Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack
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DEF CON 1968 / 122
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00:00
Distribution (mathematics)Service (economics)Musical ensembleFile archiverMultiplication signProjective planeCASE <Informatik>Computer animation
00:49
FamilyData miningMultiplication signWebsiteMeeting/Interview
01:34
Process (computing)FrequencyDynamic random-access memoryConnectivity (graph theory)Group actionDifferent (Kate Ryan album)MereologyCodecMultiplication sign
02:28
Instance (computer science)Factory (trading post)Denial-of-service attackPoint (geometry)
03:03
Disk read-and-write headFamilyWater vaporMetropolitan area networkHill differential equationBlock (periodic table)Right angle
04:00
Factory (trading post)Hill differential equationProcess (computing)Identity managementMortality rate
04:39
Barrelled spaceSoftware testingLatent heatProcess (computing)1 (number)Local ringBitRight angleComputer animation
06:10
Object (grammar)Factory (trading post)Arithmetic meanMereologyBackupIdentity managementMultiplication
07:19
WebsiteProof theorySemiconductor memoryObject (grammar)Variety (linguistics)WordMereologyForcing (mathematics)HypermediaMeeting/Interview
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Semiconductor memoryVariety (linguistics)Form (programming)WritingWebsiteFamilyInstance (computer science)HypermediaGame theoryArithmetic meanQuicksortRight angleShared memoryComputer animation
09:32
MereologyQuicksortTape driveFloppy diskHacker (term)CASE <Informatik>HypermediaVideo gameArithmetic meanSemiconductor memoryInstance (computer science)Computer animation
10:24
Arithmetic meanPrice indexConstructor (object-oriented programming)Web browserWebsiteDatabase normalizationMereologyNumberRight angleFrequencySilicon Graphics Inc.Dynamical systemFehlererkennungParameter (computer programming)Multiplication signNichtlineares GleichungssystemPhotographic mosaicBuilding
12:21
Instance (computer science)SpacetimeRevision controlFrame problemWebsiteConstructor (object-oriented programming)Variety (linguistics)Different (Kate Ryan album)Right angleComputer animation
13:18
Discrete element methodComa BerenicesVariety (linguistics)EmailWeb pageConstructor (object-oriented programming)Web browserMassComputer fileComputer animation
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Execution unitPoint (geometry)WebsiteCodePrice indexFrequencyUser-generated contentComputer-assisted translationSurreal numberRight angleLecture/Conference
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Pay televisionProgrammable read-only memoryExecution unitConvex hullFreewareSurreal numberSystem callService (economics)Closed setFile archiverLecture/Conference
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Data conversionRight angleMultiplication signWeb 2.0Process (computing)Content (media)WindowWebsiteFile archiverGeometrySpacetimeComputer animation
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System callWebsiteInternetworkingWeightNoise (electronics)Functional (mathematics)File archiverRight angleOnline helpMultiplication signGeometryBit
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Convex hullCASE <Informatik>Musical ensembleReading (process)Graph coloringExistential quantificationMultiplication signPower (physics)WebsiteSoftware testingInstance (computer science)Computer configurationStandard deviationDigital photographyGoodness of fitFacebookPresentation of a groupGame controllerWhiteboardWeb pageLetterpress printingComputer animation
22:16
Inclusion mapVideo projectorMereologySpacetimeGeometryField (computer science)TheoryAreaSoftwareExpressionComputer animation
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Inheritance (object-oriented programming)Right angleVideo gameSpacetimeWeb pageMultiplication signFrequencyWeb 2.0Ring (mathematics)GodWebsiteGeometry
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Greatest elementMetropolitan area networkGeometryWeb pageConstructor (object-oriented programming)File formatGezeitenkraftSheaf (mathematics)Computer animation
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Focus (optics)PlanningQuicksortBuildingGeometryIntegrated development environmentLecture/Conference
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File archiverBitDisk read-and-write headPhysical systemBand matrixLimit (category theory)Neighbourhood (graph theory)GeometryPoint (geometry)Right angleContent (media)FreewareSheaf (mathematics)Virtual machineError messageMetropolitan area networkDot productComa BerenicesRobotComputer animationSource code
29:22
Geometry
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Data typeGame theory1 (number)Multiplication signBand matrixIntrusion detection systemComputer fileProcess (computing)Revision controlVideoconferencingBitThomas BayesNumeral (linguistics)Copyright infringementMassComputer animation
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Inclusion mapContent (media)Enterprise architectureDivision (mathematics)Computer networkDirected setHypermediaDesign by contractContent (media)File Transfer ProtocolCASE <Informatik>Internet forumWord
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Library (computing)CASE <Informatik>QuicksortDeterminismSearch engine (computing)User-generated content2 (number)
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Profil (magazine)Computer-assisted translationScripting languageWebsiteXML
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InformationExecution unitGamma functionEmailMaxima and minimaConvex hullInformationInstance (computer science)Service (economics)Multiplication signLine (geometry)Film editingCASE <Informatik>SpacetimeIP addressServer (computing)QuicksortRange (statistics)Computer animationLecture/Conference
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VideoconferencingPhysical systemYouTubeGeometryGoogolComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Broadcasting (networking)File archiverYouTubeTape driveMultiplication signTrailLecture/Conference
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PurchasingFile archiverLibrary (computing)QuicksortTape driveGoogolAutomatic differentiation
