Internet Archive

Brewster Kahle has the gleeful air of a man who has just found something wonderful and wants to tell his friends all about it. And his friends are the 2 billion people, and counting, who are on the Internet every day. What he has found -- or more accurately, crafted -- are the means and the mechanisms to preserve the human record, the whole human record, in its many media, so other humans can get to it with a tap or a mouse click, on www.internetarchive.org ...

You could say Backpage.com is a page nearly everyone wants to rip out of the Internet, crumple up and throw away. Last week, two legal cases out of Washington state illustrated how the popular website, known for its promotion of adult escort services, has to cling by its nails to the generosity of American law to survive. On Friday, three girls - two 13 and one 15  at the time they ran away from home - filed suit in Pierce County Superior Court against Backpage.com, alleging it allowed them to be bought and sold over the site for sex by the pimps who captured them.

You could say Backpage.com is a page nearly everyone wants to rip out of the Internet, crumple up and throw away. Last week, two legal cases out of Washington state illustrated how the popular website, known for its promotion of adult escort services, has to cling by its nails to the generosity of American law to survive. On Friday, three girls - two 13 and one 15  at the time they ran away from home - filed suit in Pierce County Superior Court against Backpage.com, alleging it allowed them to be bought and sold over the site for sex by the pimps who captured them.

Brewster Kahle has the gleeful air of a man who has just found something wonderful and wants to tell his friends all about it. And his friends are the 2 billion people, and counting, who are on the Internet every day. What he has found -- or more accurately, crafted -- are the means and the mechanisms to preserve the human record, the whole human record, in its many media, so other humans can get to it with a tap or a mouse click, on www.internetarchive.org ...

Historians often struggle with a dearth of firsthand accounts of important events, cultural changes or people from past centuries. The study of modern times often presents the opposite problem--researchers are quickly buried in an avalanche of data, held back only by government and corporate secrecy.

Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry rushed to pull a suddenly sensitive report from its Web site titled "Industrial Chemicals and Terrorism." The agency eliminated all traces of the document and its description of sources for home-brew nerve gases and improvised explosives. But on the World Wide Web, almost nothing truly dies.

In a crushing blow to Google Inc.'s grand ambition to build the world's largest digital library, a federal judge rejected the company's plans to share and sell the millions of books it has scanned over the last decade. U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin said Tuesday that Google's agreement with publishers and authors "would simply go too far" toward giving the company a major advantage over competitors in the electronic book world. The ruling, a crucial development in a five-year legal saga, effectively keeps Google from offering to the public more than 15 million books it has scanned since 2004.

It didn't take long after the capture of American Taliban John Walker Lindh before journalists were fanning out to learn more about this mysterious young man and how he went from a posh California suburb to a dingy Afghan prison. In the end, some of the most tantalizing clues emerged not from family members and neighbors but from Lindh himself, in writings he had posted years ago on the Internet.

It was a historian's nightmare. During the change from the Clinton to the Bush administration, websites affiliated with the Clinton White House went dark, and an unknown number of online documents and files were forever lost. Such Internet deaths inspired the Cyber Cemetery at the University of North Texas, which preserves government websites in their final form. The Cyber Cemetery archives sites when commissions or panels expire, allowing the online work of defunct government bodies to live on and remain accessible to the public.

In a crushing blow to Google Inc.'s grand ambition to build the world's largest digital library, a federal judge rejected the company's plans to share and sell the millions of books it has scanned over the last decade. U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin said Tuesday that Google's agreement with publishers and authors "would simply go too far" toward giving the company a major advantage over competitors in the electronic book world. The ruling, a crucial development in a five-year legal saga, effectively keeps Google from offering to the public more than 15 million books it has scanned since 2004.

It was a historian's nightmare. During the change from the Clinton to the Bush administration, websites affiliated with the Clinton White House went dark, and an unknown number of online documents and files were forever lost. Such Internet deaths inspired the Cyber Cemetery at the University of North Texas, which preserves government websites in their final form. The Cyber Cemetery archives sites when commissions or panels expire, allowing the online work of defunct government bodies to live on and remain accessible to the public.

It didn't take long after the capture of American Taliban John Walker Lindh before journalists were fanning out to learn more about this mysterious young man and how he went from a posh California suburb to a dingy Afghan prison. In the end, some of the most tantalizing clues emerged not from family members and neighbors but from Lindh himself, in writings he had posted years ago on the Internet.

Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry rushed to pull a suddenly sensitive report from its Web site titled "Industrial Chemicals and Terrorism." The agency eliminated all traces of the document and its description of sources for home-brew nerve gases and improvised explosives. But on the World Wide Web, almost nothing truly dies.

Historians often struggle with a dearth of firsthand accounts of important events, cultural changes or people from past centuries. The study of modern times often presents the opposite problem--researchers are quickly buried in an avalanche of data, held back only by government and corporate secrecy.

People who know about "50 Shades of Grey" have probably heard that author E.L. James began the story as post-"Twilight" fan fiction. But now the Internet evidence of its start has been deleted; its origins have been erased. That's what the website Galleycat discovered when it went to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine allows anyone to look at websites as they appeared on days past, when the Internet Archive's computer systems took a snapshot of the site.

What a short, strange trip it was. After the Grateful Dead halted free downloads of its ubiquitously circulating concerts from a nonprofit website last week, surviving members of the psychedelic jam band changed their minds late Wednesday amid protest from some of their biggest fans. Internet Archive, a site that catalogs content on websites, reposted recordings of Grateful Dead concerts for download after band members decided to make them available again.