"Do you need a liberal education? We say that it is unpatriotic not to read these books."
""The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
Robert M Hutchins (of Great Books fame)

I donated to the Internet Archive today.
They do valuable work and are a huge resource for humanity.
https://archive.org/
"The Internet Archive, a non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to rese…

The AI Hard Drive Shortage Is Making It More Expensive and Harder to Archive the Internet https://www.404media.co/the-ai-hard-drive-shortage-is-making-it-more-expensive-and-harder-to-archive-the-internet/

Das CIA-Factbook findet sich zumindest im Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260204071503/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/
Siehe auch:

Does anyone remember this?
Little Computer People, by Activision (1985).
#gaming

Little Computer People : Activision : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Little Computer People (1985)(Activision)Developed byActivision, Inc.Released1985Also ForAmiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari ST, PC-88, PC-98, ZX...

Linking data with the help of AI.
There are old medical PhD theses coming online (yea!).
Found Wikipedia articles about the doctors, and then edit the wikipedia articles that would be improved by pointing to them. Also added a review to the Internet Archive items to point to the wikipedia.

Just released a small but useful update for my little Internet Archive Plugin for Craft CMS. 🏛️
You can now opt individual entries out of automatic archiving via a lightswitch field – and manually send any entry to the Wayback Machine straight from the Craft CP entries index. ✨
https://github.com/matthiasott/cr…

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

from my link log —
Apple Scorpius CPU architectural specification. (1989)
https://archive.org/details/scorpius_architecture
saved 2019-12-29 https:/…

Apple's Scorpius CPU (Aquarius project) - 1989 : Apple Computer : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
If you've used computers over the decades, you're probably aware the CPU chips have multiple cores and graphics instructions (or SIMD instructions)....

Claude Code is good at doing research!
In this case helping find the disposition of 126,000 digitized US Supreme Court dockets (cert denied or full opinion), and then reporting why in a archive.org review (using like a wikipedia discussion).
This took real hand-holding and QA to be sure, but it is super helpful. Looked at court listener, the supreme court site (and the old one via the wayback machine!), the Caselaw Access Project at harvard. So good.

about the war against the Internet Archive :
🔁 https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/13/news-publishers-are-now-blocking-the-internet-archive-and-we-may-all-regret-it/

News Publishers Are Now Blocking The Internet Archive, And We May All Regret It
Last fall, I wrote about how the fear of AI was leading us to wall off the open internet in ways that would hurt everyone. At the time, I was worried about how companies were conflating legitimate …

Einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Wordpress-Plugin des Internet Archive erweckt tote Links
https…

An analysis of Internet Archive data finds that by mid-2025, ~35% of new websites published since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 were AI-generated or AI-assisted (Matthew Gault/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/study-finds-a-third-of-new-websites-are-ai-gene…

Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated
Researchers found the internet is becoming aggressively positive as AI-generated text floods the web.

What in the hell am I looking at 🧐
https://toot.community/@internetarchiveeurope/116340086494523511

Did you miss one of the Web414 meetings in 2007? Looks like we recorded them!
#mke

I really like Google Search’s stated mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” but I’m curious what organizations do y’all think are most ideally invested in that mission?
Wikipedia seems like an obvious one. Internet Archive seems like another. Any others?

An analysis of Internet Archive data: by mid-2025, ~35% of newly published websites since ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 were AI-generated or AI-assisted (Matthew Gault/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/study-finds-a-third-of-new-websites-are-ai-generate…

Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated
Researchers found the internet is becoming aggressively positive as AI-generated text floods the web.

gentlemen of a certain age will perhaps appreciate the first issue of dirt, launched in 1992 as sassy magazine's teen boy-aimed spinoff. you know, with crispin glover on the cover. https://archive.org/details/dirt-issue-1-spring-1992/

Dirt Issue 1 ( Spring 1992) : dirt magazine : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
dirtt magazine volume issue 01 spring 19

As so often, the Internet Archive has come to save the day.
At its newly opened Aadam Jacobs Archive, you can now listen to nearly 2,500 of the concert recordings that volunteers have digitized and uploaded so far.
In that more than a terabyte of files, you’ll find concerts by Nirvana, Phish, Tracy Chapman, Depeche Mode, Flaming Lips, Stereolab, Liz Phair, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Björk, They Might Be Giants (recorded four times in 1988 alone), and the Mekons, a…

10,000 Chicago Concert Recordings Are Being Uploaded to the Internet Archive: Nirvana, Phish, Sonic Youth, They Might Be Giants & More
Perhaps you've had the experience of moving to a new city and immediately being told that you've missed its golden age of live music. To an extent, this has happened in more or less every period of the past fifty or sixty years.