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Modal logicMereologyMultiplication signFile archiverSource codeComputer animation
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Coma BerenicesRadio-frequency identificationInterior (topology)Execution unitSign (mathematics)Euler anglesMoving averageMultiplication signFile archiverWebsiteEntire functionGroup actionVideo gameWikiCodeProjective planeDirect numerical simulationQuantumUniform resource locatorCryptographyWeb 2.0Figurate numberFlickrBasis <Mathematik>Computer animationLecture/Conference
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Execution unitKeyboard shortcutMaizeFile archiverMultiplication signKeyboard shortcutFrequencyPresentation of a groupVideo gameSemiconductor memoryProjective planeCryptographyMiniDiscWebsiteComputer fileMeeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
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MereologyFile archiverData storage deviceProcess (computing)Constructor (object-oriented programming)BackupMeeting/Interview
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Coma BerenicesMessage passingWebsiteFile archiverUser profileBitPresentation of a groupMeeting/InterviewComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
So again, thank you all so much for coming to this and for enjoying, I hope, DEFCON. Excellent. Yeah. Says one guy. Okay, so the name of this talk is Archive Team, a distributed preservation of service attack. A hilarious title meant to bring you in, and it worked apparently.
00:23
My name is Jason Scott. I am the mascot of Archive Team, which is a rogue band of archivists, preservationists, and jerks, dedicated to saving online, and in some cases, offline history. And this project has been going on for a little while, and I thought,
00:42
well, maybe it's time to kind of make people understand what we're up to here. So, before I get started though, I want to dedicate this talk to Tim Recker, a very old friend of mine who unfortunately passed on this year, and it had been one of his dreams to bring his family back to DEFCON, so they are here in the house tonight to enjoy DEFCON.
01:06
And I must say, you know, as time goes on, I'm currently 40 years old, you know, you have experiences of losing friends you didn't know you were going to keep around for such a short time, so it's always worthwhile, even though I'm in a talk, to skip a talk, if there's a friend you haven't seen in a while and spend maybe an extra four or five minutes with them,
01:23
to remember some things with them. It's just a benefit to that aspect of it. So, since we're all about saving websites, let me in fact talk about soy sauce. So, soy sauce, soy sauce, as some of you might know, is basically fermented soybeans, wheat,
01:41
it's a process in which these things are brewed, and simply just like beers, or other kinds of fermented dishes, there's an experience to it, there's an idea behind it, it's a long process to learn, we've been doing it for hundreds of years, but different groups have different approaches, and it's extremely important that the essence of them are maintained.
02:04
In fact, this is part of the marketing of a lot of beers and crafts and everything else, that, you know, it's important that all the components stay absolutely the same. This is the Yamasawa Soy Company, a company that's been around for 208 years, this is since the Edo period. They've had eight presidents, and they've been basically producing soy sauce
02:22
in their local town for all this time. And they are beloved enough that, like for instance, here's a tourist who's just gone and taken a beautiful drawing of this soy sauce factory to kind of show you, you know, they've been around forever, and they do this kind of work. So, they were hit by the tsunami.
02:41
This is that same factory, and that's the creator, the current ninth president of this soy sauce company. He was given to it by his father after the flood because his father felt he was too old to figure out what to do next because what are you going to do about a company in which everything is absolutely obliterated?
03:03
Obliterated to the point, for instance, that this is the company safe from which he was able to extract their incorporation papers from two centuries ago so that he could prove that the company was still around and still existent. And again, I'm crediting Robert Gilhooly. This was the man who walked around with it. Now, bear in mind, when they got hit with the tsunami,
03:22
one of the first things that they discovered, or one of the first things that happened was that their head of sales ran to one of the dams to save the dam and was killed by the ensuing rush of water. This man as well, this is the ninth president, was absolutely convinced his family had died and that he'd lost his children because their house was just a few blocks from this place.
03:43
As it turned out, his children had actually been led up a hill by some teachers and elderly residents who were nearby, most of which then proceeded to die. So this was a family business that is just ensconced in tragedy right now. And so this is him kind of standing on the hill that he was able to run up to
04:03
with all the employees who didn't die overlooking their factory losing this thing. So what I want to explain though is that this is a, you know, a person might say, well, who cares, it's a company. What does a company matter in human lives? Well, this is a company that was so entwined in the identity of this town
04:21
that even with a 70% death rate, people were coming to this soy sauce company and giving them money to say, when you make soy sauce again, I'll wait for my soy sauce delivery because I want to be able to, you know, keep this important thing around. Now in the process of making soy sauce, there's this whole process here,
04:44
and one of the most important ones is the adding of the moromai, the fermentation where they add the specific yeast, the specific fermenting agent that will be able to make more of the soy sauce and it's got a specific flavor and it's cooked in a certain way.
