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And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is off the hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Hi.
Out in Signal Land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
Yes, you do.
Good evening.
We also have our good friend Jason Scott joining us tonight.
Welcome, Jason.
Salutations.
Well, it's a steamy day here in New York, but we have lots to talk about.
We also have overtime following the show for the first time in a few weeks where you can call us and speak uninhibited as we're prone to do on the radio.
But Jason, since you're the guest of honor tonight, what's new in your neck of the woods with archive.org and textfiles.com?
Sure.
So right now there's a nice little burstlet of news happening right now because a variety of news organizations have started blocking the Internet Archive from crawling them, citing AI reuse and other excuses.
And a lot of journalists and others are taking a lot of issue with that.
Some of the writing is a little bit apocalyptic because they're like, it's the end of the Internet Archive.
And I'm like, yeah, I don't think our hard drives are really thinking it's the end because we're pulling in billions of URLs every couple of weeks.
It's just a variety of media outlets are making this anti-scraping decision.
And to their, you know, to the understanding that they're getting hit very hard by random AI scrapers or their stuff's getting reused, fine.
But the subtlety is lost.
So the archive's been a little proactive, telling people, hey, you know, please don't block us.
I'll give you a little bit of a gossip, which is that the New York Times, they blocked us so hard you can't read the New York Times at the Internet Archive, which I think is like really nose off spite of.
They just look for every IP address ever affiliated with the archive and blocked it, which is a little bit of a blunt force tool, if you ask me.
So we can't even keep news about what we're doing.
So even read it.
If there's an article about the Internet Archive in the New York Times, you're saying that that's the URL is blocked from the New York Times?
We can't read articles at the New York Times.
So if they wrote something about us, technically, we can't read it from the headquarters of the building.
OK, so wait, the New York Times is blocking you or the Internet Archive is blocking you from reading the New York Times?
I'm a little confused.
Sure.
The New York Times is blocking the Internet Archive as an entity, as if we are an invading force.
Like basically, if you go to NY Times from the Internet Archive building in San Francisco, it doesn't resolve because they're blocking it at the router level, which is an example of how subtle they've been about this process.
I don't think they do that for, you know, Russia, Russia or China or, you know, any so-called enemies of our government.
Why?
What are they afraid of?
I think what a lot of them are afraid of.
We're in a we're in a realm right now.
I think we've seen you and I have you and I have lived through this because we're over 3000 years old.
But the situation is when a resource begins to in some way be overused, the response is usually completely disproportionate.
So, you know, like in the old days, it would be like, oh, you use bandwidth at this college and we have to pay for bandwidth.
No discussion of whatever, unless it is specifically for your class, do not use it for recreational, you know, browsing of this Internet, unless it's for your job and everyone over overreacts.
But how much how much bandwidth could you possibly be using by connecting?
Are you playing Wordle or something?
What's going on over there that they're afraid of?
I think what they're specifically afraid of is that the Internet Archive gets scraped by AI companies for data, which if the if the AI companies want the data from The New York Times, they're they're going to get it.
But the idea is that then it's being reused in AI and they want to limit the access of AI to read news.
And we're potentially a proxy.
It's kind of a silly overreaction.
That's what I'm talking about.
If this goes on for more than a month, I will be very surprised.
I think I think we'll embarrass them into just doing it.
But it was interesting to have so many people rise up in our defense.
Well, I think I get a few more tonight.
That's for sure.
Alex, go ahead.
This is insane, Jason.
I didn't know about this until you just mentioned it.
This is like to me, it sounds like blocking the Internet Archive from accessing the news is sort of like burning down the library because you're afraid somebody might photocopy a copyright.
It's like a copyrighted page of a book.
It's totally insane.
It's like a radical overreaction.
Yeah.
But there's a lot of irony here, too, because if the issue is scraping, right, AI scraping, I can understand.
We want to try to prevent AI from training on all of this proprietary information and data.
But in trying to keep AI from training on our collective memory here, what we're doing is actually erasing that memory ourselves.
I mean, this is the perfect irony for the digital age here.
We've built these machines that have the capability to remember everything.
And now we're teaching them and ourselves to actually forget.
I think fundamentally we always see kind of this like the archive has proudly joined libraries and many other things as if it was invented, if it was proposed now, it would not be allowed.
Right.
So it started out before anyone even thought there was an idea about this.
Like Brewster had been kind of thinking about memory and the interaction of information since the 80s and different things he did.
So by the time you talk to him, there's these interviews with him in 92.
Sorry, Brewster's the head of the Internet Archive.
If you talk to him in 1992 and 1993, he's essentially talking about search engines.