The fact that so many - including Wikipedia - rely on a shady website that (unsurprisingly?) is doing some really shady stuff recently shines a light on major shortcomings of newspaper websites: they want your data to share it with 900 "partners", are nevertheless full of ads and every redesign breaks deep links to their articles.
Like Napster/Limewire before, archive.today provides a service that solves an actual need of many Internet users.

Damals, als die iX noch eine Sonderpublikation der c't war: #vintagecomputing

iX - c't Spezial 4 : Jürgen Seeger : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Bürokommunikation: UNIX kommtThemen:schnelle 386er: GTI 325, Sun 386iDOS unter UNIXSoftware macht Software: CASE68030-Workstation Apollo DN3500Forschung:...

What LLMs and the Turing test¹ tell us: most of us not only are² stochastic parrots³ but are also fine with that – otherwise we would not happily use LLMs to produce all the output we communicate to others.
One could frame this as “insult to humanity” but I prefer to call it telling.
__
¹the Turing test does _not_ measure “intelligence”. I recommend to read the original paper:

I.—COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE : A.M Turing : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
I.—COMPUTING MACHINERY ANDINTELLIGENCE1. The Imitation Game.I PROPOSE to consider the question, ' Can machines think ? 'This should begin with definitions of...

Fernleihe des Internet Archive (@…) funktioniert
https://archivalia.hypotheses.org/252272

News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns | Nieman Journalism Lab https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-internet-archive-access-due-to-ai-scraping-concerns/

News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns
Outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times are scrutinizing digital archives as potential backdoors for AI crawlers.

Aadam Jacobs ging 1989 mit einem Rekorder zu einem Konzert von #Nirvana. Seitdem hat er sich seinen Spitznamen "Taper Guy"" redlich verdient. Mittlerweile nahm er mehr als 10.000 Konzerte auf Band auf. Jetzt werden die Aufnahmen digitalisiert und bei

This is an absolute gold mine for music fans, especially us #genx folks. After listening to pre-Grohl Nirvana, I'm now listening to Tracey Chapman from 1988. Thank you Aadam Jacobs and the @… !!

Wordpress-Plugin des Internet Archive erweckt tote Links
Wer seine Webseite mit Wordpress betreibt, kann tote Links automatisch zum Leben erwecken. Ein Plugin reicht.
https://www.heise…

Internet Archive: Aadams Jacob Collection
No tapes left behind
#bootlegme
https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection

If you didn't know about this collection of shows, check it out. Aadam Jacobs collection at the Internet Archive. Seeing he was Chicago based I took the chance to search and sure enough, he has a few Troubled Hubble shows. Amazing. https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jac

Web archiving is troubled: The Internet Archive is under attack constantly, and archive.is/archive.today seems to be on the way towards turning itself and its users into personae non gratae on the web.
Is it now time to turn web archiving into a distributed affair where obtaining the snapshot happens while browsing, and produces a witness statement a la "at this point in time, I observed these responses to those requests", and storing/accessing those becomes decoupled from ob…

Aadam Jacobs has secretly recorded over 10,000 local concerts since 1989.
Now, they are cleaned up and ready to listen to for free online:
https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection

This SpaceX Situation: Not Good!
#Musk #SpaceX #Starlink

A look at the Aadam Jacobs Collection, which is adding its 10,000 concert recordings to the Internet Archive; only one or two artists have requested takedowns (Christopher Weber/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/aadam-jacob

Inside a rare collection of 10,000 concerts, from Nirvana to Björk
In 1989, an up-and-coming rock band from Washington called Nirvana played in Chicago for the first time at a club called Dreamerz. In the crowd, with a compact cassette recorder in his pocket, was a music fan named Aadam Jacobs. He surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band two years before their global breakthrough. That nascent Nirvana recording, with the audio cleaned up, is available for streaming at the online repository Internet Archive. It’s one of over 10…

The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive is in peril
#WaybackMachine

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril
As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast collection of web pages.

scene reports from the kaiser, 40 years ago tonight. #deadfreaksunite #gd020986 [4/4]

Originality AI: 23 major news websites and Reddit block the Internet Archive's crawler; journalists and advocacy groups sign a letter supporting the Archive (Kate Knibbs/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-archiving-to…

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril
As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast collection of web pages.