05:01
So one of the things that the president discovered was that, and again, he's 37, right, and he's been saddled with this idea, rebuild a company, so he looks for the barrels. There's about 30 barrels that they keep this agent in and he comes and he finds most of them completely crushed, gone, missing. He finds one or two that are intact, but to his horror,
05:20
he tells people, okay, we're good, we got the moromai, but it turns out that too much seawater has gotten in and it's killed it. So there's none. So what ends up happening is when everything looks bleak, they recall an experiment that had happened four months earlier and what it was was there was a local marine biology laboratory
05:41
that was doing experimentation and asked for some of the moromai. So what they had done was asked for a small segment, a barrel's worth or whatever, of moromai to test with. They had given it to them. That lab had also been hit with the tsunami and had its first floor destroyed. But among the first floor was a one kilogram bag of the moromai
06:03
still in the plastic wrapping that they had never gotten around to. And from that small bit, this company is rebuilding itself into this very beloved brand, once again. This is the two new sales girls who were hired by this company. That's their new digs while they're working it out
06:21
and this is a piece of their old factory and the girl saying, you know, thank you. Thank you for your patience. We will have your soy sauce soon. So why am I saying all this? Well, what I'm trying to say is that, first of all, backups are important.
06:47
Multiple backups apparently even better. But even beyond that, this object, this yeast, was an emotional, meaningful human item that had relevance to a culture and a world that was, you know,
07:08
basically something that people considered part of their identity. Really, if you think about it. And even though it's just an object, it's got meaning that way. So what I'm saying here is that objects that maintain memory,
07:22
objects that are part of us, have relevance to us even after their initial use may be initially gone. In other words, you look at these items and you say, I remember I was with this person or this proves that we were part of this or, you know, this is the proof that I invented this first.
07:41
Or more accurately, this is a friend who I've lost. This is somebody who I can't speak to anymore but I have their work. And I think that that's something that can sometimes be lost when I start to tell you about some websites because one of the things people will say is, Well, who gives a crap? These are really old websites. And I say these websites are collections of memories
08:01
that have been gathered up through people online. That is the driving heart and force of what I'm talking about here. And there's a wide variety of old media, I might mention, and old websites and things that are currently sustaining our memories magnetically
08:21
in forms that are kind of strange and each year becomes harder and harder to extract them. But beyond that, they contain things that their exterior may not really reveal. So, for instance, you might have writings that you might not remember doing, letters a family might not have done, basically stored on very, very old media.
08:42
Additionally, you get weird shit. For instance, this is eBay, the home game. This speaks to a lot of things because it indicates that people thought eBay,
09:00
well, first of all, you have this belief that someone thinks eBay is something you'd want to do at home with your family with no money down. But it also indicates that eBay had some sort of cultural meaning to us in 2000 when this came out, that it was strong enough of a feeling to feel
09:20
this is an experience that you should share elsewhere, that idea of getting completely fucked on shipping costs. Very critical, right? And again, I'm keeping a lot of things myself that are part of that. For instance, there are some very old issues of 2600. I have three complete runs of 2600 magazine.
09:40
Actually, I got a lot of stuff. If you don't know me, that's fine. That's awesome. I don't have anything. I live a free life. How about that? But if you actually know me, then you know about the shipping container and you know about the various pieces of old media that I'm sent. I'm sent lots of floppy disks, old tapes, tapes drives, you know, basically all sorts of collections of items that are things that I transfer out.
10:02
So I've been able to get my hands on some very old things and I constantly make myself available for this because I believe that all of these old memories have meaning and it's pretty easy with something like 2600. Very prominent, lots of copies, very easy. To tell you that there's a hacker calendar now for sale from 2600 in case you want to support them.
10:20
But the 2600 magazine is just one of just many. But we also have these electronic artifacts, right? So, for some of you, this has... Can I just get a clap if this has any emotional meaning to you whatsoever?
10:42
And I do do error correction for the person going... It's cool. I'll just quickly go over what we're looking at here. These are two different items. The first one is a Netscape Now button. This is a period of time when browsers were just starting out and you had a number of browsers, there were about 20 or 30,
11:01
but there were a few that were trying to kind of build themselves up and one of the original investors in SGI went out and scooped up all the creators of the Mosaic browser and started a new company and named it Netscape. And as part of that, I wanted to let you know that if you wanted to see a really good site and you wanted to watch it properly, you should get Netscape right now. So there was a button that they produced that was animated
11:22
that said, go to get Netscape right now so you can see my website the way it was meant to be seen. And so that's the Netscape Now button. Underneath it is the under-construction GIF. I am not going to get into the GIF GIF argument right now.
11:42
So the under-construction GIF is basically an indicator that you're not finished with your website. Now obviously, we in the future with our incredible abilities know websites are actually never finished. So it's redundant. We factored that thing out on both sides of the equation. We're like, you know what, always building.
