Internet Archive Blogs

Two Grants Announced Supporting Web Archiving

Posted on April 26, 2015 by jefferson

We are excited to announce Internet Archive’s participation in two new grant-funded collaborative projects to advance the field of web archiving! Our Archive-It service, which works with libraries, archives, museums and others to provide the tools for institutions to create their own web archives, will partner with New York University and Old Dominion University on two separate areas of work. We thank both The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for their recognition of the value of web archiving and their support for the continued development of tools and initiatives to expand the quality, accessibility, and extensibility of these collections. We also thank our awesome collaborative partners on these projects, New York University Libraries, NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program, and Old Dominion University’s Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group and look forward to working with them as part of our broader initiative for “Building Libraries Together.”

For the project “Archiving the Websites of Contemporary Composers,” led by NYU Libraries and funded with a grant of $480,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we will work with the Libraries and MIAP. This project will archive web-based and born-digital audiovisual materials, and research and develop tools for their improved capture and discoverability. Contemporary musical works, as well as the rich secondary materials that accompany them, are increasingly migrating to the web. We outlined a number of current challenges to capturing and replaying online multimedia, such as dynamic and transient URL generation and adaptive bitrate streaming, as well as a need for continued research and development around the integration of web archives and non-web collections.

We have two specific pieces of work in the grant. First, we will build tools to improve the crawling and capture of web-based audiovisual materials, addressing the increasing complexity of streaming audiovisual materials, especially on third-party hosting and sharing platforms. This development work will build on our experience creating “Heritrix helper” tools like Umbra. Our second area of work will explore methods to integrate discovery of high-quality, non-web multimedia content held in external repositories into the Archive-It platform. Linking Archive-It collections with non-web institutional content has great potential to integrate web and non-web archives. This work will build on NYU’s creation of an API for their preservation repository, our increased use of API-based systems integration in Archive-It 5.0, and our continued work on improved content discovery for web collections. See NYU’s press release for more details.

The second recently-announced grant project is being lead by Old Dominion University’s Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group, which received a $468,618 National Leadership Grant for Libraries from IMLS for the project, “Combining Social Media Storytelling With Web Archives” (grant number LG-71-15-0077). Readers not familiar with ODU’s great history of research and development around web archives are encourage to check out projects such as WARCreate/WAIL, their work on visualizations and Archive-It, and our recent favorite, the #whatdiditlooklike tool. In this project ODU will be building tools and processes to assimilate user-focused, online storytelling methods, such as Storify, to 1) summarize existing collections and 2) bootstrap new or expand existing web archive collections. The project will provide new ways to create unique topical and thematic collections through URLs shared via social media and storytelling platforms.

We will be working with them to integrate these tools in Archive-It, conduct user testing and training, and explore other ways that storytelling and user-generated materials can help build narrative pathways into large, often diffuse, collections of web content. We are excited to work with ODU and continue our increased focus on new models of access for web archives, as many institutional web collections are now of a breadth, volume, and operational maturity to begin focusing on novel ways their web archives can be studied and better understood by users and researchers.

Thanks again to Mellon Foundation and IMLS for supporting these cooperative efforts to advance web archiving and we are excited to work with our great partners and the broader community to keeping preserving and expanding access to the rich historical and cultural record documented on the web.

Posted in Announcements, Archive-It | Leave a comment

Will We Let Congress Vote to Fast-Track Secret Trade Deals?

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Chris Butler

Yesterday, legislation was introduced in the US Senate that would enable Congress to fast-track approval of secret trade agreements by Republican Orrin Hatch and Democrat Ron Wyden. The timing is important because the President is currently pushing for the approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement negotiated in secret meetings with international lawmakers that has serious ramifications for a host of important issues, Internet privacy and intellectual property among them.

We are worried that Congress’ and the public’s ability to review, discuss, and debate proposed agreements would be significantly limited by this bill. It would also force Congress to have a strict yes/no vote on the presented agreement, with no ability to make amendments beforehand.

The impacts of these agreements and the international rules that they impose upon citizens and Internet users across the globe are too sweeping to be coordinated behind closed doors and then presented in a short window for a straight up and down vote.

There is still time for concerned individuals and organizations to resist this push, as we did with SOPA, PIPA, and the threat to net neutrality.

For more information and organized ways to take action, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s write-up and the Internet Vote campaign.

Posted in Announcements, News | 3 Comments

Internet Archive and CADAL Partner to Digitize 500,000 Academic Texts

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Jeff Kaplan

The Internet Archive and the Chinese Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL), are pleased to announce that 500,000 English-language, academic books will be digitized through a partnership that leverages strengths from both organizations. This furthers an initiative begun in 2009, The China-US Million Book Digital Library Project, seeking to bring one million texts into the public domain.

“We are working together with a valuable global partner, CADAL, to create a digital library of high quality, academic, eBooks for use in China, North America and the world at large; I couldn’t be happier!” Robert Miller, General Manager of Digital Libraries for the Internet Archive, remarked on the collaboration.

The Chinese Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL) is a consortium of over 70 Chinese University Libraries. CADAL will provide access to a leading set of libraries, the technical resources to display, and share the books inside China, as well as the staff needed for digitization. The Internet Archive will select the books, and provide equipment and processing resources. Both organizations will offer access and discovery tools for both scholars and citizen-scholars. Together, CADAL and the Internet Archive are contributing to a growing, global digital library.

Chen Huang, Digital Librarian and Deputy Director of Administrator Center for CADAL, shared the vision for the project: “We are pleased to be working with the Internet Archive. Together, we have developed a program that will allow Chinese university students to have access to materials that will enhance both specific knowledge, and exposure to broad trends and ideas.”

This phase of the partnership will last about 3 years and involve teams in the US, Shenzhen, China and ZheJiang University in Hang Zhou, China.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library with over 6 million texts online and a popular global website, with 34 million downloads a month. Their mission is “Universal Access to All Knowledge” – https://archive.org/

Contact Robert@Archive.org for more information.

The China Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL) is a long term project of the Ministry of Education of China. The consortium aims to construct an academic digital library with high-level technology and abundant digital resources that are multidisciplinary, multilingual, and categorically diverse. http://www.cadal.cn/

Contact service@cadal.cn for more information.

Posted in Books Archive, News | Leave a comment

Sharing Data for Better Discovery and Access

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Jeff Kaplan

The Internet Archive and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are pleased to announce a joint collaborative program to enhance sharing of collections from the Internet Archive in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

The Internet Archive will work with interested libraries and content providers to help ensure their metadata meets DPLA’s standards and requirements. After their content is digitized, the metadata would then be ready for ingestion into the DPLA if the content provider has a current DPLA provider agreement.

