Some time ago, I wrote about the interesting situation we had with emulation and Version 51 of the Chrome browser – that is, our emulations stopped working in a very strange way and many people came to the Archive’s inboxes asking what had broken. The resulting fix took a lot of effort and collaboration with groups and volunteers to track down, but it was successful and ever since, every version of Chrome has worked as expected.

But besides the interesting situation with this bug (it actually made us perfectly emulate a broken machine!), it also brought into a very sharp focus the hidden, fundamental aspect of Browsers that can easily be forgotten: Each browser is an opinion, a lens of design and construction that allows its user a very specific facet of how to address the Internet and the Web. And these lenses are something that can shift and turn on a dime, and change the nature of this online world in doing so.

An eternal debate rages on what the Web is “for” and how the Internet should function in providing information and connectivity. For the now-quite-embedded millions of users around the world who have only known a world with this Internet and WWW-provided landscape, the nature of existence centers around the interconnected world we have, and the browsers that we use to communicate with it.

Avoiding too much of a history lesson at this point, let’s instead just say that when Browsers entered the landscape of computer usage in a big way after being one of several resource-intensive experimental programs. In circa 1995, the effect on computing experience and acceptance was unparalleled since the plastic-and-dreams home computer revolution of the 1980s. Suddenly, in one program came basically all the functions of what a computer might possibly do for an end user, all of it linked and described and seemingly infinite. The more technically-oriented among us can point out the gaps in the dream and the real-world efforts behind the scenes to make things do what they promised, of course. But the fundamental message was: Get a Browser, Get the Universe. Throughout the late 1990s, access came in the form of mailed CD-ROMs, or built-in packaging, or Internet Service Providers sending along the details on how to get your machine connected, and get that browser up and running.

As I’ve hinted at, though, this shellac of a browser interface was the rectangular window to a very deep, almost Brazil–like series of ad-hoc infrastructure, clumsily-cobbled standards and almost-standards, and ever-shifting priorities in what this whole “WWW” experience could even possibly be. It’s absolutely great, but it’s also been absolutely arbitrary.

With web anniversaries aplenty now coming into the news, it’ll be very easy to forget how utterly arbitrary a lot of what we think the “Web” is, happens to be.

There’s no question that commercial interests have driven a lot of browser features – the ability to transact financially, to ensure the prices or offers you are being shown, are of primary interest to vendors. Encryption, password protection, multi-factor authentication and so on are sometimes given lip service for private communications, but they’ve historically been presented for the store to ensure the cash register works. From the early days of a small padlock icon being shown locked or unlocked to indicate “safe”, to official “badges” or “certifications” being part of a webpage, the browsers have frequently shifted their character to promise commercial continuity. (The addition of “black box” code to browsers to satisfy the ability to stream entertainment is a subject for another time.)

Flowing from this same thinking has been the overriding need for design control, where the visual or interactive aspects of webpages are the same for everyone, no matter what browser they happen to be using. Since this was fundamentally impossible in the early days (different browsers have different “looks” no matter what), the solutions became more and more involved:

• Use very large image-based mapping to control every visual aspect
• Add a variety of specific binary “plugins” or “runtimes” by third parties
• Insist on adoption of a number of extra-web standards to control the look/action
• Demand all users use the same browser to access the site

Evidence of all these methods pop up across the years, with variant success.

Some of the more well-adopted methods include the Flash runtime for visuals and interactivity, and the use of Java plugins for running programs within the confines of the browser’s rectangle. Others, such as the wide use of Rich Text Format (.RTF) for reading documents, or the Realaudio/video plugins, gained followers or critics along the way, and were ultimately faded into obscurity.

And as for demanding all users use the same browser… well, that still happens, but not with the same panache as the old Netscape Now! buttons.

This puts the Internet Archive into a very interesting position.

With 20 years of the World Wide Web saved in the Wayback machine, and URLs by the billions, we’ve seen the moving targets move, and how fast they move. Where a site previously might be a simple set of documents and instructions that could be arranged however one might like, there are a whole family of sites with much more complicated inner workings than will be captured by any external party, in the same way you would capture a museum by photographing its paintings through a window from the courtyard.  

When you visit the Wayback and pull up that old site and find things look differently, or are rendered oddly, that’s a lot of what’s going on: weird internal requirements, experimental programming, or tricks and traps that only worked in one brand of browser and one version of that browser from 1998. The lens shifted; the mirror has cracked since then.