12:01
Because if you're not always building, it's now currently a period of shame, right? Lack of dynamism is a shameful trait of your website, an indication of your failure and lack of interest. So you would not want to say, oh, I'm under construction. Of course you're under construction, all right? So yeah, there's a very emotional reaction to that. But I find there's even a bigger one to this,
12:21
which is, this is a collection that I have of all of the Netscape Now buttons. As you can see, there's a whole variety of stories being told here because some of them indicate what the, some of them are obviously made by hand. Some of them go for different versions. Some of them rejigger themselves.
12:41
These are all actually MD5 different. What I am discovering, for instance, here's a little story you might not know, is for instance, some of them, you look at it and you say like, well, why is this different from the one next to it? And it's because they removed the extra frames to save some space. They took out a K or two, and that way they got a little more space for their website.
13:02
So the thing looks a little crappier, but they got it, they got a little more space, they can write a little part. We don't think about things that way. Also, somebody right over there seems to be really against Netscape Now, so. Screw you. Similarly, on the under construction thing, also a lot of emotional reaction.
13:21
I got 10,000 of these things. And as you can see, I mean, there's all variety of things put under construction. And I think what I'm trying to say is, and again, if you go to textfiles.com slash under construction, it says, this page is under construction, and then puts all of them underneath, which will crash some browsers.
13:42
And then, it says if there's a problem, mail me. That goes to one with mail me gifs that does crash all browsers. So you can be a historian and also be an asshole. It works out, actually. So anyway, so what you have here is, again, like I said, a wide variety of interesting cultural artifacts.
14:03
And I have found that people who go to this just automatically get a massive amount of reaction from it. Right? Well, what we're experiencing right now is a bunch of websites that were started earlier, and earlier now can be anything from the mid 1990s up through to even maybe a year ago or further,
14:21
where they reach a point where somebody decides they're not going to stay up anymore. And it's usually done with like a post-it note on the outside of a restaurant that's been shut down for health code violations. It is just simply something saying, by the way, we're gone.
14:42
Now, normally I would not care, right? I mean, if you've created, you know, hatsforcats.com, and suddenly nobody wants to buy your cat hats, and you say, sorry, thank you for, you know, thank you for four months of wonderful business, and away you go, that's fine. But what we have right now from the mid 1990s on to now
15:02
is this whole period where we're taking user-generated content and a large amount of marketing is being made to make it as easy and quick and frictionless to put as much of yourself online as quickly as possible into something with a huge lack of any interest in telling you what that something is.
15:21
It's just there. You get an IT department, and you don't even know how to reach it. And so what ends up happening is you get this, right? AOL Hometown, which was a whole bunch of really interesting websites from the early 1990s, and in 2008 they said, you know what? We're out of here.
15:41
And that was it. Hometown was gone. Same thing up there with Kickstart, but you don't know what Kickstart is. I didn't know what Kickstart is, but I like the button, the indication there that it's like, huh, see this light bulb? Going out. And then you get these kind of surreal shutdowns, right? Like free pro-hosting, which offers you more,
16:01
and then the next thing it says is we're going to be discontinuing our free hosting service at the end of the year. And look at that smiling girl. Guess what? We're closed. We're out of business. So, hey, welcome to free pro-hosting where nothing is now free. That is a tough, tough sell. What do you call it? Free cars.
16:21
What do you sell? Cars. Free? No. No, Bob Free, pleased to meet you. Yeah. So we founded Archive Team. Okay? Archiveteam.org. We are going to rescue your shit.
16:40
We are the A-team. We are the team that will come in and we will rescue things that need to be rescued. Help the helpless. Go after the site. Site the sightless. We're going to go after places that look like they're being shut down. And we download them and then we figure out what to do next. We know, you know, so much in history.
17:02
If you go ahead and look at a lot of things, how we have it with housing and things, that, you know, basically when you evict somebody from a home, right, it is a huge-ass painful process that sucks, right? Yes, right there. You're looking outside. You can see in the window. You're the landlord. You can see them fucking up your apartment.
17:20
And you're like, I'm going to get rid of them. It's only going to take six weeks. I'm going to get rid of them. And you have to apply. You have to go in front of a judge. You have to show things. And you have to do all these things. Well, with web hosting, we don't have to do any of that. And some people think that's beautiful. And yes, the Wild West was fucking awesome until you died of dysentery. And I'm saying that it's 2011.
17:44
And this is Def Con. This is one of these places which goes, by the way, this idea is stupid. We don't do this anymore. Well, the idea of completely uncontrolled, non-transparent hosting of user content
18:00
really needs to come to an end. But until then, we're duping stuff because the conversation otherwise ends. Like, if you go to AOL Hometown now and go like, I need my old stuff, they go, that's a shame that you still need it. Are you sure you need it? Would you like to buy a new account with more space? Because right now, it's OK.
18:22
So Archive Team set out on its mission. And we've started to download things. We've been having a great old time. And then GeoCities went down. All right. So we were like, people came to us. And they were like, hey, Archive Team, GeoCity, you going to download? How many people here know GeoCities?