And what are we going to do with search engines?
But nobody's what's what's he talking about?
And now suddenly Google.
Right.
Well, the same way, I think that there's this he's he's always believed the way he puts it is let the robots read because it's important to get to information.
So robots help us can be used to help us.
But obviously, this whole AI thing was when I think about how they rolled it out.
Right.
Like and I've been thinking about this a lot because it's like such an interesting study case.
Right. Like if you think back to when, again, some of you may not have dealt with this, but like one year, Adobe announced context aware image resizing.
There's a picture of you and a tree.
You shrink the picture.
It keeps you and the tree in the picture.
Oh, that's so nice.
What a nice effect.
You can have two different versions.
Well, now they're like, you can just make up the tree.
And now people are losing their minds or they're like, why did you spring this on us?
And we're having this like existential fight on the part of business and life and everything of like, what is this technology?
And I'm like, we've been doing this for 50 years, but now it's in the hands of regular folks.
And I think that there's a great debate there.
I think it's an endless good debate.
But we are going to see these overcorrections like, oh, God, stop everybody from reading us, even institutions that fulfill this important purpose.
No, I don't trust you.
And being in the middle of it, like I said, for me, it's a fire drill for people to once again realize that the Intranet Archive does this important utility.
And what does it mean?
And it caused all of these journalists and writers to come out of the woodwork to write essays about like, what are you doing?
This is the dumbest thing you can do.
Why are you doing this to them?
Like, at the very least, I'm sure we could negotiate something with them.
Like, just, but their opening salvo was network level blockage.
And I just think that's just put us on the map for a lot of people this last couple of weeks.
Have they commented at all?
If they've said anything on the record?
No, not yet.
Not yet.
Well, do we know if they're doing this to companies like Anthropic or OpenAI Foundation?
You know, the real AI people?
You know, I have no idea.
And, you know, I have, you know, you look at some of what these companies have done, the big ones.
And they'll, like, again, worthwhile debate among your audience.
But, like, clearly for OpenAI and for Anthropic, no action was off the table.
Right?
They were definitely from the De Beers school of market share.
Or, like, whatever we needed to do, we're going to do it.
Right?
And so I would not think that, like, Anthropic and OpenAI are, like, if you're connected to the internet, I think OpenAI can scrape you if they want.
Like, I just don't see how, like, they've got infinite incentive to do whatever it takes.
But the archive isn't necessarily doing that.
So, yeah, no, I think it'll be a temporary thing.
But in the meanwhile, we're archiving tons of other, you know, things are...
I will say this, by the way, that AI is actually really screwing us in another way, which is the fad.
And it is a fad for the next couple of years about data centers.
I mean, people are going to, like, make these processes more efficient.
But right now, they need a lot of RAM and a lot of hard drives.
And the archive loves hard drives.
We pull in about 150 to 180 terabytes a day of data.
So you can imagine we want hard drives.
And we are being told by vendors, oh, yeah, we're not doing hard drives for people like you in 2027.
Like, we just have no...
So we've been watching that.
This isn't the first time we've had that happen.
Thailand had a fire about seven or eight years ago that changed the market.
We had to do things.
We discovered that Sam's Club was sitting on a bunch of hard drives that had gone through the pipeline.
So we bought them all and shucked out all of the cases and gave the cases away to hacker groups and everything.
And people would see the pictures of us shucking the cases and go, what are you doing?
That's so inefficient.
What are you doing?
You should be doing...
And they're like, no, no, no, you don't understand.
This was the only place to get hard drives.
And our head of admin, she became customer of the month at that particular Sam's Club because she went in with a credit card and bought like 500 hard drives.
So AI has really caused this gold rush or this land rush on hard drives.
This is a terrible time to want to buy a server, a hard drive, a RAM chip.
I'm sure everyone's going to feel it until somebody comes up with a routine where they can do all the work they're doing in one 100th the space like they did with everything else.
And then suddenly we'll have a glut of hard drives and it'll be Shangri-La.
Come on, everybody.
I believe it.
I believe it.
Hosanna.
Hosanna.
You know, Jason, I just had a vision.
I get them sometimes.
And I just had a vision now of something that could happen in the future or maybe it won't happen in the future.
But I see an AI company of one sort or another reaching out to you and inviting you to join in a partnership where they supply you with hard drives and they also give you all the access you need to the New York Times.
Are you ready for something like that to happen?
I mean, I can't speak for the archive as a whole, but my impression is, you know, over time we've talked with lots of groups.
Sometimes it's not been like sometimes people have offered us piles of data and where we can will ingest it if we can verify its provenance.