The DPLA is excited to collaborate with the Internet Archive in this effort to improve metadata quality overall, by making it more consistent with DPLA requirements, including consistent rights statements. Better data means better access. In addition to providing DPLA compliant metadata services, the Internet Archive also offers a spectrum of digital collection services, such as digitization, storage and preservation. Libraries, archives and museums who chose Internet Archive as their service provider have the added benefit of having their content made globally available through Internet Archive’s award winning portals, OpenLibrary.org and Archive.org.

“We are thrilled to be working with the DPLA”, states Robert Miller, Internet Archive General Manager of Digital Libraries. “With their emphasis on providing not only a portal and a platform, but also their advocacy for public access of content, they are a perfect partner for us”.

Rachel Frick, DPLA Business Development Director says, “The Internet Archive’s mission of ‘Universal Access to All Knowledge’, coupled with their end-to-end digital library solutions complements our core values.”

Program details are available upon request. Please contact:
Rachel Frick – DPLA Business Development Director, Rachel@dp.la
Robert Miller – General Manager of Digital Libraries, robert@archive.org

Posted in Announcements, Books Archive, News, Open Library | 1 Comment

You are invited to a Party for GETDecentralized–Wednesday April 1 at the Internet Archive

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Wendy Hanamura

Help Us Lift the Fog on Decentralization!

The GETDecentralized community wants to do something fundamental: “To transform bureaucratic hierarchies into technology-driven networks” (Fred Wilson).

The Internet Archive and Jolocom invite you to GETDecentralized! An evening of conversation, celebration and community-building around new ideas in decentralization.

GETD Party will be Wednesday, April 1st at the Internet Archive in San Francisco!

Location: The Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118

Schedule:
6:00 — 7:00 pm, Reception
7:00 — 7:30 pm, Speakers (including Brewster Kahle and Markus Sabadello)
7:30 — 8:30 pm, Reception and Tours of the Internet Archive

Markus Sabadello, a long-time decentralization activist and hacker, will take us on a tour of the new technologies of decentralization. Learn what “decentralization” means and how we can all benefit from it. Markus runs his own open-source effort “Project Danube,” which is based on XRI/XDI technology and experiments with user-centric identity, personal data storage and Vendor Relationship Management.

Also Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive, will share his ideas about a “Locking the Web Open” through decentralized technologies. He’ll lead a tour of this digital universal library — 20 Petabytes of our culture’s books, films, music, software and Web pages. Hope to see you next Wednesday!

RSVP Today!

Posted in News | Comments Off

Political Ads Win Over News 45 to 1 in Philly TV News 2014

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Roger Macdonald

[press: Columbia Journalism Review, USA Today, BloombergPolitics, Washington Post]

Study finds 842 minutes of political Ads compared to 18.7 minutes of political news stories in large sample of Philadelphia TV news programs archived by the Internet Archive in a joint project.

In the closing eight weeks of the 2014 campaign, political candidates and outside groups bombarded viewers of Philadelphia’s major TV stations with nearly 12,000 ads designed to sway voters in the Nov. 4 elections. But the stations that benefited from political advertisers’ $14 million spending spree also appear to have devoted little time to political journalism. A study of a representative sampling of newscasts on those stations put the ratio of time devoted to political advertising and spent on substantive political news stories at 45:1.

Political Ads & Local TV News – Philly 2014, by Danilo Yanich

These are the findings of a University of Delaware team lead by Associate Professor Danilo Yanich. The university’s Center for Community Research and Service researchers collaborated with the Internet Archive, The Sunlight Foundation, and the Committee of Seventy – the 100+ year-old Philadelphia-based political watchdog organization.

Our joint pilot project, Philly Political Media Watch, worked to open a library of all television news from stations based in and around Philadelphia and index the political ads presented in their newscasts. The ads were joined with information on who paid how much for them. The Sunlight Foundation was able to unearth those financial data from being buried in PDF disclosures every TV stations is required to submit to the Federal Communications Commission. The experimental project was supported by individual contributors and grants from the Democracy Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation.

The Philadelphia television market was chosen as a 2014 laboratory to experiment how the interaction between news media and political money; to learn lessons that could be taken to scale across the nation in 2016. The Philadelphia region is the nation’s 4th largest TV market, 19% African American, and includes parts of three states. In 2014, important contests in the region included races for: Pennsylvania governor, a Delaware U.S. Senate seat, two open congressional seats in New Jersey and an open state Senate seat in suburban Philadelphia.

The six major Philadelphia metro TV stations carried 8,003 political ads in their news broadcasts between September 8 and Election Day. As Yanich’s report notes, political strategists have long acknowledged that they try to place ads during or near news programming because it attracts the highest proportion of likely voters.

Here is a sample program from the Delaware study. This 60-minute WCAU, a NBC affiliate, program aired at 5:00pm the day before the elections. It offered two substantive political stories. One about election day poll hours and the other about the leading candidates for governor commenting on their attack ads. Good set up. Questions of incumbent elicit an unequivocal assessment of opponent’s assertions. Followed by other candidate asked if his ads are negative. Seemingly timely and germane. Quiz: Can you find WCAU’s mistake followed sometime later by an unacknowledged correction?

Although WCAU clearly addressed important election issues, that same 60 minute program was also stuffed with 24 political ads. Here is one, below. Quiz: Can you spot the word “EBOLA”? And for extra credit: which is more toxic to our Republic, this kind of ad or the disease?

Although local TV station marketing directors are more than happy to accommodate the needs of political ad buyers, the local news directors appear to take a less supportive view of their audience’s interest in politics. Yanich and his research team looked at a representative sample of the news programs (390 of 1,256) and found politics taking a back seat to other types of stories in terms both of time and placement in the broadcast. The Delaware researchers found that many of the political stories aired were blandly informational, describing candidate schedules or appearances. Isolating political stories that focused on substantive political issues, Yanich’s team found that during the broadcasts they analyzed, there 18.7 minutes of those stories, compared to 842 minutes of political ads, a ratio of 45:1.

Next Steps

With so much heat, where will citizens find the light they need to navigate through this onslaught of political messaging?

The Internet Archive has begun to welcome new collaborators to join us in tackling the challenge of creating timely information resources for the 2016 U.S. election cycles. Data individuals and civic organizations can trust when considering how to participate in some of their community’s most important decision making. Reliable information they can use to hold television stations accountable for the choices they make in balancing obligations to serve the information needs of their communities and the allure of one of their biggest revenues sources: political advertising.

How might we better inform voters and increase civic participation before, during and after elections?