18:41
All right. I see that they don't want to make noise and call attention to themselves. The thing about GeoCities, and I think GeoCities falls into this right now, right? GeoCities is the moral mind. GeoCities is this place that started in 1994 with Beverly Hills Internet, got turned into this very strange little hosting company,
19:00
gets bought by AOL, not AOL, by Yahoo for an enormous amount of cash. I mean, an astounding amount of cash. Billions of dollars to become hosting. Now, at the time that it's purchased by Yahoo, it is the second or third, depending on the month, browsed site on the internet. This is the most popular of popular sites.
19:23
It is huge. And one day, one day, they announced they were shutting it down. Oh, but I don't mean they really announced they were shutting it down. I meant that buried in one of the help files, which somebody brought to our attention. It said, I'm having trouble getting this done. And the answer was, yes, because of the shutdown,
19:42
that functionality is currently not here. That was it. We were like, wow, that is burying the fucking lead. And what they did was they were shutting down sometime in the summer. And then all of this site was going to go down.
20:02
Now, bear in mind, when GeoCities finally went down, it was the 218th most browsed site on the net. It had only gone down a little bit. Yahoo made no attempt to get rid of it. They didn't try to sell it off, do anything like that. They just simply said, OK, let's turn this off. Hooray for us. Now, granted, you go look at one of the sites that was on there.
20:22
And you'll be like, well, of course, of course. I mean, look at this thing. This is the rogue cowboy. Hey, y'all, military couple. Been here for a while. I'm reading this for you because you cannot possibly see it over the bucking Bronco background. Also, I want to point out that there's a little gold item there,
20:41
and it says HTML Writers Guild. Another thing that's kind of gone by the wayside is HTML Guilds. Now it's just stock options. And the thing is you look at a site like that, and you're like, well, these guys are awful. And I want to point out something I've really come to understand, which is how do we do this?
21:01
How do we get rid of all something? In fact, how do we destroy cultures? How do we destroy lives? How do we do this? And the answer is disenfranchise, demean, delete. Disenfranchise. Remove their ability to have any control over something. Like I said, with Facebook, good luck calling them up to get something fixed. Good luck calling them up because something's not working like you expect.
21:23
Go ahead and tell me that it doesn't cost any money and I get what I pay for. Fine. But I'm telling you that's what the case is. Second, demean. Tell people that this thing is useless. Look at this thing. It's ugly. By our design standards, this thing fails our test. We, the board of Vogue, have decided that this thing is not to our liking. And then delete.
21:41
And then say, well, who gives a shit about these people? These are nothing. Whatever. But we have to under-realize that for these people, this presentation, this website, may be the widest audience that this genetic line has ever reached. And you can't turn away from that kind of power, even if that was never your hope. Printing a color photocopy was $1.50 a page at this time.
22:06
I mean, you know, to be able to do full color, occasionally with musical background, websites that would have all the things you wanted to say. And it's interesting what people pulled. For instance, welcome to space. Now it's interesting.
22:20
The projector really gets rid of the beauty of the star field. I feel like it's not really there. But bear in mind, there's a beautiful star field there. It's not animated, but it's something that's there. And this person obviously likes space. And there were areas in GeoCities for you to store based on Hollywood space, gay, queer, Western, and so on.
22:42
And you were able to, like, declare what your kind of interests were and go down there. So this particular person was in Area 51, the space thing. And there's a part in there called personal experiences, which I just love because you read it, and their personal experiences are like, Was watching television. Felt outside of myself for 12 minutes.
23:03
Continued watching television. Yeah, okay, great. Hilarious, but also, I mean, this person wanted to kind of express this, and obviously this leads to interesting conspiracy theorists and the paranormal network and all of that. Let's go with this one.
23:20
Welcome, Patrick Joel Mielke. Born on April 16, 1981. Entered heaven April 17, 1983. Page lovingly dedicated to Patrick Joel, child of God, loaned to us for a very short time. This is a celebration of his life and the love and joy he so enriched his lives with. Now this is a woman, this is, I think, what's sometimes not noticed here.
23:43
The child died in 1983. This website's created in 1996, right? This is a woman who has enough pain at that time that when she sees GeoCities, where other people say, I'm going to talk about watching TV, and I'm going to talk about my bucking bronco background and join the HTML Writers Guild,
24:01
here's somebody who's saying, no, the world needs to know about my baby. I want to let everyone know how much I loved him. And she has pages after pages in the 10 megabyte space about how much her baby meant to her. So here's a case, and by the way, of course, there was a web ring. Do you know what a web ring was? Of, what was it?
24:22
It's an angel's web ring, so it's a bunch of parents who lost children who were under two to talk about losing, you know, they touched an angel for a short period of time. This is real stuff. This is as real to save as anything else, I think. So, big on it.
24:49
It gets better the longer you look at it. So, Jason, a question that now you, some of you who've never heard of me before now will ask,
25:01
what the fuck is up with that, Jason? It's a general question I get about everything. All right, here's the deal. He's an under-construction GIF. And he got wrapped up in the trawl. Basically, I went through a bunch of GeoCity stuff and found a bunch of under-construction GIFs, and he was one of them. And I was like, what the hell is that?
