XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.misc, alt.censorship   
   XPost: alt.politics   
   From: d@ray   
      
   Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite   
   ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has   
   been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for   
   sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over   
   content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in   
   favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content   
   survive to see the light of day.   
      
   It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a   
   range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the   
   Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million   
   views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it   
   hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that   
   disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the   
   platform X to post all three hours.   
      
   Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part   
   of the business model of alternative media.   
      
   Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are   
   technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability   
   of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly,   
   the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking   
   images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have   
   gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has   
   chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.   
      
   As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted   
   for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and   
   consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about   
   partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are   
   being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole   
   memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.   
      
   The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was   
   suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only   
   took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it   
   out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a   
   read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content   
   that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public   
   display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.   
      
   In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors   
   content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the   
   invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the   
   ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of   
   researchers looking into government and corporate actions.   
      
   It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers   
   to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration   
   systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all   
   later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the   
   only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the   
   World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which   
   was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks   
   only to this tool which is now disabled.   
      
   What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and   
   take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some   
   user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to   
   verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and   
   when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being   
   censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths   
   of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry   
   can get away with anything and not get caught.   
      
   We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a   
   coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We   
   just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines?   
   Here is what they say:   
      
   > Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email   
   > addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website   
   > javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and   
   > improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and   
   > we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires   
   > heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We   
   > apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.   
      
   Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the   
   effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history   
   fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has   
   clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future   
   of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed   
   through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant   
   authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector,   
   technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from   
   the ability to act online without leaving a trace.   
      
   To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback   
   Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have   
   continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as   
   services are secured.”   
      
   When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be   
   some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing   
   behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in   
   read-only mode now. It is not.   
      
   Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one   
   place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you   
   were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space   
   to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact,   
   the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the   
   Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.   
      
   Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet   
   disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th   
   election.   
      
   Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results   
   increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives.   
   The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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