Posted in Announcements, News | 2 Comments

Open Source Housing for Good

Posted on March 17, 2015 by brewster

This is from a talk given by Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, at Commonwealth Club panel titled Open Source Housing for Good on March 9th. [covered by KQED public radio]

Foundation Housing

Our employees are being driven from their homes by rising rents; they are commuting great distances because of the lack of affordable housing; they are living in insecurity because of the fluctuation in rent and home prices.

Internet Archive – Non-Profit Library

I believe it is becoming harder to attract and keep good people working in nonprofits, including the Internet Archive, because of this problem.

Our employees spend an average of 30-60% of their income on housing. 30-60%.

That is a lot more than the “spend less than 25% on housing” that HUD recommends. Turns out that this is not just our employees, and not just the bay area. According to a Harvard study, the average American renter pays 30-60% of their incoming on housing. Similarly, homeowners pay about the same, except for those lucky few that own their houses outright.

The Bay Area is particularly problematic because rents and house prices have been rapidly rising, which is causing dislocations or people feeling locked into apartments and jobs. Nonprofits are particularly hit because their funding does not rise and fall as fast as the market fluctuations. Further, when the market is down, it is exactly the time you want non-profit services to be strong.

So the Internet Archive, and I would say other nonprofits as well, have an existential problem: affordable and stable employee housing.

The Internet Archive and the Kahle/Austin Foundation are trying a new model to help. Foundation Housing as a name for a new housing class : Permanently Affordable housing for non-profit workers.

In this model, a new nonprofit, the Kahle/Austin Foundation House, has been set up to purchase apartment buildings. These rental units are then made available to employees of select nonprofits at a “debt free” rate– basically equivalent the condominium fee and taxes. Typically, the debt makes up about 2/3 of the cost of a building and the other costs (tax+maintenance+insurance) makes up about 1/3. Since the employee does not pay the debt part, the monthly fee is now about $850-1000/month rather than $2700-3000 current market rent. This way, the fee to those employees is about 1/3 of the cost of market rent, and we believe more stable than market based rents.

Foundation Housing Residents

Currently, this is being tried with an 11 unit apartment building in San Francisco 6 blocks from the Internet Archive. As apartments have become available through normal attrition — we do not force the existing tenants out– the Foundation house has made units available to 2 nonprofits, and there are now 3 employees living there. Having a walking commute, lower housing cost, and a nice neighborhood has been well received.

Roxanna used to commute over an hour each way from Bay View on 3 buses, and raising her 8 year old daughter in a building that had drug dealers actively dealing. Now she walks 6 blocks to work, pays less, and feels safer.

Michelle is a librarian who was being evicted from her apartment and would have left San Francisco and probably would not be now working at the Internet Archive.

And Samantha worried that her rent was continuously on the rise, thinking she might have to leave the city in a few years, likes that the building is feeling more like a community and less like than an anonymous number in an apartment building.

Having housing provided as part of an employee benefit is similar to faculty housing, military, monasteries, and some hospital housing. But having to leave your apartment upon leaving your job is a negative aspect of this model. We have not seen the effect of this because no one has left yet.

So we think we have a model… but how do we make it permanent, and how do we finance it? To help make it permanent, we are borrowing ideas from the free and open source world and creative-commons licenses. “Some Rights Reserved” rather than “All Rights Reserved“. “Share and Share Alike” rather than “Get Off My Property”. With free-and-open-source software, the writer is giving up some of the profit potential in return for increased community participation. In the Foundation House, the supporters are giving up the ability to flip the building for a profit in return for making a permanent asset for the public good.

To finance the creation of these, we have thought of 4 ways, and are trying 3 of them already:

We built a credit union with this idea in mind, called the Internet Credit Union. It has plenty of deposits to start creating Foundation Housing, but alas, the credit union regulators (indirectly controlled by the banks) are not allowing us to make mortgages. This is a sad state of affairs for our nations new credit unions, but is not the subject of this talk.

We have tried the “endowment” approach with the current Foundation House, where we appealed to major donors for an endowment in the form of a building. The attraction is that it is much like an endowment, but instead of having money in a Goldman Sachs account, where they do their magic to make some return, the building-as-endowment is both good deal financially, and helps the nonprofit support their employees.

Beyond this, we would like to look into raising money through a low-interest bond, say for $100 million, to government and local investors, to fund the purchase of these houses, then using market based renters to pay off the bond. This way the buildings would slowly transition into debt-free Foundation Housing. We have not tried this yet.

Lastly, and maybe most promisingly, there are people that are looking for new answers and participating in conversations like this. A number of people in the Bay Area are starting co-working spaces and group houses . When these are being started can be a good time to set up a structure to work off debt and keeping it off — then use the benefits to perpetuate a mission. While still in formation, there seems to be interest from people like Jessy Kate and others. This could be helped by creating a Foundation Housing License that others could adopt or remix.

With about 10% of all employees in the US working in the non-profit sector, maybe we could hope for 5% of US housing to become Foundation Housing to provide stable, affordable housing for those dedicating themselves to service.

Lets create more debt-free Foundation Housing for non-profit workers!

[Other pieces on this]

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You are Invited to a Party: Victory for the Net

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Wendy Hanamura

The event was a success, with resulting video and press.

victory7

Dear Friend of the Open Internet,

JOIN US!

FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler, wants to do something monumental: reclassify broadband access providers under Title II of the Communications Act.

Translation: we’ve made huge progress in the fight to protect the Open Internet. And it’s time to celebrate!

The Internet Archive & Electronic Frontier Foundation invite you to VICTORY FOR THE NET! An evening of celebration, conversation, and sharing what’s next. The party will be Thursday, February 26 at the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, from 6-9 p.m.

The FCC still has to vote on Chairman Wheeler’s proposal and we don’t know the exact details yet. What we do know is that we’ve all worked hard to get the agency on the right track at last. We’re not done yet, but we have a lot to celebrate.

We are joining hands with our friends and co-hosts from:
Free Press, 18 Million Rising, Center for Media Justice–home of the Media Action Grassroots Network, Common Cause, Daily Kos, Demand Progress, Fight For the Future, Media Alliance, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Public Knowledge, San Francisco Bitcoin, San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, The Greenlining Institute, The Utility Reform Network and to take stock of how far we have come, and where we are headed in the movement to protect the Open Internet.

Hope to see you next Thursday! RSVP Today!

Brewster Kahle
Founder & Digital Librarian
Internet Archive

Posted in Announcements, News | Tagged fcc, net neutrality | 24 Comments

What’s new with v2

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Alexis Rossi

As many of you have already seen, we are working on the next generation of the archive.org web site, which we call Version 2.0 (v2). It’s in beta right now, so go check it out!