25:20
What's the fucking story about bulgy, fish-hat guy? So I go look it up, and it's this guy in the Hollywood Hills section, and he is gay, and he has a page that he talks about his dream guy.
25:43
It's from 1998, and he talks about what he wants in a man, what he will do with the man, where they'll go, the places he'll do, the dreams he'll live. And it's from basically, like I said, 1998, and at the bottom it says, this is always under construction, and there is this guy at the bottom.
26:03
In 2005, it's updated, and it says, no need to keep looking, I found him. And it's just a story that turns out, even with the bulge, to be pretty heartwarming.
26:21
All of this buried in a little tiny graphics interchange format, which I believe just got out of copyright. Oh, sorry, patent. Okay. So when they closed it, right, Yahoo just decided to do this twerpy friggin' goddamn thing. Right? This to me is the embodiment of the problem.
26:42
Why did GeoCities close, which by the way should really be said in like kind of a scream with like rending of documents, because that's usually when you're, when do GeoCities close? We have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. That's like shooting somebody and saying, I have plans for your car.
27:07
All right? It's this sort of corporate douchebaggery that ensures that I will never work within a corporate environment again. I don't know. That's my visceral reaction. What do you think?
27:21
So that's what our archive team said. So we said, you know what? Let's download it. So downloading was very interesting. Downloading GeoCities was somewhat complicated. It took us about 100 people to download it over the course of about six months.
27:40
We had no idea when the shutdown date was, right? So we just went at it. Now, it turns out that GeoCities had a very interesting thing. You got a gigabyte of bandwidth a month, but only about 12 megabytes of it could come out every hour. And switch.
28:02
Well, so when we would try to do it, it would go, sorry, error, 999 error. Content limit has been reached, right? Didn't take long by putting our heads together, by having all this assembled people on an IRC channel to have someone go, you think they're locking out Google? So we go look, and nope, they're not locking out Google.
28:21
So we changed all of our user agents to not the Google bot. At that point, we aimed a couple people at them. We had 100 virtual machines that downloaded basically all of the old. GeoCities has an old neighborhood, and an old one, the old neighborhood system,
28:41
which was like, basically it would be GeoCities slash West Hollywood slash, you know, Hills slash 2252, right? These are all pre-1999. When Yahoo got their nutsack on it, they just reapplied it across to the Yahoo section, right? So basically what they did was,
29:01
you could be GeoCities dot com slash tilde tool bag, and be whatever. So it was going to be harder to find them. But man, did we send people after them. And we did, and we downloaded as much as we could, which turned out to be a little bit over a terabyte of GeoCities.
29:20
So then what do you do? Well, first, bear in mind, this is GeoCities in 1999. This was a nine terabyte array of theirs. Just to give you an idea of how pathetic it is now, when people are like, oh god, we're going to keep all that, and it's like, I can make a stack of nine terabytes right now that are barely functional.
29:40
We have to keep in mind that. I mean, this is a whole cage at Exodus dedicated to GeoCities. So we ended up with it, and we were sitting on it, and then GeoCities went down, and there was the usual, like who cares. And I put up those animated GIFs by basically going through this terabyte of data, and coming up with basically a collection of interesting GIFs.
30:03
But then a year went by, and I thought, you know what, we've got to get attention. We've got to remind people that GeoCities went down for no fucking reason. So we did what anyone would do. We torrented it.
30:21
So we put ourselves up on the Pirate Bay. We have a 641 gig, because it compressed well, torrent with 7,854 files that were basically a bunch of 7z's, and we put that sucker up, and we torrented it. We were, until recently, I think it's changed, but we were, until recently, the second largest torrent that ever appeared.
30:40
The number one was high definition versions of all of the World Cup games. So nice, nice, nice counterpoint, huh? World Cup games, GeoCities. Because we knew, right, that by warezing GeoCities, this would bring this massive amount of embarrassment back. You know, it did. We got all these great interviews,
31:01
and I put up this thing saying, Yahoo found a way, I was quoted by Time for this, Yahoo found a way to destroy the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time. All right, excellent. Then Yahoo Video was announced it was going down. We got that. Well, we were helped, of course, because Yahoo Video sucks.
31:22
But it was 10 terabytes. We just downloaded all of the video, everything in all of it. Luckily, they use numeric IDs. Very easy to go through. We ended up downloading it. We're in the process of getting it all back up again somewhere. And yes, a lot of it is spam. Some of it is really terrible. It seems to be really popular with people in countries that are not America who were using it
31:41
as a way to have stuff that needed bandwidth that they didn't have to pay for where the bandwidth was expensive. But we've got this thing, and we were able to, you know, basically do this through this gift of volunteers who all worked together very hard. These are all the things that Yahoo has shut down in the last four years, just so you understand. Yahoo Briefcase, where you're able to store
32:02
10 megs whenever you wanted and get it from anywhere via FTP. They shut down. Why? No spare USB drive? Content mash. Some of these you won't know. Yahoo Pets was funded by Purina for a five-year contract. And on the day that the contract ran out,
32:21
they shut it down and redirected it to Yahoo Women. I don't know why, but they did. But it was a case of there was this secret contract. And when I say they shut it down, I mean with no warning. One day it was there, one day it was gone. It had pet pictures, it had forums, it had everything. Gone. Totally gone. So, in other words, I'm saying, Yahoo blows, okay? It is a fucking clown car.
