Dead Internet? (discuss)

**Tintin** · 16th October 2024 08:30

Pertinent to the theme here I think and a useful place to record the current Internet Archive travails. Essentially they've been clobbered by a pretty serious DDOS attack and have been working hard to restore services: this has been going on for at least a week now. None of the vast amount of information they've archived there seems to have been compromised but they've obviously been bedevilled with functionality issues.

Brewster Kahle - founder - with the latest update, here:

Text:

Wayback Machine running strong (yippie!).

Still working to bring http://archive.org items & other services online safely.

@internetarchive
team spirits high, but tired.
10:20 PM · Oct 15, 2024

**Bruce G Charlton** · 16th October 2024 09:17

The dead internet is the tip of a vast iceberg of corruption and evil.

Things could hardly be otherwise with the world as it is; and, after all, the internet was always intended to be a means of surveillance and control, but for a while it "got out of hand", and seemed like the opposite.

My understanding is that the internet is part of The System, and The System is so vast, extensive, deep-cutting, and powerful; that it cannot be fixed, cannot be reformed.

I'm afraid that "the whole thing" (including the internet) will have to come down (in fact, it is already self-destructing due to the inevitable progression of evil, and this will surely continue) - if we are to avoid that spiritual fate-worse-than-death (omni-surveillance, total-mind-control) that our Global Establishment Masters have planned for us.

**Tintin** · 20th October 2024 15:11

Follow up from the Internet Archive, here.

The headline?

Twitter's blog posts from 2019 to 2024 appear to be missing from @internetarchive 🤔

Attentive commentators have noticed that these span pre-2020 US Election, and the entire fake Biden/Harris marriage-made-in-Hell, up to end of 2023. An attempt to bury evidence?

------------------

Maybe we need to trawl through the many thousands that have been posted up here on the forum, and make sure they're archived.

**Tom Booth** · 28th July 2025 23:39

Alarm bells went off for me a long time ago with the introduction of cascading style sheets.

The original HTML specification was very simple. Nobody needed to be a computer programmer to author a website. It could just be plain text if you just wanted to say something, and all that was needed was to put an

Code:

<html>

tag in front of that and a

Code:

<p>

tag or

Code:

<br>

to seperate paragraphs. Anybody could do it.

But css was pretty complicated.

It wasn't so much the introduction of css, more options for website design is a good thing. The problem I saw was that at the same time they started phasing out, or trying to phase out simple HTML. They came up with "HTML transitional" kind of quietly announcing that standard HTML was in the process of being phased out for something else. Now instead of just prefacing your text file with the tag

Code:

<html>

to bring it alive on the internet you were SUPPOSED TO start using this insanely complicated prefix:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

What happened to the KISS philosophy: "keep it simple stupid".

But, there were, thankfully, already way too many websites on the internet to just squash plain old HTML overnight and browsers in general continued to support it, and thankfully, still do. News Flash! It is still quite possible to use basic HTML and it isn't difficult to learn and for the most part it still works.

Alarm bells really started going off when browsers started dropping the "view source" button.

In the early days if you liked a website, it was a very easy matter to simply click on "view source" copy the entire website coding and populate it with your own content.

Then there was a push to make the "look and feel" of a website copyright protected, so this practice became something to be frowned upon and perceived as somewhat risky. If you copied the "look and feel" of someone else's website maybe you could be sued. Aside from that, the underlying code was becoming more and more complicated and more and more dependent on external adjuncts like css, java, and so forth so that looking at the source code of your average website would just be a nightmare anyway. Too too complicated.

As things became more and more complicated, it also became necessary to upgrade your computer hardware, so using the internet in a meaningful way was becoming more expensive.

Now, what alarms me is the push to use https by default, everywhere. Along with browsers adopting the policy of flagging every website that neglects to use https as "dangerous". GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!!.

What is that all about? If I want to post a website to the internet for everyone to read, why would I want to have it encrypted?

Well, I don't actually. I want anyone and everyone to be able to read it. This is a rather blatant form of control and censorship and also a way of raising the bar for website creators. Now to put up a website I need to know about .htaccess files and probably pay an additional fee for a Secure Sockets Layer certificate and its installation on a web server.

Oh, and what about the fact the EVERY INTERNET ACCESS SERVICE PROVIDER by default, gave everybody who paid (a modest fee) for internet access free disk space to host their own website. Usually something like 50MB on the internet access providers own server. Your domain would end up looking something like internetaccessprovider.com~my_own_website.index.html but, at least it was something that was always available to everyone with an internet connection.

Today, that is very often an "extra" for business users. often a very expensive "extra".

Oh, and now the search engines are all pretty useless.

Someone posted a link above to a page where it is quoted: Radio Liberty quote:

...I remember seeing a link on the Google web site where you could submit your site for indexing by Google. Then, after doing it, you could monitor your server logs and see the hits accumulate as the Google spider indexed the different pages on your server. The same for Infoseek, Hotbot, Dogpile (lots of different search engine spiders), and many, many more. ... Today,... It seems to me that there's a "white list" and a "black list". Somebody looks at the data indexed and white lists the "acceptable sources" and black holes the rest

Actually, the option to ask Google to index your website is no longer available. At least as far as I've been able to find, for many years now already. You are not allowed the privilege of even being allowed to have your site indexed at all any longer, so good luck putting up any kind of website in the hopes that a lot of people will be able to view your content, thoughts and opinions or gripes and complaints.

I'm not too alarmed however.

