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It sadly bears repeating: Preserving the web is an unsolved problem. A few arseholes have breached and defaced archive.org and the DDoS attack continues. Apart from that, the Internet Archive is still at risk of becoming bankrupt due to lost legal battles, that sadly have been taken on rather needlessly.

So, there we are: between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand we have the vandals (destroying things, because you can) and on the other the self-inflicted pain that the naive/idealistic leadership of archive.org took on by giving the big corps right about enough reason to sue them into oblivion (not to mention the late-stage capitalist corporate bastards that of course happily sue...)

The internet archive is one of the best sites there is. An invaluable research tool and right about the only attempt to on a significant scale prevent the loss of the cultural heritage of the digital age. And I would not bet any money on it that there will be something substantial left of it ten years down the road. We still don't have a meta-backup strategy, as the old sys-admin adage goes: no backup, no sympathies.

Why is it, pray tell, that our species has this urge to screw up just about every nice thing there ever was? Maybe the digital dark age will turn out to be but the charitable silence about the failed generations we've got the misfortune to be part of. Let no generative pre-trained transformer write my epitaph...