One Internet Archive Quirk Which May Not Be Relevant [View all]

[jberryhill]

If you remember, a lot of the early web, in which the IA was first launched, consisted of static HTML pages, making it relatively easy to store and compress content. However, if you think the IA is merely gorging down a "copy of everything on the internet" on their budget and without the storage space of the Almighty, then you may have a simplistic view of how the IA works, and how it has worked at different times during its development.

And, oddly, since I was looking for an old picture I tweeted from an IA server location several years back, I found that my photograph wasn't archived....

Link to tweet

In any event, as things moved beyond static HTML and storage capacity varied, IA implemented, at various times, different sorts of tricks to deal with either problem.

Since I deal in IP disputes which often hinge on claims of "who was first", one of the tricks I noticed was that IA would skimp on storage space by sometimes making external calls to the existing site for images. If the image wasn't stored at IA, one of two things would happen, (a) you'd get a broken image icon, or (b) if the same filename still existed on at the reference URL and the same last-modified date (which is easy to change on some systems), then when you called up the "archived" version of the page, IA would simply inline the presumed-to-be-the-same image file from the referenced site.

There was a time, and I haven't checked this lately, where active content - i.e. content generated by scripts or served up from databases - would be handled in a similar way: if the relevant php file existed on the live and current server, then it would be invoked to serve up the content.

None of this may be even remotely relevant to the teacup tempest at hand. I am only saying that there are circumstances I have encountered in the course of my career where there had been issues involving "things in the Internet Archive not actually being what they seem to be". That's all. Whether it applies in this instance - I have NO IDEA.

But more importantly:

Joy Reid is a living breathing human being. IMHO if you want to know what sort of person she is, and what sorts of opinions she holds, you don't need to consult the Internet Archive. I would imagine the best way to know what sort of person she is and what sorts of opinions she holds, would be to converse with her.