Democracy? What Democracy? It's all about the old mighty cold dollar... ->
"When the World Wide Web went live in the early 1990s, its founders hoped it would be a space for anyone to share information and collaborate. But today, the free and open web is shrinking.
The Internet Archive has been recording the history of the internet and making it available to the public through its Wayback Machine since 1996. Now, some of the world’s biggest news outlets are blocking the archive’s access to their pages.
Major publishers – including The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and USA Today – have confirmed they’re ending the Internet Archive’s access to their content.
While publishers say they support the archive’s preservation mission, they argue unrestricted access creates unintended consequences, exposing journalism to AI crawlers and members of the public trying to skirt their paywalls.
Yet, publishers don’t simply want to lock out AI crawlers. Rather, they want to sell their content to data-hungry tech companies. Their back catalogues of news, books and other media have become a hot commodity as data to train AI systems.
While using the Wayback Machine the last few days, I've had a lot of "503 Service Unavailable" errors. I'm seeing those errors not just when archiving pages, but also when retrieving pages from the archive as well.
In the past, I've seen issues with Wayback Machine short-term corresponding to an event that would trigger a lot of archiving (example: a major government agency caught deleting web content.)
Meme of Heath Ledger as Joker Nurse.
Top Text: AWS US-EAST-1 AND CLOUDFLARE HAVE A HICCUP, EVERYONE LOSES THEIR MINDS
Bottom Text: BUT SOMEONE BREAKS WEB.ARCHIVE.ORG AND NOBODY SEEMS TO NOTICE OR CARE?
Jean Armour Polly, aka the Net-mom & the person who helped popularize the phrase “surfing the internet," celebrates the Internet Archive’s 1 trillionth webpage. Her message highlights the ephemerality of websites, the importance of preserving digital culture, & honors the librarians & archivists who make it possible.
📡 The #livestream doesn’t stop when we're off for a holiday or weekend.
When the microfiche scanning team powers down overnight & on weekends, the feed keeps on keeping on, shifting to silent films, home movies & other gems from the #InternetArchive.
Go behind the scenes at the #InternetArchive! 🌐 Join us Tues in Richmond, CA, for Doors Open 2025 & explore how physical collections are preserved, digitized & shared.
Photo of Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive’s physical archive site. He is leaning forward and looking into a large shipping container used for storage, with palettes visible inside.
Hackers. COVID-19. The Navajo Nation.
HACKING AT LEAVES tells their story. After struggling to secure distributors and festival screenings, Grenzfurthner released it FREE on the
@internetarchive.
A person in a yellow hazmat suit sits in a dimly lit wooden booth against red patterned wallpaper. Above them hangs a painting showing a similar figure in a hazmat suit standing by a mountain stream, creating a surreal mirror effect. Still from the 2025 documentary Hacking at Leaves.
The Wayback Machine has preserved 1 trillion web pages — a historic milestone for digital memory. 🌐
Join us next week, when we mark the occasion with two fantastic events:
1️⃣ Oct 21 – Doors Open 2025 (Richmond, CA): Tour the Physical Archive.
2️⃣ Oct 22 – The Web We’ve Built (SF + Virtual): Celebrate digital memory, stories & the resilient web we’ve made together.
Poster with a gradient blue background. Large text reads “the web we’ve built.” Smaller text says “Celebrating 1 trillion web pages archived.” Pixelated 3D icons of a floppy disk, magnifying glass, cursor arrow, computer window, and others radiate outward from a bright starburst in the center. On the right, text lists event details: “Wednesday, October 22, 5–10PM PT. Live stream: 7–8PM PT. 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco.” The Internet Archive logo appears in the bottom right corner.
I haven't done a #FollowFriday in a while. Here are some accounts that I frequent! If you find them useful and/or interesting, you should follow them as well!
@AIF_Massachusetts#AmericanIronFront in Massachusetts: standing against Nazis, the alt-right, and fascists of all stripes in Massachusetts and the greater New England area.
@RadicalAnthro
London's longest running evening class, studying What it means to be human at UCL #Anthropology dept. We are FREE, on Tues eves term time. Account run by #CamillaPower. Radical anthropologists include #ChrisKnight, Ian Watts, Jerome Lewis and Morna Finnegan.
@thebeeguy
Founder of #WorldBeeSanctuary - the expanded ambition of The #Bee Sanctuary of Ireland - 55 acres of certified stock free organic land dedicated to our #NativeWildBees. The one and only true native wild bee sanctuary on the planet. No hives! No honey! Just wild! A not for profit social enterprise. Disruptive but irresistible.
@mutualmorris
We are a#MutualAid group in Morris County, New Jersey, USA wanting to connect with likeminded folks, to learn, share, and build #solidarity communities as far as we can. We are led by mostly #queer, #poor / #unhoused, #immigrant, #socialist, #communist, and #anarchist types from multiple generations and we seek to build a real, active path out of "business as usual".
@CrimethInc #CrimethInc. is a rebel alliance—a decentralized network pledged to anonymous collective action—a breakout from the prisons of our age. We strive to reinvent our lives and our world according to the principles of self-determination and mutual aid. We believe that you should be free to dispose of your limitless potential on your own terms: that no government, market, or ideology should be able to dictate what your life can be. If you agree, let’s do something about it.
@igd_news
In search of new forms of life. A digital community center and media platform featuring news, opinion, podcasts, and reporting on autonomous social movements and revolt across so-called North America from an #anarchist perspective. 🏴
@Todd #ToddChretien is a farmer, translator, editor, and author. He is co-chair of #MaineDSA and works in the #PineAndRoses editorial collective.
@g7izu #SpaceWeather, #aurora and #RadioPropagation from a UK perspective. Any alerts or warnings are informational only and are not official. I post about various other subjects as well, but always hope to be informative and interesting. Not a professional space weather forecaster, it's my hobby!
⏱️ Here's a time-lapse taste of our after-hours #livestream: when the microfiche scan. teams log off, the feed rolls on with #InternetArchive gems—silent films, home movies, NASA images & more.
This clip is sped up 45x, so you can sample the vibe in just over a minute.
The calm pace of our livestreamed microfiche scanning may not show the scale of the work, so here’s a time-lapse revealing how many pages we can digitize in just one hour.
#lofi Archive radio 🎞️ beats to scan/read microfiche by.
Preservation in progress, 7:30 AM to Midnight PT, Mon–Fri.
Archive ambience the rest of the time.