia...

      • The survivors are going to want Wikipedia, it has a shit ton of information they will want.

        • Several projects and apps can already give you an offline version of Wikipedia.

          To cite but one example: Kiwix [kiwix.org]. The archived (uneditable) "wikis" are anywhere from a month to years old. The "maxi" version of the English wikipedia comes in at 93GB, the "nopic" version at a "mere" 50GB. The Kiwix site also contains downloads for other free internet resources like Project Gutenberg and TED Talks.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ink ( 4325 )

          Paper has a poor shelf life as well. Perhaps if stored in a vacuum in a vault?

          Why is life mimicking The Foundation now?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • There's probably a name for it but I have heard a theory posited that since we have already exploited all the easily accessible oil and coal resources it would be far far more difficult for another human civilization after a collapse to rebuild the technology back up, basically we get one industrial revolution so best not to blow it all up.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The biggest problem after a full nuclear exchange would be re-building safe agricultural supply lines. I would expect the number of people who die due to starvation is greater than those who die in the initial attacks.

      Paper books are obviously the best way to preserve knowledge in that situation, as the technology supply line could take decades to rebuild. Computer equipment will all be "vintage" before such a rebuilding is complete.

      Some societies may regard all advanced technology with suspicion and burn

  • When you really need them. Make sure all the movies are saved.

  • This is the first war to be thoroughly documented due to the wide availability of the internet, cell phones, etc.
    No place to hide from war crimes. The victor will not get to re-write history.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      Yeah because we've seen that the Internet has completely eliminated misinformation.

      • The amount of blatant propaganda I have seen with this conflict was astonishing. The fake pictures, the old repurposed footage, the "anonymous" posts making stupid claims... And of course the stupid heroic titles given to random soldiers that got crazier and crazier The "Ghost of Kiev" who takes down squadrons on his own, the "Iron Man of Kiev" who killed 50 on his own, the fucking "Ass Goblin of Kiev" who raped 1000 Russian soldiers in a night...
        I frequent several high profile websites, and the number of p

        • "And don't get me started about the TV channels who's wet dream is a nuclear war."

            Don't worry, in the event of global nuclear war, they will hop into the escape jet with suitcases full of money and fly to..."aww fuck"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kmoser ( 1469707 )
      Pretty sure that started happening with Vietnam.

      • I don't think they had cell phones and the internet then.
        What we got was what the three news networks gave us. Limited and biased as later analysis has shown.

  • Bad Headline (Score:3)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @03:14PM (#62316163)
    The headline has a completely different connotation than the summary or the story itself.
  • In 1918 alone Kiev changed hands 12 times. The Bolsheviks were factory workers while the Ukrainians were peasants and did not accept the Bolshevists. They were organically social revolutionaries or anarchists like the great Nestor Makhno. Putler's vision of his region's history is astoundingly stupid, although his cynicism of western weakness is possibly accurate.

    There was Gen. Mikhail Muryavov who killed anyone caught speaking Ukrainian. There were the Bolshevik "activists" who found out anyone with

  • Did they archive Iraq has WMDs too?

    Why would anyone continue to believe those who have worked so hard at establishing a track record of lying?

  • Where were these archivists when Atlantis went down? And what about the mysterious disappearance of the Great Library of Alexandria that may or may not have happened in AD 391? Where was the independent free press in Jesus' time, huh? We only got one side of that story.

    But now; now we will know what everyone had for breakfast on the day of the Russian invasion. We will know if and when Putin blinked or Zelenskyy flinched. Now we suffer from a mind boggling excess of data for each moment of the war. It's alm

  • and make sure the internet doesn't forget about the war crimes the US committed in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq

  • in soviet russia we forget you! (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @04:21PM (#62316493)

    in soviet russia we forget you!

  • Broken archive link. Also, are they making sure to back up all the fake stories as well?

  • I'm sure the "Ghost of Kyiv" will be remembered fondly in their history books.

  • You can find videos over on the fark politics tab where Tucker Carlson explicitly praises and endorses Putin. In spite of that I've seen people say that didn't happen. I've seen a hundred other bits of misinformation floating around and often if not usually the people spreading it don't even know it's misinformation.

    It's called a Gish Gallop. You spread too much misinformation and lies to be effectively debunked. You force the other side to waste all their energy trying to disprove your insane claims by
  • archive of fake flase flag ops ... lol
  • The US continues to work with the Saudis to slaughter Yemenis by the hundreds of thousands. Did we forget them? And the Ukrainians shelling their own people for the last seven years, those dead women and children don't matter. And the US illegally putting its military in Syria. Any special archive for that? And of course, US DoD and NIH/NIAID mad scientist just assaulted the entire world the last year with their bioweapon release. But I think we have already forgotten that. In fact you are banned for

  • all the historical information about what led up to Russia taking action against Ukraine, and the foreign players involved.

  • It's a pity that everything turned out this way and I really hope that this war will end soon. I am a resident of Ukraine myself and therefore decided to turn to you for help, among other things https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/natsionalniy-bank-vidkriv-spetsrahunok-dlya-zboru-koshtiv-na-potrebi-armiyi [bank.gov.ua] Read how to assist Ukrainian military forces fighting Russian troops. I am sure that the sooner the Russian troops leave the territory of Ukraine, the sooner people will stop dying and this war will end.

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