About two months ago The New Yorker magazine ran a very interesting story titled, "The Cobweb," written by staff writer Jill Lepore. The story has to do with efforts at archiving the Internet and profiles the Wayback Machine website and the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit digital library. Ms. Lepore reports that, contrary to popular belief, "the average life of a Web page is about a hundred days." They get rewritten, they get deleted, pages get moved, the site is taken down. It's a problem. Lepore discovered it's a particular problem for the legal profession:
One of the most recent examples of how quickly something can disappear off the net was last July 17th when someone from a Ukrainian separatist group posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: "We just downed a plane, an AN-26." The post included links to video of the wreckage of a plane.
Very quickly people -- including some in the news media -- were citing this post as proof of separatist involvement in the downing of what turned out to have been, not a military transport, but a commercial airline jet with 283 passengers on board. But two hours and twenty-two minutes after the message was posted it was taken down. Luckily screenshots of the message existed. One of them had been captured by the Wayback Machine.
But what if there had been no screenshots? Then no one who had seen the message would have proof it ever existed. They could have been accused of a malicious lie, of deliberately inventing something with which to frame the separatists.
Quote:
In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” Article link |
One of the most recent examples of how quickly something can disappear off the net was last July 17th when someone from a Ukrainian separatist group posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: "We just downed a plane, an AN-26." The post included links to video of the wreckage of a plane.
Very quickly people -- including some in the news media -- were citing this post as proof of separatist involvement in the downing of what turned out to have been, not a military transport, but a commercial airline jet with 283 passengers on board. But two hours and twenty-two minutes after the message was posted it was taken down. Luckily screenshots of the message existed. One of them had been captured by the Wayback Machine.
But what if there had been no screenshots? Then no one who had seen the message would have proof it ever existed. They could have been accused of a malicious lie, of deliberately inventing something with which to frame the separatists.
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1B2AN71
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