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.

@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.

@andrade @briankrebs FWIW… Current Folks running recent Apple software—on iPhone, iPad, and Mac—can access links and other text embedded in images and (paused) video with the Live Text feature.

It’s one of the most helpful new features around, and it’s ~unknown by many…

Live Text is integrated into Spotlight search, so text found in images shows up in local searches, too.

https://support.apple.com/en-asia/guide/iphone/-iph37fdd714b/ios

Use Live Text to interact with content in a photo or video on iPhone

Use Live Text to copy text in photos and videos, translate languages, make a call, and more in the Photos app on iPhone.

Apple Support

@HoffmanLabs @briankrebs I hadn't heard of Apple's Live Text before. I imagine they're applying OCR to these images. It's a useful feature but only works when links are visible in the image.

In web pages we may have links where the URL and the link text are different (think "Home" vs "infosec.exchange/home") or the link is incomplete / shortened (like the Apple link you posted). In this case OCR'ing a screenshot doesn't work because the link information is lost.

SingleFile allows clicking (or copying) these links like we do on normal web pages. It's one of the reasons I like the extension.

GitHub - bellingcat/auto-archiver: Automatically archive links to videos, images, and social media content from Google Sheets (and more).

Automatically archive links to videos, images, and social media content from Google Sheets (and more). - bellingcat/auto-archiver

GitHub