And other times somebody will offer us like like somebody offered us like a petabyte of disk space, but it was on a very weird form factor drive and we couldn't take it.
But it was very appreciated that they were like, here, you know, here you go.
So to be honest, what I'm more or less expecting maybe is some startup or a data center being like, hey, do you want some five-year-old hard drives?
We don't need them anymore.
And we're like, yes, yes, indeed.
Please give them to us.
Whatever, man.
We'll take them.
I suspect that's what's going to go.
It's going to be a little hairy for a couple of years on that front.
And that's all.
That's all AI and data center hype.
You know.
Mm-hmm.
Fascinating.
Well, you know, I just heard about this, you know, a couple of days ago.
I had no idea this was going on with the times and all these other challenges that AI is sort of causing.
Is it the only challenge going on right now or are there more fun things happening?
For the archive, you know, the biggest challenge that the archive has right now, I guess, is, well, obviously, AI scrapers that are just randomly hitting things at the archive hundreds of times over and we have to block them.
You know, people who are just doing these, like, ridiculous projects and, you know, a lot more hackers come up and want to beat up the old man, you know, show up at the bar and be like, I can shoot you at high noon.
And we're like, ah, we get those all the time.
So people are like, why are you so slow?
And I'm always like, yeah, well, we're slow because some rando in, you know, somewhere in Europe decided that he was going to take us on.
And, you know, we get that.
We get that sometimes.
What I love is that whenever they do it in a public way, that is to say, we've had, like, people who have tried to DDoS us when they claim it, like, you know, death to America.
We're going to take down the archive.
Everyone is like, you loser.
Like, it's just not we're not a target that people go, yeah, stick it to them.
So it's nice to have that positivity.
But, no, I mean, in terms of nothing more or less than we've always had, which is just, you know, we're, you know, 190 or whatever petabytes of interesting data on the Internet.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Just moves on with whatever it is.
I, you know, I definitely still love working at the place, still love digitizing things, getting them up there.
People who use us for accessing old media or browsing the web or playing.
I was just talking just now with you guys about how there's this taper in Chicago named Adam Jacobs, who for like 15 or 20 years would go every night to every club he could in Chicago and record them.
And he was sitting on 10,000 performances and didn't know where he was going to go with it.
And another group said, can we help you?
And he finally said yes.
So there's 2,400 live shows on the Internet from Chicago of the 1990s and 1980s, including Nirvana.
They might be giants and a lot of others that wouldn't have existed and would have probably been locked behind something.
And, you know, for me, that's a Tuesday.
That's a Tuesday.
And I'm still, you know, still happy about it.
Well, if someone ever gives you the spinoff to Mary Hartman called Forever Firmware, let me know, because I've been looking for that for decades.
Jason, for the people maybe tuning in for the first time hearing about the Internet Archive, could you maybe explain its origins, what it stands for, what it's trying to do?
Sure. For the people who don't know about this site, or maybe they do and they don't know they've been on it, which happens more than you would think.
In the mid-1990s, an entrepreneur named Brewster Kale, MIT graduate, had helped create some work in the 80s in technical work after graduating.
And then in the early 90s had created a gopher search engine, which really just all those words, I'm sorry.
But then he moved from that to something called Alexa Internet, which was this idea of browsing websites and coming up with metrics so you could use this service to go, you are the 105th most browsed educational site in North America.
So it was a way of doing metrics.
fight. Brewster was like, oh, man, now I get to be a librarian.
And so he created a bunch of websites that we think of as archive.org or the Internet Archive.
And because he had been part of that company that did what I what I said, metrics for websites, it would capture websites to compare them.
So it had all this hysterical, you know, historical website data.
And he was like, could we have a copy of that?
My old company. And they were like, sure.
And around 2000 or 2001, he just said, wouldn't it be funny if you could type in a domain name of an old website and look at it?
What it used to be like a year or five years ago.
We'll do that.
And at the time, he was like, this could grow to be a terabyte of data.
I have him on tape saying that he's like, we think we're up around a terabyte now.
We don't know where this is going to end.
And that was 25, 30 years ago.
The Wayback Machine, which is the name of that application, is one of the killer apps of the Internet.
You can go there, type in an old URL, be shown captures.
You can go in and look at what Yahoo looked like in 1996 or what Google looked like in 1999.
And of course, people use it to find old websites they used to browse, to find their own work when it's been deleted.
And pertaining our long discussion just now, journalists, writers, bloggers will find work they did that was gone, like off the Internet, and be able to retrieve it or find it or use it for their resumes and say, here's essays I wrote back when I was working when I was 22 and so on.
It's been a wild success.
It is a nonprofit.
It's not for the money.