Immer wieder toll, wie Internet-Konzerne unsere Daten schützen …
Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts
https://archive.is/mqXsZ

It looks like the Internet Archive @… is down at the moment.
#InternetArchive

Apple only has keynotes/events from 2007 onwards archived on their website (as video podcast episodes).
Is there an ideally complete and high quality source for keynotes/events from 1998–2006?
(Yes, I know some are on the Internet Archive and YouTube, but they’re incomplete and often extremely low quality.)

Menschen haben ein Gedächtnis. Ein Kurzzeitgedächtnis und ein Langzeitgedächtnis. Ein episodisches Gedächtnis und weitere Formen des Gedächtnisses. Fällt eines dieser Gedächtnisse aus, funktioniert auch der Mensch nicht mehr richtig.

Auch die Menschheit hat ein Gedächtnis. Es besteht aus dem Google Cache, aus dem Internet-Archive, aus Archive Today, aus Annas Archive, aus Wikipedia, aus Grokipedia.

Den Google Cache gibt es nicht mehr. Archiv Today hat sich selbst komp…

A voyage towards the South Pole performed in the years 1822–24. Containing an examination of the Antarctic Sea, to the seventy-fourth degree of latitude; and a visit to Tierra del Fuego, with a particular account of the inhabitants. To which is added, much useful information on the coasting navigation of Cape Horn, and the adjacent lands.
htt…

A voyage towards the South Pole, performed in the years 1822-24: containing an examination of the Antarctic Sea to the seventy-fourth degree of latitude, and a visit to Tierra del Fuego, with a particular account of the inhabitants : Weddell, James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
iv, 276 p., [4] leaves of plates: ill. (some folded, 1 col.), maps (some folded); 22 cm. Subtitle: To which is added much useful information on the coasting...

»Die Kunst, die uns lehrt, die Nahrungsstoffe, welche uns die Natur verschwenderisch reicht, so zu behandeln, daß daraus eine gesunde und schmackhafte Speise bereitet wird, ist gar nicht leicht, nie ist dieselbe ohne Nachdenken, Vorsicht und Mühe zu erreichen.«
Aus: Sophie Wilhelmine Scheibler – Allgemeines Deutsches Kochbuch für alle Stände, Leipzig, 1887. #kochen

Allgemeines deutsches Kochbuch für alle Stände : Ein unentbehrliches Handbuch für Hausfrausen, Haushälterinnen und Köchinnen : Scheibler, Sophie Wilhelmine : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
52a, 528 pages : 20 cm

A woman calling out the patriarchal system and rape culture... in 1771 London.
This was a great episode of #WhatsHerName podcast, and Catherine Jemmat's memoir is so old that you can read the full scanned version on the Internet Archive from the New York Library.

THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE Catherine Jemmat — What'shername
After a lifetime of betrayal and abuse as an 18th century sex worker, Catherine Jemmat broke the ultimate social taboo: she wrote the truth about her life. Her “scandalous memoir” helped change the way readers thought about women’s lives, and her second book introduced a radical new idea into English society – that the true ‘perpetrator’ driving women into lives of so-called sin and degradation was, in fact, society itself. Returning guest Miranda Garno Rossa …

of interest to a few certain strains of music heads: huge stash of NME back issues now dropping on @…, 300 issues, 1969-1983 (so far).

The Removed DOGE Deposition Videos Have Already Been Backed Up Across the Internet https://www.404media.co/the-removed-doge-deposition-videos-have-already-been-backed-up-across-the-internet/

I should check to make sure this Turnip executive order has been archived in the Wayback Machine...
"Saved 641 times between February 5, 2025 and March 25, 2026."
*nods* Good job, Internet Archive.
#InternetArchive #WaybackMachine

Does anyone ever feel nostalgia regarding PDAs? As a kid, I first got an old Palm and then a Pocket Loox 720 (with Windows Mobile 2003SE) as a hand-down from my dad.
I have very fond memories of browsing through the depths of the Internet trying to find some cool new program. Most notably though, there was a port of Android you could boot from a CF or SD card, and it was the coolest thing ever:

Mentre le maggiori piattaforme di streaming aumentano i prezzi, è stata messa su una “nuova” piattaforma, WikiFlix. Che rende disponibili e, cosa non scontata, facilmente ricercabili, oltre 4000 film di pubblico dominio
Il catalogo aggrega contenuti che provengono da diverse fonti, ma soprattutto: Wikimedia Commons, il mai abbastanza amato Internet Archive e YouTube, dotando il tutto di schede informative e rendendo possibile sia guardare i contenuti in streaming, sia scaricarli.

Originality AI: 23 major news websites and Reddit currently block the Internet Archive's crawler; journalists and advocacy groups sign a letter backing the IA (Kate Knibbs/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-archiving-…

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril
As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast collection of web pages.

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…