This is a lot of philosophy and stray thoughts, but what am I bringing this up for?

The browsers that we use today, the Firefoxes and the Chromes and the Edges and the Braves and the mobile white-label affairs, are ever-shifting in their own right, more than ever before, and should be recognized as such.

It was inevitable that constant-update paradigms would become dominant on the Web: you start a program and it does something and suddenly you’re using version 54.01 instead of version 53.85. If you’re lucky, there might be a “changes” list, but that luck might be variant because many simply write “bug fixes”. In these updates are the closing of serious performance or security issues – and as someone who knows the days when you might have to mail in for a floppy disk to be sent in a few weeks to make your program work, I can totally get behind the new “we fixed it before you knew it was broken” world we live in. Everything does this: phones, game consoles, laptops, even routers and medical equipment.

But along with this shifting of versions comes the occasional fundamental change in what browsers do, along with making some aspect of the Web obsolete in a very hard-lined way.

Take, for example, Gopher, a (for lack of an easier description) proto-web that allowed machines to be “browsed” for information that would be easy for users to find. The ability to search, to grab files or writings, and to share your own pools of knowledge were all part of the “Gopherspace”. It was also rather non-graphical by nature and technically oriented at the time, and the graphical “WWW” utterly flattened it when the time came.

But since Gopher had been a not-insignificant part of the Internet when web browsers were new, many of them would wrap in support for Gopher as an option. You’d use the gopher:// URI, and much like the ftp:// or file:// URIs, it co-existed with http:// as a method for reaching the world.

Until it didn’t.

Microsoft, citing security concerns, dropped Gopher support out of its Internet Explorer browser in 2002. Mozilla, after a years-long debate, did so in 2010. Here’s the Mozilla Firefox debate that raged over Gopher Protocol removal. The functionality was later brought back externally in the form of a Gopher plugin. Chrome never had Gopher support. (Many other browsers have Gopher support, even today, but they have very, very small audiences.)

The Archive has an assembled collection of Gopherspace material here.  From this material, as well as other sources, there are web-enabled versions of Gopherspace (basically, http:// versions of the gopher:// experience) that bring back some aspects of Gopher, if only to allow for a nostalgic stroll. But nobody would dream of making something brand new in that protocol, except to prove a point or for the technical exercise. The lens has refocused.

In the present, Flash is beginning a slow, harsh exile into the web pages of history – browser support dropping, and even Adobe whittling away support and upkeep of all of Flash’s forward-facing projects. Flash was a very big deal in its heyday – animation, menu interface, games, and a whole other host of what we think of as “The Web” depended utterly on Flash, and even specific versions and variations of Flash. As the sun sets on this technology, attempts to be able to still view it like the Shumway project will hopefully allow the lens a few more years to be capable of seeing this body of work.

As we move forward in this business of “saving the web”, we’re going to experience “save the browsers”, “save the network”, and “save the experience” as well. Browsers themselves drop or add entire components or functions, and being able to touch older material becomes successively more difficult, especially when you might have to use an older browser with security issues. Our in-browser emulation might be a solution, or special “filters” on the Wayback for seeing items as they were back then, but it’s not an easy task at all – and it’s a lot of effort to see information that is just a decade or two old. It’s going to be very, very difficult.

But maybe recognizing these browsers for what they are, and coming up with ways to keep these lenses polished and flexible, is a good way to start.

Recently the Internet Archive and Mozilla announced “No More 404s”, an experiment to help you to see archived versions of dead web pages in your Firefox browser. Using the “No More 404s” Firefox add-on you are given the option to retrieve archived versions of web pages from the Internet Archive’s 20-year store of more than 490 billion web captures available via the Wayback Machine.

To try this free service, and begin to enjoy a more reliable web, view this page with Firefox (version 48 or newer) then:

1. Install the Firefox “Test Pilot”: https://testpilot.firefox.com
2. Enable the “No More 404s” add-on: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/no-more-404s
3. Try viewing this dead page: http://stevereads.com/cache/ephemeral_web_pages.html

See the banner that came down from the top of the window offering you the opportunity to view an archived version of this page?  Success!

For 20 years, the Internet Archive has been crawling the web, and is currently preserving web captures at the rate of one billion per week. With support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, we are making improvements, including weaving the Wayback Machine into the fabric of the web itself.

“We’d like the Wayback Machine to be a standard feature in every web browser,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “Let’s fix the web — it’s too important to allow it to decay with rotten links.”