It loses money every year.
We do our best.
If you don't like us, just keep hitting refresh.
And if there's a killer app for the net, for the history, you know, the archive has become the web's memory.
And then the other side of it, and I'm not as big on this, but I get it.
It's a good gotcha machine.
You know, a politician will say, well, we never said this.
And it's like, ah, here it is.
You did say it, or, you know, I was, you see, I want to be egalitarian here.
Right now, our current administration is kind of known for, like, shifting around the goalposts in terms of describing their own history.
But, frankly, every administration does that.
Like, almost every, you know, administration will have a site, and it'll be like, freecreditforeverybody.gov.
And then a new administration will come in and say, forget that thing.
And they'll delete any record of it ever being on the net.
And then people will say, well, we've never done that project.
And the answer is, yes, you did.
Here it is on the Wayback Machine.
You know, we don't really have a really good way of dealing with history and knowledge on the internet.
And the Wayback Machine is a hack and a hard hack, but it's what we got.
And so, for most people, that's the internet and the internet archive.
And then, of course, there's a little side project where we also have, like, cultural data, you know, scans and music and movies and software and things like that.
And I'm involved in that as well.
So, you can go and read books or watch old films or, you know, that's a significant thing.
And, of course, there's no ads.
There's no pop-ups.
We're not charging you.
But it's dwarfed by the Wayback Machine.
Like, to most people, we're the Wayback Machine and nothing else, you know.
So, it's a great life.
It's a good thing.
I started working there in 2011.
Some people think I've been there since the beginning.
No.
But they keep me around because I'm good at being a hype man.
So, that's my, you know, that's my other good thing in this world.
Hype man.
You are quite meticulous in grabbing all the data and making sure it's all there and sorted properly.
So, we're glad to have you on our side for sure.
Now, Alex, I know that you do a lot of research as far as following domains when they get deleted.
Kind of a different way of checking the archive, the archive of internet domains.
I know you've found some things over the past few months that have kind of quietly been erased that we might be able to find on the internet archive if we look at the right URL.
It escapes my mind what the most recent one was.
I think it has something to do with civil rights or something.
Yeah.
What was the name of that domain?
It was very...
It's very...
They erased it and we've already forgotten.
I know.
Wow.
That's...
Orwell would be proud of that.
You know...
Oh, go ahead, Jason.
I was going to say, somebody uploaded and just...
They randomly uploaded.
And I'm saying this as a private citizen who happened to notice that this person uploaded it.
They uploaded a document that is a list of clearly somebody on the inside decided to put this out.
It's a list of every park placard and historical display they want to take down along with listings of what they said.
And, you know, document, like, clearly, clearly some pretty saucy, like, real, real late stage authoritarian government thing.
A non-zero amount of government employees, when they're told, you know, do this in this direction, will do it and be like, oh, it's a shame I'm being asked to do this.
But they won't stand up and say, like, oh, this is bad.
And, of course, we can have a million novels and television shows about that person, right?
But some people go, I'll do it, but I'm going to keep a copy.
I think I'm going to tell people.
And so I saw that go by, and I was like, yeah, bro.
That's good stuff.
So, you know, there are some very brave people who know that, like, history is now, and they're doing the right thing.
Yes, Alex?
The domain that we saw removed from the zone file for .gov, which is essentially the zone files for top-level domains like .com, .net, .org, if you're not familiar with this, those are the files that contain all of the domains in that particular top-level domain, right?
So the zone file for .com is going to be about 300 million entries long.
.gov is one of the zone files that I monitor all the time.
And what we found, and I think this is what you're talking about, Emmanuel, is a couple of weeks ago, it was around the 26th of March.
So I look for things that pop up in the zone files, new domains that are .gov domains, and also things that are removed.
So if you just reverse the analysis, you can figure out what went away if you're comparing two files.
And there was a domain that was so telling and was so symbolic of what was happening in the United States, especially at that particular time, just a few weeks ago.
The domain that was removed was civilrightsusa.gov.
That's the domain that they took away from the .gov's own file.
So that means, Alex, that means they didn't just erase the website, they deleted the name so that it doesn't exist in any form except on the Internet Archive.
That's correct.
That's exactly right.
I had to go to the Internet Archive to even figure out what it used to be at the time when they took this down.
And I think Trump had wanted to do something with it, wanted to disable this during his first reign as president, and then finally got around to removing this entry from the zone file a couple of weeks ago.
But you know something that popped up today, which was somewhat interesting in the .gov zone file, something new that showed up, was about NASA.
And it was the nasaforce.gov site that came up today, which is all about kind of recruiting for NASA, which is, you think, oh, that's kind of interesting, right?