Version 1 (v1) showing the banner to try the BETA Version 2 (v2)

We get a lot of feedback from the people who have elected to try out v2, and we read ALL of it. As themes emerge about what people are having trouble with, we make changes to the design and then we pay attention to subsequent feedback to try to gauge whether we solved the problem (or not).

Volume prepended to title

The goal of this redesign is to make the site more inviting and easier to use. Right now our work is focused on how the site looks and how things are organized on the page. For the most part, everything that is available to you in Version 1 (v1) of the site is available to you in v2 – but those things may be in different places!

Rights information displayed in About tab

We have a lot of long-time users of the site, and we know that any major changes will cause them to have to relearn where things are and how to accomplish the things they already know how to do on v1. This kind of major change can be very annoying, so we’re working hard to make sure you only need to relearn things once. While we will be adding more features as time goes by, we expect those changes to be incremental and not to affect the basic layout of pages.

If you’ve been using v2, you’ve probably noticed some changes over the last few weeks. I’ll discuss some of those changes here, and some of them are highlighted in the included images.

The collection About tab contains a longer description, info about contributors, and stats for reviews, forums, views and items

Volume information. We have a lot of journals and books with Volume information that was not showing in search, collection or account pages. The volume information is now prepended to the title for easier visual scanning within a collection.

Live Music. Rights information for a collection is now displayed on the About tab. We also changed the way shows are described in band collections to list the date and venue before the band name, making it easier to visually scan the items in a collection.

Mobile. On most mobile devices we decreased the initial number of search results from 50 to 25 in order to lighten the page load time.

Collections Page

Go to list view for a collection and click the “Show details” checkbox

Collection description. The description area for the collection at the top of the page has been shortened. We encourage collection builders to add useful descriptions, and you can see the additional information in the new About tab.

Click to see additional collections for an item

About tab. The About tab replaces the Contributors tab. We wanted to have a place for all of the information about a collection, and “Contributors” didn’t cover it. The new About tab contains the longer description for a collection, rights information (when it exists), data about how many reviews and forum posts are in that collection, and the content from the previous Contributors tab – the collection creator, people who have added to the collection, and charts for Views and Items over time. You will also find related collections listed on the About tab below the graphs. Parent collections and subcollections still show up in the Collections tab, since they are part of a collection’s direct hierarchy.

The See All Files page

Collection tab. The Collection tab has a few changes as well. In list view, you can now “show details” for each item if you want to see more information.

Item Pages

Additional collections. If an item belongs to more than one collection, you can choose to view those additional collections.

Upload tile on user account page

Stream only. When an item is not available for download, you will see a “Stream Only” notification where the “Download” button normally appears. We made some visual changes to this notification to make it seem less button-like.

Favorites list sorted by Date Favorited

See All Files. In the “see all files” view, “playable” media files are pushed to the top, just under the “all files” options for torrent and zip. Files are grouped logically, with the original first and bolded and the derivative files listed below.

User Account Page

Uploads. Your Uploads tab has a new “Upload” tile in it, just to make uploading easier to find. You can still upload from anywhere on the site by clicking the upload icon at the top of the page, of course.

Favorites. Your Favorites list (called bookmarks in v1) will now display your favorites sorted by “date favorited” so that you can see your most recently favorited items first.

Tell Us!

As always, please use the Beta feedback link in the top right corner to let us know what you think. Is everything awesome? Are you confused about where to find something? Tell us!

If you’re interested in a more detailed running log of changes from our lead developer, Tracey Jaquith, you can get the “nerd version” here: https://archive.org/CHANGELOG.txt

This project receives support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge.

Posted in Archive Version 2 | Comments Off

Locking the Web Open, a Call for a Distributed Web

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Roger Macdonald

Presentation by Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive Digital Librarian at Ford Foundation NetGain gathering, — a call from 5 top foundations to think big about prospects for our digital future.

Hi, I’m Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive. For 25 years we’ve been building this fabulous thing—the Web. I want to talk to you today about how can we Lock the Web Open.

One of my heroes, Larry Lessig, famously said that “Code is Law.” The way we code the Web will determine the way we live online. So we need to bake our values into our code.

Freedom of expression needs to be baked into our code. Privacy should be baked into our code. Universal access to all knowledge. But right now, those values are not embedded in the Web.

It turns out that the World Wide Web is very fragile. But it is huge. At the Internet Archive we collect 1 billion pages a week. We now know that Web pages only last about 100 days on average before they change or disappear. They blink on and off in their servers.

And the Web is massively accessible, unless you live in China. The Chinese government has blocked the Internet Archive, the New York Times, and other sites from its citizens. And so do other countries every once in a while.

So the Web is not reliable— And the Web isn’t private. People, corporations, countries can spy on what you are reading. And they do. We now know that Wikileaks readers were targeted by the NSA and the UK’s equivalent. We, in the library world, know the value of reader privacy.

But the Web is fun. We got one of the three things right. So we need a Web that is Reliable, Private but is still Fun. I believe it is time to take that next step. And It’s within our reach.

Imagine “Distributed Web” sites that are as functional as Word Press blogs, Wikimedia sites, or even Facebook. But How?

Contrast the current Web to the internet—the network of pipes that the World Wide Web sits on top of. The internet was designed so that if any one piece goes out, it will still function. The internet is a truly distributed system. What we need is a Next Generation Web; a truly distributed Web.

Here’s a way of thinking about it: Take the Amazon Cloud. The Amazon Cloud works by distributing your data. Moving it from computer to computer—shifting machines in case things go down, getting it closer to users, and replicating it as it is used more. That’s a great idea. What if we could make the Next Generation Web work that, but across the entire internet, like an enormous Amazon Cloud?

In part, it would be based on Peer-to-peer technology—systems that aren’t dependent on a central host or the policies of one particular country. In peer-to-peer models, those who are using the distributed Web are also providing some of the bandwidth and storage to run it.

Instead of one web server per website we would have many. The more people or organizations that are involved in the distributed Web, the safer and faster it will become. The next generation Web also needs a distributed authentication system without centralized log-in and passwords. That’s where encryption comes in.

And it also needs to be Private—so no one knows what you are reading. The bits will be distributed—across the Net—so no one can track you from a central portal.

And this time the Web should have a memory. We’d build in a form of versioning, so the Web is archived thru time. The Web would no longer exist in a land of the perpetual present.

Plus it still needs to be Fun—malleable enough spur the imaginations of a millions of inventors. How do we know that it can work? There have been many advances since the birth of the Web in 1992.