“The Internet Archive came to us with an idea for helping users see parts of the web that have disappeared over the last couple of decades,” explained Nick Nguyen, Vice President, Product, Firefox.

The Internet Archive started with a big goal — to archive the web and preserve it for history. Now, please help us. Test our latest experiment and email any feedback to info@archive.org.

Note: Hip-Hop tends to be for a mature audience, both in subject matter and language.

I’m sure this is entirely old knowledge for some people, but it was new to me, so I’ll describe the situation and the thinking.

There’s some excellent introductions and writeups about mixtapes in Hip-Hop culture at these external articles:

• A (Not at all Definitive) History of Hip Hop Mixtapes
• The History of Mixtapes
• The Real Difference Between a Mixtape and an Album

So, in quick summary, there have been mixtapes of many varieties for many years, going back to the 1970s to the dawn of what we call Hip-Hop, and throughout the time since the “tapes” have become CDs and ZIP files and are now still being released out into “the internet” to be spread around. The goal is to gain traction and attention for your musical act, or for your skills as a DJ, or any of a dozen reasons related to getting music to the masses.

There is an entire ecosystem of mixtape distribution and access. There are easily tens of thousands of known mixtapes that have existed. This is a huge, already-extant environment out there, that was established, culturally critical, and born-digital.

It only made sense for a library like the Internet Archive to provide it as well.

There’s a lot coded into the covers of these mixtapes (not to even mention the stuff coded into the lyrics themselves) – there’s stressing of riches, drug use, power, and oppression. There’s commentary on government, on social issues, and on the meaning of entertainment and celebrity. There’s parody, there’s aggrandizement, and there’s every attempt to draw in the listeners in what is a pretty large pile of material floating around. It’s not about this song or that grandiose portrait, though – it’s about the fact this whole set of material has meaning, reality and relevance to many, many people.

How do I know this has relevance? Within 24 hours of the first set of mixtapes going onto the Archive, many of the albums already had hundreds of listeners, and one of them broke a thousand views. Since then, a good amount have had tens of thousands of listens. Somebody wants this stuff, that’s for sure. And that’s fundamentally what the Archive is about – bringing access to the world.

The end goal here is simple: Providing free access to huge amounts of culture, so people can reference, contextualize, enjoy and delight over material in an easy-to-reach, linkable, usable manner. Apparently it’s already taken off, but here you go too.

Get your drank on here.

Yesterday Christina Wilkie, a national political reporter for the Huffington Post, published a story noting that Melania Trump’s elaborate website, www.melaniatrump.com, which existed as recently as July 20, now redirects to the Trump Organization’s official website. The removal of the website followed questions about a biography that appeared on it, that claimed  that Melania Trump had “earned a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia.”

Many media outlets have followed suit, writing that the website has now disappeared.

Today Melania Trump tweeted that the website was taken down because  “it does not accurately reflect my current and professional interests.”

Wilkie and other reporters had questioned whether Trump truly obtained those degrees from the university. The inquiries took on new potency after she was accused of possible plagiarism in her speech before the Republican National Convention last week. The campaign has not answered questions about the biography. Snopes.com has reported that there is no “University of Slovenia.”

Meanwhile, Melania’s original biography is preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which crawls websites to create a historical archive. The most recent snapshot was taken on July 20 — see the screenshot below.

The Political TV Ad Archive is tracking and archiving political ads in the 2016 elections. In addition, we’ve set up a special Archive-It collection to track candidates’ and political organizations’ social media websites here, with more 320 million captures to date.

Cross posted on the Political TV Ad Archive. July 29: quote from Melania Trump’s defunct website corrected.

(In case you’ve been living in a cave without Internet connectivity for the last month, Pokémon Go is an augmented reality Internet game. Participants on three different teams band together to find and capture as many types of Pokémon as they can, sending Nintendo a goldmine of personal data in the process.)

It turns out that the stairs of the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters are a PokéGym, a site where players can train their Pokémon and fight with other Pokémon. Fortunately, the Pokémon warriors aren’t rowdy or disruptive; they resemble somnambulistic zombies stumbling around under the control of their glowing smartphone screens.

As Jean Cocteau noted, “Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.” Pokémon will join pet rocks, beanie babies, and chia pets in the annals of popular fads sooner than later. Perhaps then the gamers will take advantage of their Internet devices to discover that the Internet Archive has much more to offer than the ephemeral, pixelated creatures outside of our doors.

