The Internet Is Getting Flushed Down Orwell's Memory Hole. 1/2

Stephen Green November 01, 2024

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” —George Orwell

We interrupt today's important election coverage for a story that could have impacts even longer-lasting than President Kamala Harris's first ten-trillion-dollar budget.

I'll wash my keyboard out with soap later for typing the phrase "President Kamala Harris."

When the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine was hacked in early October, it looked at first like just another email-and-password smash-and-grab. But that was followed up by repeated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that crippled the service. The Internet Archive was hit again on Oct. 20, "this time with the threat actors gaining access to their Zendesk support email system."

The Wayback Machine came back but as a read-onlyservice. What that means is, while you can search archived webpages from before the attacks, "you can’t currently capture an existing web page into the archive."

That matters bigly. When the New York Times, Washington Post, or anyone else stealth-edits a news report to hide the truth, you could still find the original on the Wayback Machine. That's no longer true. "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," the Brownstone Institute reported this week.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

But it gets worse.

Google killed off its cache feature — similar to the Wayback Machine— right around the time the Internet Archive got hacked. Coincidence? Probably. But I'm making a tinfoil hat, just in case.

The White House just got caught altering Presidentish Joe Biden's "garbage" remarks. "Nothing to see here," Sean Davis quipped, "just the Biden-Harris administration deliberately falsifying federal records."

They got caught this time, and sources like X still have the original video. But what happens next time, when some politician or MSM editor waits until the furor dies down before making their stealth edit — and there's no Wayback Machine to catch them?

Wikipedia is the defacto internet encyclopedia but has proven time and againto be biased at best and subject to stealth edits at worst.

More people are using AI to perform their web searches and summaries for them,but the large language models are scraping data from sources increasingly subject to manipulation.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/11/01/the-internet-is-getting-flushed-down-orwells-memory-hole-n4933849