But there was something weird about it, too, because if you look at the WHOIS data for nasaforce.gov, normally the registration information points to CISA, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency,
and they're generally the registrant for all of these domains.
But for some weird reason, the registrant today on nasaforce.gov was the executive office of the president.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, that's an odd one.
I don't know what's going on there, but that's certainly an anomaly.
Yeah.
Well, you know, NASA's the biggest threat to NASA right now, I think, is Trump being enthused by it and trying to make it his.
But let's try to think about that.
We'll keep our eyes open for sure.
Jason, go ahead.
For your group that cares, obviously, I'm on Blue Sky primarily now, but there's an account called Federal U.S. Domain Bot, and it posts whenever a domain is added or removed to .gov.
And I just kind of keep it running.
And, yeah, like the little stories that go by when you see one, like you'll see one go by and I'll go look at it.
You know, I'll see one, like, what is it, techprosperitycore.gov was registered.
And I'm like, oh, another dumb program or whatever.
Or there'll be another one that's taken away.
And, you know, you look at some of them and you're like, okay, this thing is an honest case of like, yeah, this is probably some long dormant whatever.
But other ones, it's like the most, I guess, what do you want to call it?
It tells a little story in its own little way, right?
There's one that says productofusda.gov has just been registered.
And I'm like, I just don't imagine that website's going to be very inspiring.
I just sense there's going to be something very, very propagandistic about it.
But, yeah, I definitely, this has been, this is, this has been, it's been a tough decade, man.
Yeah, it ain't over yet.
It ain't over at all.
And, you know, it's been interesting because I think, you know, the work that we've seen with 2600 and other, you know, events and hope and DEF CON and others is like they sound alarms.
And they, they look at the current situations and they say, this could go very wrong.
And they, they talk about like, be aware, be, be functional, be knowledgeable about these situations.
And then it's like, well, it's here.
Like the thing you've been warning about is here or the potential issue is here.
So now what do you do?
Do you just boot up Call of Duty and forget about it?
Do you not go out in the street?
Do you not talk to people?
Do you not, you know what I mean?
Oh, no, no, no.
Someone mainstream has to come in and take credit for it and then turn a profit.
Well, that's, yeah.
Like buy a shirt.
Are you going to buy a shirt?
You're going to, you're going to, you're going to have a printed, you're going to, you're going to make a, you're going to, you're going to issue a crypto coin with it as a theme.
Is that your, is that your approach?
So, yeah, I mean, people who read, people who read, you know, a certain realm of literature, I shall say, where they read it.
And the thing, like one of the thematic things is don't take life for granted.
Don't take structures for granted.
Don't take the world for granted because things can shift very hard.
And it happens to have been in the past few years, we've gotten like almost a cartoon level.
Like you're taking a test required by work.
Like, so say you're at work and five armed guys come in and demand to find your shipping manager.
Do you, A, ask for a warrant?
B, let them through?
C, help them find your guy?
Or D, you know, whatever.
And it's like, you know, like normally that would be in a handbook.
And now it's like, well, that's, that was Monday.
And so anyway, I'm going off on a certain rail.
I, I, I just, uh, I just think about like, it's cool that we have a memory of the web and it's cool that we're aware and can do technical work to find and see domains being added and removed.
And it's great that we can point out that somebody used to say something and now they claim they never said it, but that's just the first half.
That's the awareness.
That's not the action.
You didn't do anything until you do something.
That's all I'm saying.
Right.
Right.
Well, you know, um, you talk about the various forums that we have, uh, the magazine, the conference, the radio show.
I mean, we have been doing this since 1988.
Uh, and, um, I have to say we've been warning people an awful lot about the negative uses of technology, how things can be abused, how in the wrong hands they can be nightmares.
Uh, it doesn't give us pleasure to say we told you so when these things come true.
Uh, I just hope that people learn how to be a little bit cynical about, um, uh, the portrayals of how this new bit of technology is going to, um, uh, be the second coming.
Uh, and, and, and just think about ways that it could be used in a bad way because every bit of technology can be used for good or for evil.
Uh, you know, we're, we're, we're not advocating, not researching, not developing, not learning, but at the same time, following blindly is about the worst thing that, that anyone can do with regards to any bit of technology.
So I, I, I think, you know, BAI listeners, uh, have a healthy amount of skepticism when they hear anything, whether it's, you know, the, the latest news, latest technology, or even me saying that.
But it's time to support the radio station.
Yeah.
Because how else do you get to hear these things?
We're in the middle of a fun drive.
We are at, uh, $73,635 we have raised so far.
Our goal is 120,000.