The Library Copyright Alliance (which represents the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries) has said it does not want changes, the Society of American Archivists has said it does not want changes. The Internet Archive does not want changes, DPLA does not want changes… So why is the Copyright Office holding “hush hush” meetings to “answer their last questions” before going to Congress with a proposed rewrite of the section of Copyright law that pertains to libraries?

This recent move, which has its genesis in an outdated set of proposals from 2008, is just another in series of out of touch ideas coming from the Copyright Office. We’ve seen them propose “notice and staydown” filtering of the Internet and disastrous “extended collective licensing” for digitization projects. These and other proposals have lead some to start asking whose Copyright Office this is, anyway. Now the Copyright Office wants to completely overhaul Section 108 of the Copyright Act, the “library exceptions,” in ways that could break the Wayback Machine and repeal fair use for libraries.

We are extremely concerned that Congress could take the Copyright Office’s proposal seriously, and believe that libraries are actually calling for these changes. That’s why we flew to Washington, D.C. to deliver the message to the Copyright Office in person: now is not the time for changes to Section 108. Libraries and technology have been evolving quickly. Good things are beginning to happen as a result. Drafting a law now could make something that is working well more complicated, and could calcify processes that would otherwise continue to evolve to make digitization efforts and web archiving work even better for libraries and content owners alike.

In fact, just proposing this new legislation will likely have the effect of hitting the pause button on libraries. It will lead to uncertainty for the libraries that have already begun to modernize by digitizing their analog collections and learning how to collect and preserve born-digital materials. It could lead libraries who have been considering such projects to “wait and see.”

Perhaps that’s the point. Because the Copyright Office’s proposal doesn’t seem to help libraries, or the public they serve, at all.

Is it 1968? Many pundits have been asking this question in recent days, in the lead up to what is expected to be a contentious–and some worry about violent–GOP convention in Cleveland, where Donald Trump is expected to accept the GOP nomination. A spate of mass gun killings, the death of two African American men in recent weeks at the hands of police, the murder of five police officers by a sniper during a demonstration and then three more by a lone gun man in Baton Rouge, terrorism here and abroad, involvement overseas in intractable conflicts, growing economic inequality — none of these developments quite parallel the tumultuous events of the 1960s. But the situation was volatile then, and it’s volatile now.

To set the scene, thanks to the TV News Archive, the Internet Archive‘s online free library of TV news clips, revisiting some of the more “crazy” conventions of years past (headline by Politico), or simply notable or controversial moments, is just a search away. All of these clips are editable, embeddable, and shareable on social media.

Chicago, 1968

When the Democrats met in Chicago in 1968, it was in the shadow of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Democratic primary candidate Robert Kennedy. Vice President Hubert Humphrey had the support of the some 60 percent of the delegates, largely local party leaders — people who would be super delegates today. While a liberal, Humphrey’s support of the war as Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president made him unpopular in the anti-war movement.

As described by Politico, “With Humphrey’s nomination all but certain, protesters associated with the Youth International Party (the Yippies) and National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the MOBE) took to the streets outside Chicago’s convention hall; inside, city policemen allied with the local political machine roughed up liberal delegates and journalists in plain view of news cameras. “I wasn’t sentenced and sent here!” a prominent New York Democrat bellowed as a uniformed officer dragged him off the floor. “I was elected!”

The clip below, from the CNN documentary series, “The Sixties,” shows police beating up protestors on the streets. A special commission appointed to investigate the protests characterized the violent events as a “police riot” directed at protesters and recommended prosecution of police who used indiscriminate violence.

That same night, Humphrey took to the podium to accept the nomination. He referred the violence outside when he said, “[O]ne cannot help but reflect, the deep sadness that we feel over the troubles and the violence which have erupted regrettably and tragically in the streets of this great city and for the personal injuries that have occurred. Surely we have now learned the lesson that violence breeds counter violence and it cannot be condoned whatever the source.”

San Francisco, 1964

In 1964, GOP moderates Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, then governor of Michigan, led an unsuccessful campaign against conservative insurgent Barry Goldwater, at a convention Goldwater biographer Robert Alan Goldberg later dubbed the “Woodstock of the right.” (Romney was former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s father.) Goldwater was a fierce opponent of the Civil Rights Act and strong supporter of military intervention against the Soviet Union.

Some have compared him to Trump because of his belligerence and unpopularity with the establishment Republicans. For example, like Trump, he was not one to mince words about his enemies. At the convention, when asked by a reporter about LBJ and the Civil Rights Act, he replied, “He’s the phoniest individual who ever came around.”

