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The Media Television United Kingdom

Thrifty, Anonymous Benefactor Backs Up BBC Websites Before They Go Dark 159

revealingheart writes "The BBC is set to close down 200 of its websites in the near future as part of cost-cutting measures. Hearing that 172 of these sites would be deleted from the Web entirely, an anonymous individual has taken matters into his or her own hands. The result is a BitTorrent file that anyone can download to store a backup of these 'lost' websites forever. The cost of the project? Apparently no more than $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and retrieve all the sites."
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Thrifty, Anonymous Benefactor Backs Up BBC Websites Before They Go Dark

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  • by MrQuacker ( 1938262 ) on Friday February 11, 2011 @05:16AM (#35171920)
    Is how many millions of pounds were spent developing all those sites.
  • by FuckingNickName ( 1362625 ) on Friday February 11, 2011 @05:27AM (#35171958) Journal

    So, what you're saying is that to reprint a book costs wildly less than to produce a book? That an electronic copy with no attempts to guarantee availability is much cheaper than a resilient set of servers which deliver instantly and accessibly to goodness-knows-how-many-people per minute? And that the cheapest thing of all is to do so without asking anyone's permission?

    Look, we can all observe an assault undique to neuter and privatise the BBC. But OP is attention whoring with a cheap technical demonstration which alienates him from the very people he might think he is supporting.

  • by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbender@gmail . c om> on Friday February 11, 2011 @07:15AM (#35172412)

    The same thing is going on in Germany. Our public broadcasting system was modeled after the BBC. The same huge media lobby groups comically defending independent journalism (yeah, right).

    As a result, the public broadcasters now have a list of criteria that everything they publish online has to conform with; the list is narrow enough that they're required to remove a huge amount of stuff from the archives -- aparently as much as 80%. They're also constantly under fire for everything they introduce, eg. smartphone apps. There was an effort to mirror data before it was deleted (@depub), but all the domains are dead, nobody seems to really know what happened to it. Couldn't find a torrent on the Pirate Bay, either.

  • by commodore64_love ( 1445365 ) on Friday February 11, 2011 @07:20AM (#35172452) Journal

    BBC has a real problem understanding the concept of "archiving". For some reason they think just because they are done with the sites, nobody else wants them either, so just erase them.

    It's somewhat similar to how they destroyed 1950s and 60s television tapes.

  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Friday February 11, 2011 @08:36AM (#35173034) Homepage

    I don't mean balance in the sense of providing the truth, but if you are fed left wing bias and right wing bias then somewhere in the middle lies the truth which hopefully someone could figure out.

    eg: If what you hear from the BBC is poor palestinians , look at those nasty israelis and from News Corp you hear poor israelis look at those nasty palestinians then its a fair bet that neither side is acting properly and there has been injustice done to both.

  • by coolmadsi ( 823103 ) on Friday February 11, 2011 @09:42AM (#35173910) Homepage Journal

    Theres a very noticable left wing bias at the BBC, especially on Radio 4. We need right wingers like murdoch to provide balance.

    You mean like the "balance" you can get from Fox "news" in the USA? Wasn't there reports on this site that Fox news viewers are the most misinformed, and the company won a court battle that meant they were an enternainment channel and didn't have to worry about facts. I'd rather news be accurate, not half made up. It's not what I'd call balance; lies would be a more descriptive term.

Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier.

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