If my mathematics are correct, that's 61%.
Uh, and, um, uh, we need to make that goal by the end of the month.
In fact, we need to exceed that goal.
I think we can.
There are, uh, ways that you can be a part of this.
You can, um, uh, become a BAI buddy, which means pledge a small amount every month.
And over the course of a year, you're pledging, um, a good amount that helps us quite a bit.
Uh, go to give to WBAI.org and, uh, look at all the options there.
Uh, or, uh, simply, um, um, buddy.wbai.org.
I don't know if we have any other, uh, contact, uh, uh, methods available.
I'm seeing a lot of blanks there, so I don't think so.
Um, but, uh, give to WBAI.org, uh, is, um, is, is the best way to reach the station and
support the station because WBAI has been on the air since 1960 without a single commercial.
And, um, we don't answer to anybody except our listeners.
So we're able to criticize, we're able to criticize corporations, governments, policies,
you name it.
Uh, and we're able to, uh, open up phone lines and have listeners, uh, say their piece
as well.
So if that matters to you, if that's something that you feel is unique and valuable, please
keep it going.
And you keep it going by supporting it.
That's, um, that's all I have to say.
If anyone else has, yes, Rob, go ahead.
Yeah.
The, um, so you can go to buddy.wbai.org and, uh, throw in your support.
If you'd rather do it over the phone, you can call 833-922-4692, which spells out 833-WBAI-NYC.
Thank you.
Uh, that's the, that's the phone number for you to, uh, throw in and, uh, help us do
what we do telephonically, um, over the web, buddy.wbai.org.
All right.
And, uh, hopefully, uh, we get a strong showing.
Hopefully we make that goal.
Hopefully we keep the station on the air for another 66 years, however long it's been.
Boy, it's been a long time.
Wow.
Uh, anyone else have, uh, any other news they'd like to share?
It's been a while since we've all been together.
I've just been, uh, since, uh, since you brought up that civilrightsusa.gov domain, um, I've been
poking around on the internet archives, uh, captures of it.
Um, the latest one was from 2017, which is a red hat test page.
Um, so there was no content on the site whatsoever, just, uh, just an error message from the server
software.
Um, before that, it was an unfinished site.
Uh, it was a site to transmit complaints.
If you think your civil rights have been violated, um, a lot of the stuff on the 2016
version of the site says coming soon.
Um, it was not put together.
It was not, uh, it was not a functioning.
That was an unfortunate year to start that project.
Right.
Um, it wasn't started in 2016.
It was actually, there, there are captures of the domain going back to 2011, um, when it
was started, but it just, it was started in 2011 and then kind of, uh, let rot on the
vine.
Um, nothing was, nothing was really done to get it up and running.
Apparently.
Interesting.
Um, it's, it sat in an unfinished form until 2016.
And, uh, in 2017, it was pulled off the net for good.
And now the, uh, domain has been shifted down the memory hole as well.
Well, I'd like to see a record of the conversation that led to it being deleted completely.
You know, somebody, somebody spearheaded that.
And, uh, I just kind of like to know the rationale behind it.
Uh, it's too bad it wasn't developed in the first place when it started.
It seemed like, uh, something that we could definitely use.
I have a, I have a terror.
I will.
I'll say two things to that.
First of all, um, one of the really nice things is, um, you know, there's a lot of people
who to fill up space on their broadcasts or their podcasts or otherwise will take this
situation, the civil rights website and devoid of any knowledge will say, clearly there was
the greatest overview of the history of civil rights in the government at that site.
And they took it down.
And then when it's revealed, or if it's ever like that, that wasn't true now, everything
coming out of them, even if it's a valid criticism or observation looks suspect, but by having
these records, even of a negative, you are able to say, oh, they thought they were going
to do a project and then they didn't.
And there's a story there.
Why?
Why?
Who thought that was a good idea?
And then for some reason it never, never came through.
So like, to me, that's the first, um, educational, um, thing there.
And you, you find these things by watching, by doing what you guys are doing, uh, and just
keeping track of something that exists and then doesn't exist, you know?
Right.
And I think that's, to me, that's like, that's fundamentally one of the important things here
is just like having a, like, not everything has to be a conspiracy.
Not everything has to be this straight line example of, um, you know, authoritarian ruthlessness
or undoing the work of others.
It can just be evidence of what came before so that we know.
And I think that's also just as important because it helps us focus on what the real
issues that we care about are instead of chasing shadows, which can happen a lot when you need
the evidence, you need the pieces.
Otherwise, you know, what are you going to do?
So, so I'm, I'm happy that we play a small part in that, uh, being able to give people
those citational, uh, efforts.