32:41
I wouldn't trust them with, like, a backup of, like, my nut sack, because these guys... This is a case where a company went speculatively into user-generated content, and when they decided it wasn't worth it anymore, they got out of it. Like, getting into a library and deciding, oh, library business isn't working for us, and burning it to the ground.
33:01
Okay? I don't... You know, and I got people, I got people going to me, Damn, Yahoo was great to work at. Yeah, everywhere is great to work at. If you're working for an arsonist company, it's awesome. You get the... We were trying to change the world. Well, you sort of did. Awesome. Now you're the second... Now you're using Bing as your search engine and you suck.
33:22
Friendster went down this year. Friendster, we only got 12 million of the 112 million accounts because it turns out that digital cameras really came into prominence in 2005. But we basically got most of the larger, earlier sites from it. A lot of people...
33:40
And, you know, it's funny, because if you talk to people about Friendster, they know Friendster. They're like, yeah, I remember that. That was like a social network. I think I was on it. And we feel that, like, collecting this material, and believe me, it was a JavaScript nightmare. We had to write customized scripts to go through the JavaScript, negotiate it. We all had to create accounts on Friendster, which it still allowed up to its death.
34:00
And all of us were like, hobbies? Downloading Friendster. With some really funny, like, you know, giving the finger profile. I'm downloading Friendster. That's why I'm here. What are you up to? Oh, you like cats. That's great. Not everyone likes what we're doing. This is Lulu Poetry, poetry.com.
34:21
This was exciting. They gave everyone two weeks to get off. Fourteen million poems. And as you can see, their suggestion was, well, be sure to copy and paste your poems before we go down, so you can always remember them. We're unable to save any customer information or poetry.
34:41
Actually, you don't hear that line a whole lot, do you? I'm sorry. Your poetry is unavailable. So we were like, okay. Well, we can do this. So we did. Within a short time, we start getting banned, locked out. So we switch IPs. They lock out more.
35:01
We have someone switch IPs and we watch as an entire range is blocked out. We realize there's a person or persons there stopping us. So we switch to S3. And we switch to Amazon instances. And we start doing it that way. And they run out of ways to block us out. They threaten one of my members who is in Australia and 15 with legal whatever.
35:26
And I'm trying to explain to him that a cease and desist is not a lawsuit. He's 15 years old. He's in Australia. He's probably not going to be flown to America for downloading poetry without a license.
35:44
Interpol is not going to get in on this shit. But, you know, whatever, make the kid nervous. But basically, they were like, no, no, you don't understand. We're actually going to be bought out. So this will survive. So we know what you're doing. It's okay. And I was like, it's great you said that. Fuck you. We just kept going at it.
36:02
So it turned out, as far as we can determine, they were on like one shared server in some space. That's what their problem was. We were essentially, like I said, doing a distributed preservation of service attack. We took these guys out. We were taking them out, making a duplicate of them. So we got lots of millions and millions of poems, which we're holding on to.
36:22
Because they did go down, by the way, at 1201 of the day they announced they were going down. I could tell that there was like one guy being like, because we were watching cases on a couple of nights. We would actually watch the blocking slow down because we figured out people got tired and went home. And like by three in the morning, our Australia guys are like, oh well, free and clear.
36:42
And so, let me tell you, man, nothing's greater than when you give somebody a goal that has, blanketed on it, some sort of moral righteousness. It does lead to some awesome shit and fire. Anyway, so basically they, you know, they might come back, they might not. So sometimes you got to be a little rough, but we try not to be.
37:05
So Google videos announced it was going down. Now we were scared. Because Google videos is huge. So we did it anyway. We started downloading. We were somewhere in like the ninth or tenth terabyte downloading GeoCities.
37:22
We had a distributed system that would download from these things. And we were like, yup, going to save it. What an embarrassment. Google video, what an embarrassment. What about YouTube? Why don't you just transfer stuff to YouTube? What the hell's wrong with you? Why are we doing this? What's wrong with you, Yahoo? Sorry, Yahoo too, Google. And basically, a week or two in, they give us an update.
37:45
And the update says, okay, we're not going down. We're going to add a migrate to YouTube button. We're going to do what we need to do. So basically, what I found out later is on internal, internal in Google, they went, look what archive team is saying.
38:01
This is really embarrassing. We have to stop this. Okay? And so they went, yeah, got it. So they went basically, you know, okay, we give up. And so we won. All right? One of the few times we won. It's nice to win. So what's this? Guy with nine-track tapes. Guy's got Usenet. That is Usenet from 1981 to 1991.