The convention was raucous, filled with delegates booing the moderates — as when Rockefeller called on the crowd to reject extremists. But the moment most remembered was when Goldwater took the podium to accept the nomination, when, to enormous applause, he said:

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. [applause] And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Goldwater went on to lose the election, badly, to Lyndon B. Johnson.

Other historic moments

The TV News Archive is full of many other convention speech clips of moments that turned history’s tide. Here, for example, is John F. Kennedy, accepting the Democratic nomination in 1960, stating that voters should not “throw away” their vote because of concern about his religious affiliation. He went on to become the first Catholic president of the United States.

And here is Richard Nixon, in his 1968 nomination speech, talking about the increase in crime and criticizing those who say “law and order” was code for racism. He was speaking to the charged issues surrounding race and policing at the time:

“Time is running out for the merchants of corruption…and to those who say law and order is a code word for racism there and here is the reply. Our goal is justice for every American. If we are to have respect for law in America we must have laws that deserve respect.”

Nixon’s words, however, have a doubly ironic ring today. First, because the debate over policing in the African American community stubbornly persists decades later. And second, because of his own role in covering up the Watergate scandal, which involved dirty tricks against the Democrats during the 1972 campaign. Nixon would eventually resign from the presidency in 1974. Three years later, in 1977, the journalist David Frost asked Nixon under what circumstances a president can do something illegal. Nixon’s famous answer: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

For those wanting to plumb the riches of past convention speeches, below is a list, with links, of most major convention speeches by nominees, starting with Harry Truman in 1948 and going to Barack Obama in 2012. The speeches were broadcast on C-Span.

1948: Harry Truman acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA Part 1.

Harry Truman acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA Part 2.

1952: Adlai Stevenson acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Chicago, IL Part 1.

Adlai Stevenson acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Chicago, IL Part 2.

1956: Republican Convention and Eisenhower’s nomination  Universal newsreel.

Dwight D. Eisenhower acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Daly City, CA Part 1.

Dwight D. Eisenhower acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Daly City, CA Part 2.

1960: John F. Kennedy acceptance speech at 1960 Democratic National Conventions in Los Angeles, CA Part 1.

John F. Kennedy acceptance speech at 1960 Democratic National Conventions in Los Angeles, CA Part 2.

Former President Hebert Hoover speech at Republican National Convention Chicago, IL.

Henry Cabot Lodge VP acceptance speech at  National Convention Chicago, IL.

1964: Barry Goldwater acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Daly City, CA.

Robert Kennedy speech at Democratic National Convention Atlantic City, NJ.

Lyndon Johnson acceptance speech Atlantic City, NJ Part 1.

Lyndon Johnson acceptance speech Atlantic City, NJ Part 2.

1968: Spiro Agnew VP acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, FL.

Richard Nixon acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Miami Beach, FL.

Hubert Humphrey acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Chicago, Il  NBC News.

1972: McGovern acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Miami Beach, FL Part 1.

McGovern acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Miami Beach, FL Part 2.

Richard Nixon acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Miami Beach, FL.

Richard Nixon acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Miami Beach, Florida NBC News.

1976: Barbara Jordan keynote speech at Democratic Convention New York, NY.

Jimmy Carter acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention New York, NY Part 1.

Jimmy Carter acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention New York, NY Part 2.

August 17, 1976 Republic National Convention Kansas City, MO delegates debating Ronald Reagan rule requiring Ford to name VP before they vote  CBS News Part 1.

August 17, 976 Republic National Convention Kansas City, MO includes delegates debating Ronald Reagan rule C16 requiring Ford to name VP before they vote  CBS News Part 2.

Gerald Ford acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Kansas City, MO Part 1.

Gerald Ford acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Kansas City, MO Part 2.

Ronald Reagan endorsement speech of Gerald Ford as Presidential Nominee at Republican National Convention Kansas City, MO.

1980: Ronald Reagan acceptance speech  at the Republican National Convention Detroit, MI.

Ted Kennedy speech at Democratic National Convention in New York. Kennedy was a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Jimmy Carter acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in New York, NY Part 1.

Jimmy Carter acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in New York, NY Part 2.

1984: Geraldine Ferraro VP acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention San Francisco, CA.

Walter Mondale acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention San Francisco, CA Part 1.

