I respond to one random "And then the Wayback Machine EDITED THE PAGE TO CHANGE THE STORY" tweet and this is, I must stress, generally true.
The Wayback grew organically from a wild-haired geek's "what a fun idea" dream in the 1990s to a critical part of the information infrastructure of the internet in the present day. You know, like everything else. As a result, some of the basic facts are not fully explained.
Pages sometimes disappear from a server outage, from a bug in Playback (we could do an entire CONFERENCE on how Wayback Playback works), from a bunch of potential issues. They sometimes are taken down due to a lawyer letters, and are marked as such.
It happens rarely enough that people don't see it (versus, say, Youtube, where it happens by the tens of thousands a week so people are familiar with that page). So they don't know to recognize it.

Modifying webpages because of shadowy figures dictating us from afar? No. Nope.
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More from @textfiles

18 Nov
Oracle bought an entire (admittedly ailing) company, Sun, destroyed all the current product lines including the Solaris operating system and Sun hardware, to fillet out the one nugget of Ownership of Java, to sue Google for billions.

It's weird when people say otherwise.
I encounter people who act like that didn't happen, like they didn't burn down a pretty amazing product line that was all pretty extensively vetted for quality because they wanted some IP to make easy Google-billions money.

People are weird
I got to hear about how they shut down Solaris and support networks for Sun Hardware. Only legal support contracts kept it going for as long as it did and as they expired, Oracle just threw centuries of experience out the door. To make a few bucks.
Read 5 tweets
18 Nov
People have short memories, and of course Byzantine law observation is usually either ignored by the general populace, or is the province of rather.. well, let's go with very unassertive persons noting "huh, they're sacking the village on a tuesday this month".
The question is - what will Disney do about Steamboat Willie on January 1st, 2024? To protect this specific property, they have completely upended copyright law into its current untenable position, a functionally nuclear copyright schema favoring corporations unversally.
Read 11 tweets
10 Nov
INTERNET ARCHIVE EDUCATION WEEK: OK, it's time to talk a little bit about how Internet Archive is Not a Library Image
It's not just one monolithic collection of books, or something else; it's designed to be incredibly flexible about what comes in, how to get into it, and, ultimately, ensure it's as easily accessible to every item with in it.

So, not a library.

Actually, a library of libraries. Image
We have an extraordinary amount of partner organizations who have their items at the Internet Archive, and they're in collections that have sub-collections, and have their own organization - they even have alternative interfaces on their websites to our materials. Let's meet some Image
Read 11 tweets
9 Nov
Wolfenstein 3D running in DOS running emulated in a browser running in a VR headset

Totally normal, life isn't moving too fast Image
Hmm, a 10 foot screen in VR that is an emulated Apple II running in a browser. Nothing to see here, and impossible to explain to the game what is happening to it. Image
Hey Zuck, I'm running MAME in Oculus without sideloading, come at me bro Image
Read 4 tweets
6 Nov
Well, this is starting to happen: People accusing government officials of deleting tweets.

I can tell you at least 4 entities store all government tweets, so that won't "work". But more importantly, I need people to understand "they deleted all tweets", is probably false.
A constant refrain is "Jared Kushner deleted all his tweets!!!!" and the answer actually is that Jared has been made fun of in NYC circles for almost a decade and a half and he almost never social media posts anything, just sits on empty ones. You know. Like his buildings.
I'm just saying, do not start the "Those people are so full of conspiracy and crossed wires" and then start blasting out poorly sourced conspiracy and crossed wires. Data is data. A bunch of us loooooove collecting data. We'll sort it out.
Read 4 tweets
5 Nov
I just got a cold call from someone claiming to be my primary care physician staff trying to tell me who my colonoscopy doctor is going to be and I didn't respond nicely and that was weird
They said they could give me a list of doctors we could go through immediately to choose one and I told them no and they were rather surprised and acting weird
Is this normal? Does the office of a doctor just call you and tell you where your going
Read 4 tweets

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