We have computers that are 1000 times faster. We have JAVAScript that allows us to run sophisticated code in the browser. So now readers of the distributed web could help build it. Public key encryption is now legal, so we can use it for authentication and privacy. And we have Block Chain technology that enables the Bitcoin community to have a global database with no central point of control.

I’ve seen each of these pieces work independently, but never pulled together into a new Web. That is what I am challenging us to do.

Funders, and leaders, and visionaries– This can be a Big Deal. And it’s not being done yet! By understanding where we are headed, we can pave the path.

Larry Lessig’s equation was Code = Law. We could bake the First Amendment into the code of a next generation Web.

We can lock the web open.
Making openness irrevocable.
We can build this.
We can do it together.

Delivered February 11, 2015 at the Ford Foundation-hosted gathering: NetGain, Working Together for a Stronger Digital Society

Posted in Announcements, News | Tagged brewster kahle, distributed Web, Ford Foundation, NetGain, privacy, security | 14 Comments

Internet Archive Supports Critical Updates to Electronic Privacy Law in California

Posted on February 10, 2015 by internetarchive

The California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), a newly introduced bill in California, would help bring state law up to date and require law enforcement to get a warrant before searching private online accounts or personal electronic devices. The Internet Archive is pleased to join a long and diverse list organizations and companies supporting CalECPA. To learn more, see write-ups by State Senator Mark Leno’s office, the ACLU of California, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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$4 Million Available for Digitization in 2015 Application Deadline is April 30th Let’s Apply Together!

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Jeff Kaplan

Internet Archive wants to partner with you to bring your ‘Hidden Collections’ into the public domain and become part of a global digital library!

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has launched Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials.

This competition will award up to $4 Million to institutions, consortia and collaborative groups to digitize and provide access to collections of rare and ephemeral material with high scholarly value.

CLIR endeavors that “Digitizing Hidden Collections will enhance the emerging global digital research environment in ways that support new kinds of scholarship for the long term,ensuring that the full wealth of resources held by institutions of cultural memory becomes integrated with the open Web” (http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/about-the-program).The focus of these grants is to bring entire collections into the public domain,while promoting strategic partnerships and best practices for ensuring preservation and accessibility that is both stable and enduring.

Grants of between $50,000 and $250,000 for a single-institution project, or between $50,000 and $500,000 for a collaborative project may be sought for work beginning between January 1st and June 1st, 2016 and be completed by May 31st, 2019. (http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants)

How Can the Internet Archive Digitization Team Help?

Let’s Cooperate on Your Grant Together – marry your great content with our end-to-end digitization skills to get your content up online safely and inexpensively.

We offer a Total Digitization Solution. Starting with non-destructive image capture, to storage and preservation, and ending with online discovery and access, our digitization solution saves you from having to worry about these details.

Translatable Metadata. Our existing relationship with Digital Public Library of America provides a possible route for your materials to join DPLA’s growing national collection.

Our Global Team Digitizes over 1000 eBooks and items every day. No need to reinvent the wheel. With our experience, training and engineering skills, we supply an end-to-end solution that allows our library partners and content contributors to focus on developing their collections, not on the back end details. For those new to digitization, we have the skills to help you avoid the common and costly mistakes of starting up a project.

We Don’t Just Digitize Books! Over the last decade, our format capabilities have expanded to: archival finds/ ephemera; microfilm and microfiche; audio; film and video; TV News; software and web. Let’s also apply together for grants to digitize other formats!

Many of Our Partnerships Have Been Consortial. We are proud to have driven projects for the Boston Library Consortium (BLA), LYRASIS, Consortium of Academic Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), Biodiversity Heritage Library and Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), among others. This means collections can be contributed by more than one institution, with funding issued centrally and distributed locally.

Far-flung Collections Come Together With Internet Archive. Our collections gather material from international contributors in one place; in the public domain. In some cases this has meant repatriating material digitally across great distances. Highlights include collections from the Medical Heritage Library, Biodiversity Library and Genealogy (in collaboration with FamilySearch).

Preparing Your Grant—What can Internet Archive Do?

Large and Small-Scale Digitization Capabilities. Take advantage of our experience working with collection sizes – ranging from hundreds of thousands of items to unique collections with only dozens of one-of-a-kind monographs.

We Can Tailor The Project to Your Needs. Having worked with over 1275 content providers during the last decade, our processes can be adjusted to meet your requirements.

Our Equipment and Software has been tested and Proven. Our non-destructive digitization process can be done inside your library by IA staff, or in one of our regional centers. The images can even be captured by you! We have a new Table Top Scribe system that can be purchased if your institution wishes to do the image capture in-house. It is portable, easy to use, and uploads material directly to archive.org. Our service package provides the technical back-end processes including preserving and ‘future-proofing’ your digital data 25 years, AND organizing your collections online so they can be discovered and used for scholarly research.

Our Digitization Specifications Have Become the De Facto Library Standard. Over 1,500 global libraries have used our services to digitally preserve, and importantly, make their material accessible. Our partners include 25 of the top 30 largest research and national libraries in North America.

Our Staff is located in 33 Locations, Including 26 Sites in North America. With this geographic footprint, your materials don’t have to travel far if you choose to have it digitized in one of our specialized digitization centers. This also provides opportunities to submit a grant proposal where the content might be located in 2 or 3 different libraries.

Let’s think big and make collections vital for scholarship and cultural heritage available to the world!

Want to know more? Attend the the upcoming webinars for applicants on February 4th and March 4th, 2015 from 2-3pm Eastern Time. (https://clir.adobeconnect.com/_a960001693/hiddencollections/)—looking forward to the resulting conversations, and we hope to see you there!

For more information about working with Internet Archive, contact Robert Miller.

Posted in Books Archive, Hardware, News | 3 Comments

Knight Foundation to Support Toolsets for Building Libraries Together

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Wendy Hanamura

Last September, the John S. and James L Knight Foundation issued this challenge: “How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities?” Today we are proud to announce that the Internet Archive’s plan for “Building Libraries Together” will make archive.org more community-driven, with a major grant from the Knight Fo undation. The Knight Foundation is the leading funder of journalism and media innovation, seeking to promote informed and engaged communities.

At the Internet Archive, we know we can’t preserve the world’s knowledge alone. We will need the public’s help to curate our shared human culture. So we are embarking on a two-year project to build a toolset and user interface that allow communit BuildingLibrariesTogether ies outside the Archive to save, manage and share their cultural treasures— further democratizing access to all knowledge. Citizen-archivists will be able to build collections, enhance metadata and join like-minded communities in deciding what of our history gets archived and made accessible to everyone, forever, for free.

A look at the Internet Archive’s software library in the new user interface.

