Federal Judge Says Internet Archive's Wayback Machine a Legit Source of Evidence

One point to note here, is that the Wayback Machine obeys robots.txt retroactively, so sites can hide evidence by changing their robots.txt to disallow indexing of specific content. The data won&#x27;t be purged from the servers, but it will not be displayed through the site.<p>This is quite disappointing (though probably wise from a legal standpoint). It makes it less useful if a party in a lawsuit can retroactively hide evidence of wrongdoing, and thereby deny access to evidence.<p>It&#x27;s also a problem if a domain name changes ownership and the new owner suddenly adds a restrictive robots.txt - the old content will no longer be accessible even though the current owner has no claim to it.

In many European countries, we have legal deposit laws that require the national library to run archival web crawls, at least of the country TLD and sometimes on a best-effort basis for material outside the TLD that&#x27;s considered relevant (based on language, for example).<p>These laws specify that the crawls are stored untampered and guarantee that the results can be considered valid evidence.<p>Interestingly, that&#x27;s how the Internet Archive&#x27;s heritrix crawler came about - the nordic national libraries were saddled with this requirement but didn&#x27;t really have the technical infrastructure to implement it. They formed a coalition among themselves and brought the Internet Archive into it (the IIPC[0]), and used it to fund development of heritrix.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;netpreserve.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;netpreserve.org&#x2F;</a>

Would be great if archival services recursively hashed their documents and put them in a blockchain. Then youd get 100% certainty the records havent been updated since they were first recorded

Sounds like now is a great time to be a WM employee if you don&#x27;t mind taking bribes from criminals.<p>I love the WM, but this is terrible, because they don&#x27;t have controls around the chain of evidence. Any page can be modified in the archive by an employee, both before and after a page has been identified as evidence.

Is there any sort of blockchain based authentication of the data saved by archive.org?<p>I&#x27;m not saying I don&#x27;t trust them[1] but this seems like a perfect use case for saving the content hash to prove that content X existed at least as early as time Y.<p>[1]: <i>Well maybe I am saying that...</i>

We recently posted an exposé that created a legal &quot;situation&quot;. It includes archive.org links which definitely help.<p>Earlier for another situation, my lawyer stated that they&#x27;ve successfully used it in the past.<p>If you&#x27;re going to get a bit crazy on your blog, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;</a> (see Save Page Now section) is great stuff.<p>However, one big issue is that Facebook is now blocking the ability to archive links that go directly to comments made in public postings.<p>So does anyone have a workaround or an archive.org-like site that can archive Facebook comments, full with working JS that allows the exact comment to get archived? (to get the URL of the comment, right-click on the timestamp and copy link).

How hard is it to mitm the IA over http, thus producing fake evidence that a site said something once?

I think it&#x27;s time to create the Wayback Machine of the Wayback Machine.

A Federal judge said &quot;legit&quot;? Times are a changin&#x27;

Fabricating evidence just got easier... you only have to hack one site...