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BrianKrebs Jan 2, 2023

Your periodic reminder that just because a URL is saved at archive.org doesn't mean it's going to stay there.

Last year, I wrote a series about proxy services marketed to cybercriminals, and that relied heavily on Archive.org links to document various connections. After my story ran, the person that those links concerned asked Archive to remove those links from their database, which they did. The person in question came back and said hey, what you said in your story is wrong because there's no supporting evidence and you must remove this. Archive.org confirmed they removed all of the pages at the request of the domain holder, and that was that.

If you stumble upon a page that is in archive.org and you want to make sure there is a record that won't be deleted at some point, consider saving the page to archive.today/archive.ph

Alternatively, of course, you could save the page locally, using something like Firefox's built-in full page screenshot (right click on page). Better yet, save the Archive.org pages you want locally.

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Daniel Jan 2, 2023

@briankrebs

archive.today/archive.ph can suffer from the same issues as archive.org if they don't already. I wouldn't trust them for long-term storage.

When saving something into the Internet Archive that must really be available in the future I think a good policy is to save it locally.

SingleFile is a Firefox extension that saves the entire webpage locally in a single HTML file. Screenshots are also good, but we can't click links on those.

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Phil Dennis-Jordan Jan 2, 2023

@andrade @briankrebs Would some kind of hash/signature archive service be immune to the takedown issue? Service that captures the page to a single file, then signs it together with URL and time stamp. It could keep a public record of the hash and signature but discard the exported content once you’ve downloaded it. If you held onto the file yourself, you’d have a sort of third party verification that the web page really had the saved content at that time.

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Daniel

@pmdj That might be an answer to the issue @mterhar raised earlier.

https://bfd.so/@mterhar/109620704925979134

It's kind of what I had in mind as well with the Internet Archive itself being the signature service.

mterhar (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] How does one avoid repudiation of your saved artifacts? If they're on archive.org, we acknowledge that archive folks wouldn't modify them. If they're saved on your computer, I'm not going to trust that you didn't take liberties with the content. We don't have good "distributed chain of custody" tools for this stuff that I know of.

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