As over the years I have quietly been developing a kind of secret weapon to counteract all this. I have been a kind of internet developer insider of sorts from the beginning of the World Wide Web. That the World Wide Web was "created" at CERN is actually a myth or cover story. The early Web was actually the result of a psychic experiment perpetrated in secret by psychics involved in secret black projects within ARPA. People involved were Robert Monroe (Journeys Out of the Body), Robert Anton Wilson, and myself, though I was not directly or officially involved in any ARPA projects. I don't know who else may have been involved, I only had direct communication with those two.

Anyway, before the WWW even got off the ground, I had already begun devising a kind of Dewey Decimal System for this new World Wide computer network that was about to hit the fan.

The plan was to develop all the components, browsers, protocols, search engines etc. at different top universities on a kind of need to know basis, where the developers did not actually know what it was they were developing exactly. Then when it all came together, it would be too late to stop it, as it could literally piggy back on other existing communication systems. You couldn't shut it down without shutting down all the existing communication channels it was ridding on.

The World Wide Web, in reality, was "VISUALIZED" into existence by a group of rogue psychics who used "Creative Visualization" to "MANIFEST" it.

Oh, I almost forgot. What I think is going on with this https push is once the entire internet is encrypted, well, that will be the end. Kind of like free satellite TV. At one time anyone could point a parabolic dish at the sky and get free cable or satellite TV and even after they introduced scrambling of the signals and you had to purchase a descrambler, there were some unauthorized descramblers that could be had, but as encryption technology improved it could no longer be easily broken and so all the big satellite dishes people set up in their back yards became useless.

Perhaps you could say that this is somewhat justified. Cable/Satellite TV companies had a subscription model and people were "stealing" the service.

The internet, though, was never intended to be owned. period. It belongs to the people. People need to take responsibility for its development and the direction of that development. People need to stop relying so heavily on the big tech internet platforms to do all their coding for them in the background. Learn some basic HTML. It still works actually. There are still FREE web hosting services. It is also possible to host a website on your own computer or even a smart phone, but setting up a web server can be pretty complicated and frustrating but if we are going to keep the internet going we really need to try.

Its really EASY to open an account on Facebook, Twitter, etc. and upload some photos and text, rather than learning some HTML and authoring your own web page, but if people don't do that, sooner or later, they will no longer have the option. Websites are disappearing.

Oh, back around 1995, I think it was, I had completed my "Dewey Decimal System" for the World Wide Web. Search engines and the various web portals were only intended as a stop gap. It was my "JOB" to develop a robust internet indexing system that would essentially make search engines and web portals obsolete, no longer needed.

Think of the difference between walking into a library with 100 billion books but no card catalog or sections for different subjects or subject codes taped to the bindings of books, nothing organized in any way at all, just books randomly piled up on the floor or on shelves in no particular order, how could you ever find anything?

Well, you can scan every book into a super-computer using OCR and then create a computer file that indexes every word in every book so that when you want to find a book on some subject you just look in this computer "index" for a "key word" or two and if your clever and use words to search for that are pretty limited to your area of interest then there is some chance that the super-computer will be able to find the books containing those words and tell you where that book is, if it wasn't moved.

That is a search engine used in lieu of a REAL indexing system.

Now what is your experience walking into a library that has a real indexing system?

You maybe walk in and ask the librarian, where can I find a book about such and such. Well, maybe the librarian is on a lunch break and just took a bit of a sandwich and cant answer, so they point in the direction of isle 5. You go and find the book. Or you consult the card catalogue.

Oh so in 1995 or thereabouts, I contacted the people at MIT (World Wide Web consortium) that I had completed the "indexing system" I had been working on for over five years and I was told that it was "a non starter".

What I think that meant was that "they" had already invested a great deal in the infrastructure that included Search Engines and centralized portals and to have something that replaced all that with a decentralized indexing system that would run on people's own computers easily organizing everything on the internet transparently in the background making search engines obsolete was not something that was wanted.

Well, that may be so, but it is still something that IMO is NEEDED, in order to make the internet actually USEABLE for ordinary people to get things done, make contacts, organize, collaborate and share.

I've told my story about my involvement with the early internet before, but in general the story was too wild to be believed I suppose. People would respond with "just use Google". Google was excellent back in the day, nobody saw a need for investing in some new fangled "indexing system". So. I have to confess. I more or less gave up and put the indexing project on the back burner.

You could think of this indexing system as a kind of cross-platform hashtag. For this post, If I thought it worth putting on the index, I could generate a somewhat longish "hashtag" of sorts containing various significant "metadata" of my own choosing that various browsers and web crawlers or people's personal computer "agents" could pick up and add to each individuals personal "card catalog" on their own computer. Its universal and language agnostic. The bit of code or "hashtag" generated can be included in the "head" information or metadata of people's "personal web page", internal targets within web pages and so forth.

In the later part of the 90's I had done some calculations and at that time I had concluded that such an index could catalog all the millions of websites that were then on the internet using only a 3.5 inch floppy disk as a storage medium. Today, it would take up a bit more space on a laptop hard drive or memory chip but relatively insignificant.

My hope is that maybe a few people on this forum will not immediately jump to the conclusion that I'm crazy.

Anyway, I have a "proof of concept" online and unlike Google it is still possible for anyone to add their website to the index/search engine database, If they actually have a website that is. The index/search engine is here for anyone who might like to give it a whirl: https://peoplesresearchcenter.com/XPRC_Entryform.html there are a couple of other iterations: http://www.megamapper.com/ and http://intelidex.cogia.net/XPRC_Entryform.html

I more or less quit working on this project years ago due to lack of interest and lack of personal resources to devote the necessary time to polish it and get it working and I may have left some of these sites broken or dysfunctional due to "playing around" with the code that it runs on. But I might resurrect the project if anyone here is interested.

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