
Historic Archive Of Websites From The January 18th SOPA Blackout

from the the-archive-team-strikes-again dept

We've discussed in the past the importance of preserving our digital history, including the excellent work the famed Archive Team has done rescuing and archiving various sites as they're being shut down. Of course, sites that are shutting down are not all that's worth preserving. There are also timely events that have value as well. For example, the amazing and powerful SOPA blackouts and online protests from January 18th. That was an historic moment, but it was just one day. Plenty of sites, including ours, showed some of the more interesting sites from the blackout, but there were so may that participated. Could you save them all?

It appears that the Archive Team did exactly that, archiving every site they could find that took part in the protests. The team has now released the entire archive as a 13.6 GB zipped download (don't click that unless you want to start downloading the whole thing). If you'd just like to see a listing of what's included in the file, you can see that too (though, that's also a pretty long list, so beware).

Kudos, once again, to the Archive Team for preserving important digital moments in history and making them widely available.

Filed Under: archive team, blackout, sopa


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 12 Apr 2012 @ 7:32am

    Commendable, very important to keep record of stuf like this aswell as other stuff, and well done for spreading it about, unlike some would like us to believe, available proof of information is always nice to reference.

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

  • This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:01am

    Hopefully they didn't store it on some file trading cloud system, otherwise history will be lost. Then Mike, how would you ever be able to justify your self-important position in the world?

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Chuck Norris' Enemy (deceased) (profile), 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:28am

      Re:

      Then Mike, how would you ever be able to justify your self-important position in the world?

      Might I add, so self-important that you have the never ending urge to come here every day, every post spouting baseless claims and attacks with not a single justification for your views on the topics. The fact you trolls show up here is justification enough that what Mike does is important...and it threatens you (or your paymasters) directly.

      reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:38am

      Re:

      and what are you doing that's so important you dumb shill?

      reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        Anonymous Coward, 12 Apr 2012 @ 9:41am

        Re: Re:

        Since I am not a shill, I can only say that you are clueless and don't understand. You really should get a clue, you are actually worse with the truth than Marcus, and that is something!

        reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

      • icon
        Leigh Beadon (profile), 12 Apr 2012 @ 11:26am

        Re: Re:

        It's true - he's not a shill, which makes his being here even sadder

        reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:55pm

      Re:

      The funny thing is that you're the only one who cares if Mike has self-importance or not. We don't. So you're the only ones to blame for attributing Mike having a need to "justify" his "self-important position".

      Wasn't the government's demand to delete all of Megaupload's data AND demand for them to not have a functioning legal defence team enough of a wet dream for you?

      reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    GMacGuffin (profile), 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:28am

    Awesome!

    I've been telling folks that January 18, 2012 is an historical date. They look at me like I'm insane (mostly because the media behind all this ignored or muddied the reporting - not one word about it on Jan. 18 on NBC). We'll see who has the last laugh. Muahhahahah.

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:36am

      Re: Awesome!

      It was a good thing and all, but I think we should be more future oriented. The government-industrial complex has already eroded enough of our rights through anti-competitive laws (and through other means) and they will continue to conspire to advance their authoritarian plutocracy. We must resist their future advancements and seek to undo the currently existing bad laws.

      reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 12 Apr 2012 @ 9:55am

      Re: Awesome!

      BTW, your post gives reason to why government established broadcasting and cableco monopolies should be abolished. That's another thing we should seek to abolish. These big media companies are wrongfully abusing their wrongfully granted government established monopoly power to socially engineer the public and keep them ignorant to the sole interests of the government-industrial complex. That needs to change. The government is effectively impeding free speech.

      Unidirectional government established broadcasting monopolies should never be permitted to be used for commercial purposes.

      Preserving some signals for things like GPS and emergency broadcasting are OK, things like cell phone use (some of which is unlicensed) and emergency calling is OK, but any commercial communication should be done over spectra that everyone has an equal opportunity to transmit information over following equal rules.

      reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Machin Shin (profile), 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:37am

    So is it just me who feels this would be a great file for everyone to send to any politician who keeps trying to pass poor regulations? I just find myself saddened that I can't actually attach a file that size to an e-mail.

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:40am

    Just saw you speech at the ACTA hearing Mike. Nice job!

    For everyone else:

    http://webcasts.barouhandpartners.com/marietje_schaake/a_stakeholder_hearing_about_acta

    He starts speaking around 1:00h, but the whole thing is interesting.

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Richard (profile), 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:47am

    Screen Shots

    I grabbed a load of screen shots for an article on my blog (also blacked-out for the day)
    No where near 13.6GB worth, but some pretty good ones. I liked the ingenuity of some of them. The Oatmeal did a good one.
    http://techfleece.com/2012/01/18/screenshots-of-sopa-pipa-website-protests/

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 12 Apr 2012 @ 8:48am

    and still the entertainment industries and Congress cant see what happened, thinking it was just Google that protested! amazing just how blind someone can force themselves to be!! i wonder what excuse they will have when the street and on-line protests start over TPP and CISPA? the lies that Kirk spouted to Wyden were a piss take, worthy of protests then!

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Silence8, 12 Apr 2012 @ 9:36am

    "every site they could find that took part in the protests."

    Looked at the list, and I believe it's far from a full list. Many sites shut down without fanfare, and there were a couple sites setup where you could pledge that you would be shutting down. I don't know how they got their list of sites to preserve. Commendable, but not complete.

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Phoenix84 (profile), 12 Apr 2012 @ 10:21am

    My site wasn't there

    I don't know how the got that list, but I participated in the SOPA blackout, and my site isn't in the archive.
    Granted, my site isn't very important. It just has various photographs I've taken over the years.

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Cardman, 12 Apr 2012 @ 6:13pm

    Still missing

    It is good to see that someone has done a much better job in tracking these 6000 odd websites that joined in. This is much better than the brief overview that only covered the big sites.

    With that said I cannot help but to notice that they missed out the blackout of my very own website. This is kind of odd when I did well to publish this fact on Blackout Day including on this very website.

    Although finding my 5 minutes of fame is proving difficult people can still see what I put up on Blackout Day here...
    http://cardman.com/sopa.shtml

    reply to this | link to this | view in chronology ]


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