38:24
All right? So here's what happened. So basically, this stuff is what became Dejan, went into the Google purchase of Dejanews, which then became Google Groups. And Google then proceeded to ruin it. Okay? If you know anything about Usenet, they ruined it unequivocally.
38:43
And we made a very important discovery. A lot of people are starting to think of Google as some sort of archive or library. Okay? That they're storing all this data, and even though they're running ads, they're really storing all this data. But Google is a library or an archive in the same way that a supermarket is a food museum. Okay?
39:00
These guys are basically going to do whatever they got to do. So we took it. We took back. We found the original archives that Google had taken. We put them up on archive.org. They're the UTZoo tapes. And people were doing with them. An archive team member did this. Not really associated with us, but did it and is part of us. Olduse.net. He is doing a real-time posting of Usenet with a 30-year lag.
39:22
So you can go on, connect with a news reader, and go experience what it was like. This particular one says, Perhaps you're not aware of it, but a new Star Trek movie is in the making this summer. While that is all well and good, there was a problem with it. It seems that Leonard Nimoy will no longer be available for the role of Spock, and thus they're killing him off. Loyal Trekkies here have taken great offense to this.
39:40
As well they should. There are better ways to remove the necessity of having the character present. Anyway, so that's good. And then we never saw Leonard Nimoy again. So you can connect to this thing and be able to use it right now. That's living history. Telehack.com. I don't have time to go into it. Telehack.com. Okay? It looks like a command line.
40:01
It is an entire world. Years of command line history are at that site. Spend a little time on it. Get an account. It's unbelievable. All resuscitated from old archives. And I don't mind being made fun of about this whole thing. Right? This is the stuff where my teammates will make fun of me. We believe in life. Lots of great, crazy humor.
40:20
So where else do we go from here? Well, we've got a group called WikiTeam. They've written a thing from the outside, downloads tons and tons of wikis. And we'll grab it, and then we've been putting them up. So we've got WikiTeam. So if your wiki is like dying, we're going to grab it. And we make the tools available so you can grab any wiki from anywhere else. URL team. Because URL shortening was a fucking awful idea.
40:42
URL shortening is like DNS retarded. You're going to let some third party generally decide what everything you do directs to. You are stupid. I understand the use of URL shorteners on a per-site basis, making a flicker that's FLKR, whatever. You know, that makes sense. But this is awful. Because if these things go down, now anyone looking at the history,
41:01
it's like people are talking cryptographic code. Here's this awesome site. Thing you can't figure out. So we have been taking them on, and this group over here has been basically taking all these old URL shorteners and turning them into archives that we then tore in. So I also want to point out, this is Chronomex, Jeroen Nazur,
41:21
solsare, sweb, underscore. Not me. This is not just a Jason Scott project. These guys, I'm just, I'm planning a fire, but these guys are going somewhere with it, and they don't always need me. It's very important. What else? What's left to save? So I don't know if many of you know Len Sassman. He was a wonderful cryptographer, a wonderful human being who took his own life
41:42
just a very short period of time ago. His wake was just last week, actually. And he was a big presenter at DEF CON. If you start going through the archives, you will find him there. He's a brilliant person who left a lot of friends and a lot of memories. And he's a wonderful guy. And his widow said, to me, can you archive him?
42:03
So I started a project called Away From Keyboard. This is on archive.org, and what we're doing is we are collecting artifacts from various people who have passed on to turn them into collections of files that at least we can get some piece of these people who are gone, and we can remember them and be able to build from them.
42:21
So it doesn't always have to be about websites. It doesn't always have to be discs that I'm trying to save here. It's everything. And I think that's just critical. What did we learn here? Well, we learned I'm really loud. We learned I do a lot of profanity. I think hopefully you'll look at a website that's going down as something that's dying and you'll say to yourself,
42:41
okay, that's not just a piece of crap. That's something that's meaningful to people. That's something that matters to people. And I hope that that piece sticks with you. If nothing else, I did. So my final question for you is, okay, is there anyone here from Archive Team? No, fuck you. You are all in Archive Team. I officially deputize you.
43:01
You are allowed to be in Archive Team. Go where you need to. Keep backups. Store them somewhere. Throw them over to some place you don't remember. Give me copies later or give my successor copies later about these things because it turns out what you walk in in is history because the hardest part of history is to be there when it happens. That's the hardest part of any historian's job. And what you are right now doing
43:21
is you are in companies, you are with people, you are visiting things, and you are with history. And so please save it for the future because the future will wonder why the fuck we all thought under-construction GIFs were so important. Sometimes I put that as my user profile when I'm downloading a site.
43:41
It gets the message, doesn't it? I'm just saying, if you take your site down, I'll see you there. Jason Scott, Archive Team. Thank you for coming. And please, one more bit.
44:02
Dedicated to Tim Recker, who unfortunately died before really giving a big presentation here. So I'm just proud to say my secret co-presenter, Tim Recker. Thank you so much.