ARCHIVE TEAM: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack

Why HN readers recommended it

HN points to it whenever a company shuts down a service and wipes user content, as an entertaining case for digital preservation.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

textfilesdotcom

Topic

digital preservation

Format

talk

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

3

HN mentions in dataset

3

Recommendation years in dataset

2014–2016

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• I love the ArchiveTeam. Jason Scott, the leader of the project, gave a fantastically entertaining talk about how they saved Geocities, Yahoo! Video, and Friendster — using a Distributed Preservation of Service Attack. Definitely worth a watch. [VIDEO]

• A few Defcons ago, Jason Scott gave an excellent talk about this failure mode[1]. Basically, companies host user-generated content for free. Then years later, they destroy it with little or even no notice. Sturgeon's law applies; most of the deleted content is crap. But a …

• Often, this supposedly redundant data is useful in ways current society can't fathom. Millions of photos of the Mona Lisa taken over decades won't tell you much new about the Mona Lisa. But it will tell you a lot about changes in camera technology over …