Um, there are also like a lot of websites that are out there where you say, did that
really happen?
Okay.
Uh, a really good one for me.
The one I always prove to people is, uh, rides of glory, which was a blog entry done at
Uber, um, years ago.
And it was, it's, to me, it's always been an important shot up across the bow.
One of their data scientists posted a blog entry.
And what he had done was he had analyzed multiple cities to find cases of people who were taking
Uber drives in the morning on Sunday mornings that they had never taken before to be able
to infer the aftermath of one night stands.
And then to report what sections of which cities had the most one night stands.
And it got a huge response from people, obviously, and then Uber pulled it down, but not before
it was found.
And I think that particular blog entry shows the danger of what happens when tech runs
unfettered through its technology with like no ethics training, no humanities training.
You just say, wouldn't this be funny?
It's not funny.
Wouldn't it be neat to do sort of neat, really intrusive.
And now I'm going to share it with the world.
Oh, so there's no gatekeeping or even any sanity checking in your organization.
What are you doing with a, B and C then?
Like, will you just give our information to the cops?
Like that blog entry, all the evidence of it is gone except for the way back machine.
Like that example of early, let's just say short-circuited tech bro reductive thinking,
which is the unfortunate, dangerous outgrowth of hacker culture, is you can have somebody
say, like a good hacker says, how does that, what happens here?
What does this mean?
What do we do?
A bad hacker says, oh, it does something terrible.
I'm going to do that terrible thing now at scale.
And so I'm glad that exhibit exists, even if it's a negative one.
I assume they never tied it to actual identities.
No, they didn't.
But the problem here is you start like you don't think you are.
Like they don't have names, but that's, you know what I mean?
Like that's one step away.
You know, you're adding metadata about things that can really, and like every single one
of it, every single one of it, you just have a question of like, was anybody, did you show
this to anybody?
Did anybody weigh in on this?
Like those kinds of things where you just say, oh, so when, you know, like that's what
we just, we, we saw it's, um, it's, it's, um, not ancestor.
Oh, it's descendant in the, uh, the Grok, um, uh, reduced clothing scandal.
We'll call it right.
Where people are using Grok to undress people like that's again, unfettered, no gatekeeping
break things and break things more kind of thinking and acting like that's the first time
it's happened, I think short changes the danger of like human nature to just try whatever.
So, yeah.
Wow.
We're speaking with Jason Scott from the internet archive.
As you can tell, we can, we can talk all night long about these things.
Uh, Jason, you're also involved with textfiles.com.
Anything new going on there?
Scrapers again.
Um, but you know, like what's nice about textfiles.com is, uh, it's a site that I have bulletin
board system text stuff on.
It's all text oriented.
I had a guy, let me know that the Emacs web browser seems to be having trouble with one
of the pages and we've been trying to diagnose it because I try to have it work all the way
back to like the first web browsers from like 92 and 93.
And one of them seems to be choking on a certain page.
Those are the kind of technical support issues I have to deal with at textfiles.com.
I mean, people download stuff all the time off it and that's fine.
Um, and it gets scoped all the time.
Um, I'm just glad it exists.
Um, I have a couple anonymous donors who just pay for it to keep up like just on principle.
So it doesn't, it's not very painful for me to run it.
Are you still looking for material from the past?
I mean, I'm always looking for material, but I mean, in terms of, you know, um, did I,
have I been here?
I mean, yes, I have.
I've been here since disc master, right?
Like, like not sure D I S C M A S T E R disc master dot text files.com is a project I didn't
create, but the person who created it was terrified of being bothered by the world.
So I'm, I'm in front of it cause I don't mind being bothered by the world.
Um, and what it is, is it's analyzed 35,000 shareware CD ROMs for all of their data.
Analyzed it up to 700 different formats to make them playable in the modern browser and
lets you do semantic searches of hundreds of terabytes of data.
So all of that information locked away on CD ROMs that were scooped up from the BBS era
and the early, like it's all searchable now, like looking for clip art or looking for old
people have found beta versions of browsers and quick time and, and emulators that were
on one magazine in 1996, you know, for one month or things like that. Um, along with a bunch of
old FTP sites and stuff, that project to me is the most important revolution in computer historical
work currently on the internet. So that's the other thing going on. How about that?
If you have a garage or basement full of a 3.5 inch floppies, is there any hope?
Yeah. I'd love to talk to you. Uh, Jason at text files.com. I love now. Traditionally,
whenever I appear on off the hook, I give out that email address and somebody mails me and I lose
between four and 17 days of my life dealing with a weirdo. And that is fine. I adore all weirdos,
even the ones who are weird beyond all recognition. So bring it on kids. I get it.