What Wikimedia did for encyclopedia articles, the Internet Archive hopes to do for collections of media: give people the tools to build library collections together and make them accessible to everyone.

Please try out our new beta-version of our site here.

Posted in Announcements, Archive Version 2, News | 1 Comment

archive.org download counts of collections of items updates and fixes

Posted on January 26, 2015 by traceypooh

Every month, we look over the total download counts for all public items at archive.org. We sum item counts into their collections. At year end 2014, we found various source reliability issues, as well as overcounting for “top collections” and many other issues.

archive.org public items tracked over time

To address the problems we did:

Rebuilt a new system to use our database (DB) for item download counts, instead of our less reliable (and more prone to “drift”) SOLR search engine (SE).
Changed monthly saved data from JSON and PHP serialized flatfiles to new DB table — much easier to use now!
Fixed overcounting issues for collections: texts, audio, etree, movies
Fixed various overcounting issues related to not unique-ing <collection> and <contributor> tags (more below)
Fixes to character encoding issues on <contributor> tags

Bonus points!

We now track *all collections*. Previously, we only tracked items tagged:
- <mediatype> texts
- <mediatype> etree
- <mediatype> audio
- <mediatype> movies
For items we are tracking <contributor> tags (texts items), we now have a “Contributor page” that shows a table of historical data.
Graphs are now “responsive” (scale in width based on browser/mobile width)

The Overcount Issue for top collection/mediatypes

In the below graph, mediatypes and collections are shown horizontally, with a sample “collection hierarchy” today.
For each collection/mediatype, we show 1 example item, A B C and D, with a downloads/streams/views count next to it parenthetically. So these are four items, spanning four collections, that happen to be in a collection hierarchy (a single item can belong to multiple collections at archive.org)
The Old Way had a critical flaw — it summed all sub-collection counts — when really it should have just summed all *direct child* sub-collection counts (or gone with our New Way instead)

So we now treat <mediatype> tags like <collection> tags, in terms of counting, and unique all <collection> tags to avoid items w/ minor nonideal data tags and another kind of overcounting.

… and one more update from Feb/1:

We graph the “difference” between absolute downloads counts for the current month minus the prior month, for each month we have data for. This gives us graphs that show downloads/month over time. However, values can easily go *negative* with various scenarios (which is *wickedly* confusing to our poor users!)

Here’s that situation:

A collection has a really *hot* item one month, racking up downloads in a given collection. The next month, a DMCA takedown or otherwise removes the item from being available (and thus counted in the future). The downloads for that collection can plummet the next month’s run when the counts are summed over public items for that collection again. So that collection would have a negative (net) downloads count change for this next month!

Here’s our fix:

Use the current month’s collection “item membership” list for current month *and* prior month. Sum counts for all those items for both months, and make the graphed difference be that difference. In just about every situation that remains, graphed monthly download counts will be monotonic (nonnegative and increasing or zero).

Posted in Audio Archive, Books Archive, Education Archive, Image Archive, Live Music Archive, Movie Archive, Music, Software Archive, Technical, Video Archive | Tagged collections, documentation, downloads, statistics | Comments Off

Community Wireless

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Ralf Muehlen

The Internet Archive’s mission is universal access to knowledge. For us, that access happens over the Internet. In many places, there are two or few providers of fast Internet access, which tends to lead to high prices, bad service and makes censorship too easy. We would like to see more options and are doing something where we can: in places where we own buildings, the Internet Archive provides free and fast Internet access. Currently, we cover parts of San Francisco and Richmond, California with Community Wireless. Our most recent community project is with Atchison Village, in Richmond.

There are two layers to this, an access layer that anyone can connect to with WiFi devices, and a backbone layer that connects the access layer to the Internet at large. The backbone layer is built and operated by the Internet Archive. We monitor its performance and upgrade parts as needed.

The access layer is largely build in a crowd-sourced manner by willing participants. Anybody can connect with their own WiFi devices. The Internet Archive recommends specific devices that we know work well, but access is not limited to those. We also recommend connecting rooftop-to-rooftop; while rooftop-to-couch might work for some people, best results are achieved with devices mounted outdoors with line-of-sight to the closest access point.

Participants will be responsible for their own devices, including purchasing them, mounting them, pointing them and keeping them powered. For recommended devices the Internet Archive can provide initial configurations. If such a device’s configuration is changed, it is the participants responsibility to make it work.

There are a few caveats: Both layers operate in unlicensed frequency bands where interference is common and expected. The network is also a shared resource. Thus, experienced bandwidth and latency can and do vary. The Internet Archive will do a best effort to keep the backbone running well, but we cannot guarantee specific performance metrics. Also, over time expectations of what is an acceptable speed tend to go up. For this reason, we recommend upgrading devices about every three years, just like computers and phones.

Posted in News | Comments Off

The New Yorker: The Cobweb–Can the Internet be archived?

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Wendy Hanamura

Harvard history professor and New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, has crafted a remarkable history of Web archiving–and the role of our own Brewster Kahle and the Wayback Machine.

From the January 26, 2015 edition of The New Yorker.

My favorite passage:

Where is the Internet’s memory, the history of our time?

“It’s right here!” Kahle cries.

The machine hums and is muffled. It is sacred and profane. It is eradicable and unbearable. And it glows, against the dark. ♦

It’s well worth a read here.

Posted in Announcements, News | 5 Comments

University of California Libraries to partner with Archive-It

Posted on January 15, 2015 by internetarchive

This week, the University of California California Digital Libraries and the UC Libraries announced a partnership with Internet Archive’s Archive-It Service.

In the coming year, CDL’s Web Archiving Service (WAS) collections and all core infrastructure activities, i.e., crawling, indexing, search, display, and storage, will be transferred to Archive-It. WAS partners have captured close to 80 terabytes of archived content most of which will be added to the 450 terabytes Archive-It partners have collected.

We are excited to work with CDL as we transition over the UC (and other) libraries to the Archive-It service. These UC libraries have unique and compelling collections (some dating back to 2006) including their Grateful Dead Web Archive: http://webarchives.cdlib.org /a/gratefuldead which of course fits in quite nicely with the Internet Archive’s large collection of downloadable and streamed Grateful Dead shows in our Live Music Archive.

By collaborating with CDL, Archive-it can continue to expand the core functionalities of web archiving and work with CDL and other colleagues to develop new tools to advance the use of web archives. Such collaboration is sorely needed at this juncture and we welcome the opportunity to expand the capabilities of web archiving. By working together as a community we can create useful and sustainable web archives and ensure growth in the field of web archiving.

