I love the Internet Archive, but they’re fighting the last war here. There will never be any scary, Orwellian ministry of truth in our timeline, because there’s no need for one when all the power is concentrated in a few oligopolistic platform providers whose risk appetite is such that deplatforming is the only acceptable measure when that appetite is exceeded.<p>Furthermore, the calls (for censorship) are coming from inside the house at this point. In a rush to combat genuine issues like health misinformation, even organizations like the ACLU have come to support platforms clamping down on speech - and certainly they have a point; these are private companies, not the government.<p>I don’t have any solutions to this, but the future to worry about is not what’s dramatized here. It’s something much tidier, less threatening, and more insidious.
Came across this too the other day. For a moment I was hoping that they'd trained some machine learning algorithm on the past evolution of the sites in their archive in order to extrapolate how sites may change in the future, and that they'd have thrown in some futuristic design elements in the mix.<p>But the way that this thing works is pretty satisfying too. In terms of conveying a message about our future I mean.
Given it's working on generic popups alone with no connection to the URL provided, it seems unnecessary to ask the user to enter a URL at all for the sake of a blurred background image.<p>You'd get a greater impact if you presented a search engine front page with some suggested "trending" search terms then show how they can be misconstrued and get you put onto the relevant thought crime fixated persons list while showing the user "filtered" and "approved" results from the central bureaucracy. A search engine with its 1st results page only listing .gov TLDs should get a few people thinking.
- Put in URL<p>- It loads for a bit, then shows some fake ads.<p>- "Imagine a future without access to knowledge..."<p>And then some blurbs on campaigning for 'Open access to knowledge'.
Archive.org - including the Wayback Machine - is already blocked by many major UK ISPs and has been for many years: <a href="https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/internet-archive-wayback-machine-blocked-vodafone-three-o2-ee-can-change-that/" rel="nofollow">https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/internet-archive-...</a><p>Not sure if that's ironic or not, in light of the warnings on "The Wayforward Machine" page.
This is a great not-so-subtle look at the direction we're heading - the only thing that was missed is continuously and invisibly reloading the page so that I can't use my browser history to get back to HN.
I just get "loading" Is it meant to be a commentary that future websites will have so much javascript they will take an infinite time to load?
Ok. That was anticlimactic<p>(And in general, the web archive is a bit hypothetical since downloading saved websites is disallowed according to their tos)
Pffffft, the popups are really bogus—in twenty, or more likely ten years nobody will need them. There will be a standard protocol for the ISP to present the user's identity to the website. Case closed.<p>De-anonymization of the web solves (or ‘solves’) plenty of current annoyances, like comment spam and likely email spam too; foreign trolls skewing the national agenda, or just stupid people spreading various bullshit or bullying someone; perhaps also some security attacks. So it's practically inevitable that it will keep bobbling on the tips of people's tongues, just waiting for some kind of web 9/11 to happen.<p>It probably won't even start as a government thing, but a thing for Google to prove to Amazon that the user is not some shady schmuck. Then perhaps the government will step in and say that this time Google really tries to do too much—why not just let the ISPs do that instead.
I thought this was going to be a deep learning AI that took the history of a website like Apple.com, and tried to predict what it would look like in the future. Like, would it figure out to put out an iPhone 14 announcement right around when Apple would releases such a thing? And would it have new features, like being thinner and having a longer battery than predecessors? Would be pretty neat.
If you type in www.google.com, it says "Loading the internet of the future", and in the background there's a Google 404 page.<p>Conclusion: In the future, Google will have some service outage :-P<p>----<p>If you type in "news.ycombinator.com", you get a recent HN main page snapshot in the background while "loading the internet of the future". Then you get prompted to prove that you are over 18... but really, who would be dumb enough to upload their driver's license to some untrusted website for this purpose?<p>Conclusion: In the future, 18-year-olds will be less intelligent than they are today (or I have an overly high expectation of people's intelligence).
> HTTP Version Not Supported
> Your browser is using HTTP version HTTP/1.1. We only support version 2.0 or newer.<p>The future runs on HTTP/1.1?
This is very strange. Just tried it, and I got a message flashed on the screen supposedly from the <i>Ministry of Truth</i>.<p><pre><code> This site contains information that is currently classified as Thought Crime in your region.
If you are the owner of this site, please contact your local Ministry of Truth at your earliest convenience.
</code></pre>
I am the owner! And I believe <i>currently = 2046</i>? This is hilarious, so contact now or in 2046?<p>Website: <a href="https://blobcity.com" rel="nofollow">https://blobcity.com</a>