Is it one of us or is it, I mean, you know who we are, right? Do you know all of our names?
Yeah, no, I get, I get, um, um, yeah, no, there was, there was, there was one that you don't,
don't give out anything that might lead to even more emails.
Ah, it's okay. He has passed on, but, uh, boy, did we have a, did we have a fun time? But you
know, the thing is, is, and this is, I think I'll, I'll say this because I always think life has
lessons. You have to do that. If you try to avoid any friction or strange situations or awkwardness in
life, then you're not alive. You're sitting at home, you're watching streaming shows. Go ahead,
watch all, all the seasons of euphoria. That'll never, you know, that won't bring up any awkwardness
or weirdness. You're just watching shows on TV. But if you insist on talking to people,
they all live different lives. They all come from different walks. It's okay to lose 45 minutes
on a disjointed conversation in a hallway at a conference like hope it's okay. That means you're
a human and you talk to human beings, you know, some of my finest disjointed conversations have
happened to the hope and I have loved every single one of them. Well, I think, uh, uh, we'll have fun
this, uh, this summer, uh, back in Manhattan. Uh, and, um, hopefully, um, uh, there'll be, there'll be a lot
more data coming your way from various sources as well. Uh, how do people reach you again?
Jason, J A S O N at text files, T E X T F I L E S.com. Or if you're feeling funny, you can also reach
me at beef, B E B E F at cow.net. If for some reason you want to be funny, both of them work.
Okay. We are going to be continuing the conversation on YouTube at eight o'clock,
go to channel 2600 on YouTube, or just click on the link that's on top of the 2600.com webpage.
And, uh, you'll be able to continue talking with us and, uh, maybe even call us if, uh, you're,
you're quick enough. Uh, we still have about two minutes. So if anyone has anything else they'd like
to add other than please support WBAI and keep this radio station on the air, strong, filled with,
um, uh, all kinds of, um, um, controversial topics and discussion and debate and all the things that,
uh, Jason has been encouraging us to get involved in because, uh, what's, what's the point of living
if you don't have those uncomfortable moments where you have to, uh, uh, talk to somebody who has a
different view or defend your views or learn. Yes. That's what life is all about. Life is not read
only. It is read, right. And you just got to take it. And there's a few bad sectors out there,
but there's a lot of great files too. So definitely come on, get, get involved,
take a walk, enjoy the day. Rob, can you give out that information again on how people can
support the station? I certainly can. Uh, you can give us a call at 833-922-4692. That's 833-WBAI-NYC.
Or you could, uh, point your web thing over to buddy.wbai.org. Um, make sure when you're
putting through your donation, you, uh, say you're giving it and, um, in honor of your favorite
show off the hook. Um, I hope that's your favorite show. It's my favorite show. And, uh, let us know,
let, let us and let our station know that, uh, you appreciate what we do and you appreciate our
existence and you want to help us do what we do. Also, I just used diskmaster.textfiles.com
to find a piece of, uh, shareware that I was telling Gila about recently, which is a Klingon
clock, a little talking desk clock, desktop clock for windows 3.11 that, uh, tells you the time in
Klingon, spoken Klingon. So, uh, thank you for that. At last. Okay. I can hardly wait to get that
installed. Uh, okay. So we are at a time again, uh, right to us, OTH at 2600.com. That's our email
address. And, uh, please send us, uh, anything that is of interest, questions, uh, comments,
experiences, suggestions, all that sort of thing. Uh, somebody sent us, uh, music, which is always
nice. Uh, we, um, uh, we, we, we, we had a conversation, uh, a while back about, uh, uh,
some, some hackers that were up to, uh, some skullduggery. They, they were a hacker group called
the gay furry hackers, I believe. And, um, some music came out of this. This comes from an artist known as
Sir Hard Disk Drive. And we're going to listen to this, uh, this, uh, particular tune. Enjoy. See you next week.
Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay pre-hackers
Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay pre-hackers
Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay
you find that funny rob cat girls i don't think cat girls appreciate being laughed at this
Well, I don't want to read a message, or a fucking alert, and if thanks for whatever
is, um, you have reached his parents, his parents, and, uh, uh, no, no, no, no, no, we check.
How can I, uh, just send me, um, but you're getting like five?
Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, furry packers, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, furry packers, gay,
Rawrackers.
And maybe that's why they want to encrypt the radios.
Because, you know, a recording of federal agents or cops saying,
OK, we're on the Gay Furry Hackers now, you know, that could be used in some kind of a musical track
and repeated over and over again to the embarrassment of said agents.
So there you go.
Thank you.