Be sure and check out some of the CDL collections:

Archiving the LGBT Web: Eastern Europe and Eurasia- UCB: http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/lgbtwebeasterneurope
Federal Regional Agencies in California Web Archive- UC Davis: http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/uscalagencies
Salvadoran Presidential Election March 2009 – Web Archive- UC Irving: http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/salvador
2009 H1N1 Influenza A (Swine Flu) Outbreak- UC San Diego: http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/h1n1
California Tobacco Control Web Archive- UCSF http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/caltobaccocontrol

Posted in Announcements, Archive-It, News | 2 Comments

Mirroring the Stone Oakvalley Music Collection

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Jason Scott

The Internet Archive has begun mirroring a fantastic collection of music called the “Stone Oakvalley Music Collection”. When you visit one of their websites, the archive.org mirror is one of the choices for download. Going forward, the Archive will offer a full backup of the entire site (over a terabyte) for permanent storage.

Why the Stone Oakvalley Collection is important

Manufactured from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, the Commodore 64 computer was a revolutionary piece of hardware and a critical introduction to programming for generations. It also had, within its design, a very well-regarded sound chip: the 6581/8580 SID (Sound Interface Device), whose unique properties in wave generation and effects gave a special sound in the hands of the right developers and musicians.

This successful piece of hardware was manufactured in the millions across the life of the C64, and in the late 1980s, the introduction of the Commodore Amiga computer brought to life an improved chipset for generating sound; the 8364, or PAULA. With a range of improvements to what sounds and music could come out of this chip, the Amiga soared with capabilities that took years to match in other machines.

The Archive hosts many examples of music generated by these chips: our C64 Games Archive has videos in the hundreds of games played on a Commodore 64, and searching for terms like “Amiga Music”, “Chiptunes” and “C64 Music” will yield a good amount of sound to enjoy.

But nothing comes close to the Stone Oakvalley Collection in terms of breadth, dedication, and craft in ensuring the unique sound of these chips can be enjoyed in the future.

The process, which is documented here, involved setting up a large amount of Commodore hardware connected to servers which would reboot the machines, over and over, playing thousands of pieces of music in different configurations, and automatically cataloging and saving the resulting waveforms. Considerations for modifications of the chipset over the years, of stereo versus mono recordings, and verification of the resulting 400,000 files have provided the highest quality of snapshots of this period.

Browsing the Collection

Currently, there are two websites for Stone Oakvalley’s collection – one based around the C64, and the other based around the Amiga. Impeccable work has been done to catalog the music, so if there are songs or games you remember, they are likely to be saved on the site (and powered from Archive.org’s servers). Otherwise, browse the stacks of the sites and enjoy a soundscape of computer history.

The Internet Archive strives to provide universal access to the world’s knowledge. Through mirroring, hosting and gathering of data, our mission allows millions to gain ad-free, fast access to information and materials. Be sure to check our many collections on our main site.

Posted in Cool items, Software Archive | Comments Off

Update to Terms of Use

Posted on December 30, 2014 by internetarchive

Terms dif Internet Archive’s terms of use were written in March of 2001, and they haven’t changed once – until today. The terms were written before the Wayback Machine was launched (in October 2001) when we had 4 billion web pages with no public access and 360 Prelinger Archive movies in the archive. Now we have 435 billion web pages and more than 15 million public audio, video and text items. Times have changed, and we have made a small change to our terms to reflect this.

In the interest of transparency, we want to show you exactly what the change is.

We have made small changes in paragraphs two and three of the terms. The previous version of these sections is in red below:

“…You agree not to interfere with the work of other users or Archive personnel, servers, or resources. Further, you agree not to recirculate your password to other people or organizations or to copy offsite any part of the Collections without written permission. Please report any unauthorized use of your password promptly to info@archive.org…

This is the new version with the changed portion in green type:

“…You agree not to interfere with the work of other users or Archive personnel, servers, or resources. Further, you agree not to recirculate your password to other people or organizations. Please report any unauthorized use of your password promptly to info@archive.org…

“…You agree to abide by all applicable laws and regulations, including intellectual property laws, in connection with your use of the Archive. In particular, you certify that your use of any part of the Archive’s Collections will be limited to noninfringing or fair use under copyright law. If a Creative Commons or other license has been declared for particular material on the Archive, to the extent you trust the declaration and declarer (which is rarely the Internet Archive), you may use the content according to the terms and conditions of the applicable license. In using the Archive’s site, Collections, and/or services…”

Thank you for continuing to use the amazing resources housed in the Internet Archive.

UPDATE 12/31/14: The change on 12/30 applied to the language in the third paragraph of the terms. On 12/31 we made an additional small change to the language in the second paragraph, and modified the text of this post to reflect both changes.

Posted in News | 2 Comments

Burning Brewster’s Bitcoin

Posted on December 25, 2014 by brewster

[Guest post, hope you enjoy. -brewster]

Burning Brewster’s Bitcoin
First Installment – Coinbase offers a service that is contrary to everything the company professes to hold dear
Internet Archive
Morgen E. Peck

This fall, Brewster reached out to me with a proposition. He wanted to know more about what it’s like moving between bitcoin and fiat currencies—where the trades are happening, which ones are scams and which ones are legit, how long they take to go through, how much of my privacy I have to forfeit, and especially what kinds of fees traders are skimming from each individual transaction. In short, what’s it like for people who have no bitcoin and want to get in? And once they do get in, what options do they have?

To get the answers, Brewster sent me on my way with one bitcoin. He told me to sell it and buy it again in as many ways as possible, and not to come back until I had whittled his money down to nothing.

So. This is the mission. Find out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a bitcoin, or lose it all to thievery and grift (crrrruuunch!!!). We’ll be running updates on my progress through this blog with the hope of informing casual bitcoin users and digital currency gurus alike.

______________________________________________________________________ First Stop: Coinbase

Coinbase is a bitcoin “wallet” (I’ll explain in a minute why I put this word in quotes) merged together with an exchange platform. Most of the people I know who are playing with Bitcoin as a whimsical investment arrived at Coinbase as the first point of entry. I suspect this is because Coinbase accounts link up with external bank accounts, thereby offering an intuitive and familiar interface to the financial infrastructure with which we’re all so well acquainted.

After Brewster sent one bitcoin to my address, I opened a Coinbase account and used the blockchain.info browser-based wallet to dump my funds into it.

Before we even get started, I’d like to note that using blockchain.info is the best experience I’ve encountered so far in this little experiment and I want to hold this transaction up as the ideal that we can use to judge all future stunts. The only better option would be to handle my transactions with a full Bitcoin client.