Walter Mondale acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention San Francisco, CA Part 2.

Ronald Reagan acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Dallas, TX.

Mario Cuomo keynote speech at Democratic National Convention San Franciso, CA.

1988: Ann Richards keynote speech at Democratic National Convention Atlanta, GA.

Michael Dukakis acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Atlanta, GA Part 1.

Michael Dukakis acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Atlanta, GA Part 2.

Dan Quayle VP acceptance speech at Republican National Convention New Orleans, LA.

George H.W. Bush acceptance speech at Republican National Convention New Orleans, LA.

1992: Barbara Jordan speech at Democratic National Convention New York, NY.

Al Gore VP acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention New York, NY.

Bill Clinton acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention New York, NY.

Pat Buchanan Keynote speech at Republican National Convention Houston, TX.

Ronald Reagan speech at Republican National Convention  Houston, TX Part 1.

Ronald Reagan speech at Republican National Convention  Houston, TX Part 2.

George H. W. Bush acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Houston, TX.

1996: Jack Kemp VP acceptance speech at Republican National Convention San Diego, CA.

Bob Dole acceptance speech at Republican National Convention San Diego, CA.

Hillary Clinton speech at the Democratic National Convention Chicago, IL.

Bill Clinton acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention Chicago, IL. (Currently not available on the TV News Archive.)

2000: Dick Cheney VP 2000 acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, PA.

George W. Bush acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, PA Part 1.

George W. Bush acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, PA Part 2.

Al Gore acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, CA.

2004: Barack Obama keynote speech at Democratic National Convention Boston, MA. (Currently not available on the TV News Archive.)

2004 John Edwards speech at Democratic National Convention  Boston, MA.

John Kerry acceptance speech at  Democratic National Convention  Boston, MA.

John McCain speech at Republican National Convention New York, NY.

Laura Bush speech at  Republican National Convention New York, NY.

George W. Bush acceptance speech at Republican National Convention New York, NY.  (Currently not available on the TV News Archive.)

2008: Ted Kennedy speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Michelle Obama speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Bill Clinton speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Joe Biden VP portion of acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Barack Obama acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Sarah Palin VP acceptance speech at Republican National Convention St. Paul, MN.

Cindy McCain speech at Republican National Convention St. Paul, MN.

John McCain acceptance speech at Republican National Convention St. Paul, MN.

2012: Barack Obama acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Charlotte, NC CSPAN coverage.

Mitt Romney acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Tampa, FL CSPAN coverage.

The $110,000 grant will enable Political TV Ad Archive to continue the work begun during the primary months, when the project tracked more than 145,000 airings of ads in 23 markets in key primary states. The project uses audio fingerprinting algorithms to track occurrences of ads backed by candidates, political action committees, “dark money” nonprofit groups and more—all linked to information on where and when ads have aired, sponsors, subjects and messages.

The website provides a searchable database of all the political ads archived, and all ads are embeddable and shareable on social media. In addition, the underlying metadata on frequency ad airings is available for downloading, and journalists from such outlets as The Washington Post, Fox News, and FiveThirtyEight.com have used it to inform reporting, visualizations, and other creative uses to put these ads in context for readers. The Political TV Ad Archive also partners with respected journalism and fact checking organizations, such as the Center for Responsive Politics, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org.

The Rita Allen Foundation supported the initial development of the Archive’s technology through a pilot project, the Philly Political Media Watch Project, which collected ads aired in the Philadelphia region in the lead-up to the 2014 midterm election. The Rita Allen Foundation also helped to sponsor the primary election phase of the Political TV Ad Archive, which received funding from the Knight News Challenge on Elections.

In 2010, we launched the Open Library Accessible Books collection, which now contains nearly 2 million books in accessible formats. Our sister organization, Internet Archive Canada, has also been working on accessibility projects, and has digitized more than 8500 texts in partnership with the Accessible Content E-Portal, which is on track to have over 10,000 items available in accessible formats by the end of the month.

On June 30th, Canada tipped the scales towards broader access to books for all by joining the Marrakesh Treaty. This move will allow the Treaty to go into effect on September 30, 2016 in the nations where it has been ratified, so that print-disabled and visually impaired people can more fully and actively participate in global society.

The goal of the Marrakesh Treaty is to help to end the “book famine” faced by people who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise print disabled. Currently only 1% to 7% of the world’s published books ever become available in accessible formats. This is partly due to barriers to access created by copyright laws–something the Treaty helps to remove.

