Archive.org

Good News, Everyone!
The website is officially back!

	“	Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!	„
	—Hacker in JavaScript alert

	“	It's dispiriting to see that even after being made aware of the breach 2 weeks ago, IA has still not done the due diligence of rotating many of the API keys that were exposed in their gitlab secrets. As demonstrated by this message, this includes a Zendesk token with perms to access 800K+ support tickets sent to [email protected] since 2018. Whether you were trying to ask a general question or requesting the removal of your site from the Wayback Machine – your data is now in the hands of some random guy. If not me, it'd be someone else. Here's hoping that they'll get their shit together now.	„
	—Hacker in IA's Zendesk token

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archive.org, is a site that tries to save the entire Internets. It allows people to look at saved versions of websites from years ago and comes greatly in handy when writing ED articles about sites that no longer exist, or digging up past lulz that is otherwise being removed from the Internets. When it's working, that is. The thing craps out a dozen times a week.

The Wayback Machine

ED main page from at least 100 years ago. Doesn't it look n00bish?

When a re-re decides to delete their LiveJournal after the trolls descend and they just can't take it any more, the Wayback Machine allows us to laugh at their stupidity for all eternity. Unfortunately it is possible for websites to request exclusion from the archives by putting the file robots.txt in your home directory. This prevents websites from getting robo-stalked—as is the case with MySpace—which tampers with the ED writers' trolling arsenal.

Apparently, the name of the site is a reference to an episode of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. While this reference to a shitty TV show that died before anyone can remember makes the website look like garbage, don't be fooled, it is in fact quite useful. Unless you're looking up a MySpace, in that case, use archive.is—archive.is doesn't care about robots.txt.

Pages pulled up by archive.org can be used as blackmail, as demonstrated by professional webcomics troll Scott Kurtz when he bitched about another web cartoonist re-publishing a blog post he wrote. Ironically, he has now apparently deleted that post, thus making the circle of lulz complete.

Deleted from the archives

Unfortunately, archive.org is not dedicated to archiving the entire web. Notably, KiwiFarms was excluded after causing too many lulz.

Other services

archive.org also has a huge archive of 1900-1989 B movies. When you see them, you'll shit bricks. Hundreds of Mujahideen Videos and An Hero Videos are also submitted every day to the archive, only a handful being deleted. Another reason to go to archive.org is the massive population of experimental musicians.