What I like is that the guys at Blockchain.info have done everything they can to keep their software true to the heart of Bitcoin. I can set up a wallet without giving them my name or email address. The private keys are in my sole possession. Basically, it’s all on

me. If I lose the information that I need to access my account or I let it leak into the hands of a thief, well then I’m flat out of luck and I’ll probably learn to be more careful in the future.

This is what Bitcoin looks like without her makeup on, when she’s dragging herself off the couch to open the door for a package. And, the way I see it, she now has two options. She can either gussy herself up for people or she can try to teach people to accept her for who she is. I advocate the latter (and not merely because I’m wearing sweatpants as I type). I think that the best services will be the ones that leave most of the risk with the users while simultaneously taking pains to tutor them on how to manage key pairs, use cold storage, etc. In other words, part of what’s required in getting this whole Bitcoin thing to work is giving people a new way to understand digital ownership and, in general, just making people smarter. That’s not a bad thing.

Which brings me to Coinbase. As an exchange, Coinbase has functionalities, and therefore responsibilities, that surpass my blockchain.info wallet. It has to operate in conjunction with a world of passwords, bank account numbers and identity verification protocols, many of which are determined by federal regulations. But I still think it’s fair and instructive to ask whether or not the service retains any of the features that Bitcoin the network brings to the table.

What are these features? Coinbase lays out three of the most important ones right on the homepage of its own website. It touts Bitcoin as an open, global network, one which is “not controlled by any company or country,” (that’s #1) with transactions that are secure, “fast and cheap,” (that’s #2) which are processed without the need for collecting sensitive details about the user. “There is no need to give companies extra information or a blank check to bill you” (that’s #3).

Unfortunately, transactions made through Coinbase retain none of these properties. Not a single one. Unlike Bitcoin, Coinbase is a company and when you move your bitcoins to a Coinbase account, you give the company complete control over them. This is because, as I hinted at before, a Coinbase wallet is not a real wallet.

I know that Bitcoin has only been around for 5 years and the community is still in a tug- of-war over semantics. So maybe the term “wallet” is a work in progress. But it shouldn’t be. To me, it’s very clear what this word means. When we talk about wallets in the physical world, we’re talking about something we use to carry our cash around (and all the cursed things that accumulate in a billfold). The important thing about a wallet is that we have access to its contents. At any time we can reach in and pull out the money.

In Bitcoin, the proper analog for cash is the private keys that are used to sign transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Private keys are the only thing you really own in Bitcoin, and therefore, any real wallet should give you complete access to them.

Query Coinbase as to how to get your private keys and you will be directed to this message:

As Coinbase is a hosted wallet, we do not provide users with their private keys; doing so would prevent us from taking advantage of our secure cold-storage technology to protect your bitcoin funds.

Instead, you can submit transactions and sign messages using our web-based interface, bypassing the need for control of the private keys.

That pretty much does away with feature number one. Trust Coinbase with your bitcoins and you must trust them completely, because they give you no direct control. This is not a gateway to Bitcoin. It is a surrogate.

On to number two. Transactions processed through the Bitcoin network are fast and cheap. The transaction fees are mere pennies and the transactions themselves usually clear within an hour.

The same is true of a Coinbase transaction if all you are doing is moving money from one Bitcoin address to another. But buying and selling them is another matter completely. Hooking my Coinbase wallet up with my credit union account took days. Once that was settled, I sold my bitcoin across the Coinbase online exchange and waited for the money to land in my checking account. This took another four days, which is longer than I’ve waited when using other services like PayPal or Chase’s QuikPay bank transfer.

The fee was actually not too bad. I sold my bitcoin at $372.62. Of that, Coinbase took $3.88, which is just about one percent.

So, on to number three. Bitcoin is a payment network that eliminates the need for users to divulge sensitive information about themselves. Ownership is verified through strong cryptography that references pseudonyms rather than real-world identities.

This one you can definitely say goodbye to if you start trading on Coinbase and even if you just use their wallet. As I mentioned, the company now knows my name and my bank account number (which they also have the ability to dip in and out of), and my email address. In addition to that, I’ve given Coinbase my phone number in order to set up 2-factor identification. And because they possess the private keys to all of the bitcoins I store in my Coinbase wallet, the company can associate my identity with any transactions they process.

Everything that was attractive about the Bitcoin protocol has been sacrificed to make the Coinbase service user friendly in a way that simulates modern banking and that indulges the dangerous, but well-engrained notion that we are better off trusting professionals to secure our digital information than we would be if we took control of it ourselves.

I’m only picking on Coinbase because it’s the first online exchange I’ve used. I hope to take a look at more of them in the coming weeks and I suspect to find these strategies to be endemic.

But if I were to offer an opinion, I would recommend anyone who has any admiration for Bitcoin—and for what this technology is doing to disrupt traditional payment processors —to go ahead and use Coinbase to exchange between Bitcoin and fiat currencies, but to get in and out as quickly as possible. The fees are pretty low compared to what else is available. But once you start using Coinbase to process transactions on the blockchain, you’re throwing everything beautiful about Bitcoin out the window.

Next up, I hit the Bitcoin ATMs in New York City and the open air trading nights at the Bitcoin Center near Wall Street.

Posted in Announcements, News | 3 Comments

Two Grants Announced Supporting Web Archiving

Will We Let Congress Vote to Fast-Track Secret Trade Deals?

Internet Archive and CADAL Partner to Digitize 500,000 Academic Texts

Sharing Data for Better Discovery and Access

You are invited to a Party for GETDecentralized–Wednesday April 1 at the Internet Archive

Political Ads Win Over News 45 to 1 in Philly TV News 2014

Open Source Housing for Good

You are Invited to a Party: Victory for the Net

What’s new with v2

Locking the Web Open, a Call for a Distributed Web

Internet Archive Supports Critical Updates to Electronic Privacy Law in California

$4 Million Available for Digitization in 2015 Application Deadline is April 30th Let’s Apply Together!

Internet Archive wants to partner with you to bring your ‘Hidden Collections’ into the public domain and become part of a global digital library!

How Can the Internet Archive Digitization Team Help?

Preparing Your Grant—What can Internet Archive Do?

Let’s think big and make collections vital for scholarship and cultural heritage available to the world!

Knight Foundation to Support Toolsets for Building Libraries Together

archive.org download counts of collections of items updates and fixes

To address the problems we did:

Bonus points!

The Overcount Issue for top collection/mediatypes

… and one more update from Feb/1:

Here’s that situation:

Here’s our fix:

Community Wireless

The New Yorker: The Cobweb–Can the Internet be archived?

University of California Libraries to partner with Archive-It

Mirroring the Stone Oakvalley Music Collection

Update to Terms of Use

Burning Brewster’s Bitcoin

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