The Marrakesh Treaty removes barriers in two ways. First, it requires ratifying nations to have an exception in their domestic copyright laws for the blind, visually impaired, and their organizations to make books and other print resources available in accessible formats, such as Braille, large print, or audio versions, without needing permission from the copyright holder. Second, the Treaty allows for the exchange of accessible versions of books and other copyrighted works across borders, again without copyright holder permission. This will help to avoid the duplication of efforts across different countries, and will allow those with larger collections of accessible books to share them with visually impaired people in countries with fewer resources.

The first 20 countries to ratify or accede to the Marrakesh Treaty were: India, El Salvador, United Arab Emirates, Mali, Uruguay, Paraguay, Singapore, Argentina, Mexico, Mongolia, Republic of Korea, Australia, Brazil, Peru, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Israel, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala and Canada. People in these countries will soon start realizing the tangible benefits of providing access to knowledge to those who have historically been left out.

To date this material has only been available to students and scholars within Ontario’s university system. The Marrakesh Treaty now makes it possible for these works to be shared more broadly within Canada, and with the other countries listed above. Hopefully the rest of the world will take note, and join forces to provide universal access to all knowledge.

With tens of thousands of items in the archive.org stacks that are in some way running in-browser emulations, we’ve got a pretty strong library of computing history afoot, with many more joining in the future. On top of that, we have thousands of people playing these different programs, consoles, and arcade games from all over the world.

Therefore, if anything goes slightly amiss, we hear it from every angle: twitter, item reviews, e-mails, and even the occasional phone call. People expect to come to a software item on the Internet Archive and have it play in their browser! It’s great this expectation is now considered a critical aspect of computer and game history. But it also means we have to go hunting down what the problem might be when stuff goes awry.

Sometimes, it’s something nice and simple, like “I can’t figure out the keys or the commands” or “How do I find the magic sock in the village.”, which puts us in the position of a sort of 1980s Software Company Help Line. Other times, it’s helping fix situations where some emulated software is configured wrong and certain functions don’t work. (The emulation might run too fast, or show the wrong colors, or not work past a certain point in the game.)

But then sometimes it’s something like this:

In this case, a set of programs were all working just fine a while ago, and then suddenly started sending out weird “Runtime” errors. Or this nostalgia-inducing error:

Here’s the interesting thing: The emulated historic machine would continue to run. In other words, we had a still-functioning, emulated broken machine, as if you’d brought home a damaged 486 PC in 1993 from the store and realized it was made of cheaper parts than you expected.

To make things even more strange, this was only happening to emulated DOS programs in the Google Chrome browser. And only Google Chrome version 51.x. And only in the 32-bit version of Google Chrome 51.x. (A huge thanks to the growing number of people who helped this get tracked down.)

This is what people should have been seeing, which I think we can agree looks much better:

The short-term fix is to run Firefox instead of Chrome for the moment if you see a crash, but that’s not really a “fix” per se – Chrome has had the bug reported to them and they’re hard at work on it (and working on a bug can be a lot of work). And there’s no guarantee an update to Firefox (or the Edge Browser, or any of the other browsers working today) won’t cause other weird problems going down the line.

All this, then, can remind people how strange, how interlocking, and even fragile our web ecosystem is at the moment. The “Web” is a web of standards dancing with improvisations, hacks, best guesses and a radically moving target of what needs to be obeyed and discarded. With the automatic downloading of new versions of browsers from a small set of makers, we gain security, but more-obscure bugs might change the functioning of a website overnight. We make sure the newest standards are followed as quickly as possible, but we also wake up to finding out an old trusted standard was deemed no longer worthy of use.

Old standards or features (background music in web pages, the gopher protocol, Flash) give way to new plugins or processes, and the web must be expected, as best it can, to deal with the new and the old and fail gracefully when it can’t quite do it. As part of the work of the Decentralized Web Summit was to bring forward the strengths of this world (collaboration, transparency, reproducibility) while pulling back from the weaknesses of this shifting landscape (centralization, gatekeeping, utter and total loss of history), it’s obvious a lot of people recognize this is an ongoing situation, needing vigilance and hard work.

In the meantime, we’ll do our best to keep on how the latest and greatest browsers deal with the still-fresh world of in-browser emulation, and try to emulate hardware that did come working from the factory.

In the meantime, enjoy some Apple II programs. On us.