News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-internet-archive-access-due-to-ai-scraping-concerns/

by ninjagoo • 5 months ago

569 363 5 months ago

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

Publishers like The Guardian and NYT are blocking the IA/Wayback Machine. 20% of news websites are blocking both IA and Common Crawl. As an example, https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/james-van... is unarchivable, with IA being 429ed while the site is accessible otherwise.

trollbridge3• 5 months ago

And whilst the IA will honour requests not to archive/index, more aggressive scrapers won't, and will disguise their traffic as normal human browser traffic.

So we're basically decided we only want bad actors to be able to scrape, archive, and index.

JumpCrisscross7• 5 months ago

we're basically decided we only want bad actors to be able to scrape, archive, and index

AI training will be hard to police. But a lot of these sites inject ads in exchange for paywall circumvention. Just scanning Reddit for the newest archive.is or whatever should cut off most of the traffic.

mananaysiempre• 5 months ago

If you find yourself wondering, or just feeling, "Why is everyone I wind up dealing with an asshole?" you might want to consider the possibility that you have set up an asshole filter.

https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html

fc417fc8025• 5 months ago

Presumably someone has already built this and I'm just unaware of it, but I've long thought some sort of crowd sourced archival effort via browser extension should exist. I'm not sure how such an extension would avoid archiving privileged data though.

ajb• 5 months ago

That exists for court documents (RECAP) but I think they didn't have to solve the issue of privilege as PACER publishes unprivileged docs.

nullhole• 5 months ago

Can you give a reference for The Guardian blocking IA? I just checked with an article from today - already archived, and a manual re-archive worked.

ccgreg9• 5 months ago

That 20% number is for a limited list of relatively large news websites. If you include the long tail of news, the % of blocking is much smaller.

username2234• 5 months ago

I'm part of that small but (hopefully) growing percentage, because Common Crawl is a deeply dishonest front for AI data scraping. Quoting Wikipedia:

""" In November 2025, an investigation by technology journalist Alex Reisner for The Atlantic revealed that Common Crawl lied when it claimed it respected paywalls in its scraping and requests from publishers to have their content removed from its databases. It included misleading results in the public search function on its website that showed no entries for websites that had requested their archives be removed, when in fact those sites were still included in its scrapes used by AI companies. """

My site is CC-BY-NC-SA, i.e. non-commercial and with attribution, and Common Crawl took a dubious position on whether fair use makes that irrelevant. They can burn.

OGEnthusiast• 5 months ago

If most of the Internet is AI-generated slop (as is already the case), is there really any value in expensing so much bandwidth and storage to preserve it? And on the flip side, I'd imagine the value of a pre-2022 (ChatGPT launch) Internet snapshot on physical media will probably increase astronomically.

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

Perhaps the AI slop isn't worth preserving, but the unarchivability of news and other useful content has implications for future public discourse, historians, legal matters and who knows what else.

In the past libraries used to preserve copies of various newspapers, including on microfiche, so it was not quite feasible to make history vanish. With print no longer out there, the modern historical record becomes spotty if websites cannot be archived.

Perhaps there needs to be a fair-use exception or even a (god forbid!) legal requirement to allow archivability? If a website is open to the public, shouldn't it be archivable?

phatfish• 5 months ago

Erm, there is still a newspaper stand in the supermarket I go to (Wallmart for the Americans). Not sure if the British library keeps a copy of the print news I see, but they should!

nicole_express• 5 months ago

The sites that are most valuable to preserve are likely the same ones that are most likely to put up barriers to archiving

macinjosh2• 5 months ago

We need something like SETI@home/Folding@home but for crawling and archiving the web or maybe something as simple as a browser extension that can (with permission) archive pages you view.

ryoshu• 5 months ago

This is a good idea. Not sure what ToS it would violate. But a good idea.

pclmulqdq• 5 months ago

Your TV probably does that, and you definitely gave it permission when you clicked "accept" on the terms.

macinjosh2• 5 months ago

good thing I don't have a TV!

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

In the US at least, there is no expectation of privacy in public. Why should these websites that are public-facing get an exemption from that? Serving up content to the public should imply archivability.

Sometimes it feels like ai-use concerns are a guise to diminish the public record. While on the other hand services like Ring or Flock are archiving the public forever.

sejje8• 5 months ago

Ring and Flock are not a standard we should be striving towards. Their massive databases tracking citizens need to go.

dunder_cat• 5 months ago

This exists although not in the traditional BOINC space, it's Archiveteam^1. I run two of their warrior^2 instances in my home k3s instance via the docker images. One of them is set to the "Team's choice" where it spends most of its time downloading Telegram chats. However, when they need the firepower for sites with imminent risk of closure, it will switch itself to those. The other one is set to their URL shortener project, "Terror of Tiny Town"^3.

Their big requirement is you need to not be doing any DNS filtering or blocking of access to what it wants, so I've got the pod DNS pointed to the unfiltered quad9 endpoint and rules in my router to allow the machine it's running on to bypass my PiHole enforcement+outside DNS blocks.

^1 https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

^2 https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

^3 https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam

cagrimmett• 5 months ago

I run an ArchiveBox instance locally. Recommended! https://archivebox.io/

derefr• 5 months ago

I wonder if these publishers would be more amenable to a private archiver that only serves registered academic / journalistic research projects (the way most physical private archives do), with a specific provision to never provide data to companies that would resell it or use it for training of generative models.

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

They probably have internal archives if they're smart; but that isn't accessible to the public. I think the issue isn't whether the data is archived, but whether that information is available to the public for the foreseeable future.

g-b-r2• 5 months ago

They sure have archives of the newspapers, they're much less likely to have archives of what they publish online.

And a local archive is one fire, business decision, poor technical choice etc away from getting permanently lost

eternauta3k• 5 months ago

They already have archives with online and printed articles which they license to libraries, because the libraries take care of rate limiting and limiting abuse.

coffeefirst• 5 months ago

Yes. Most publishers already do syndication deals. This is a fine idea.

The problem with the LLMs is they capture the value chain and give back nothing. It didn’t have to be this way. It still doesn’t.

Havoc2• 5 months ago

Yup. Recently built something that needs to do low volume scraping. About 40% success rate - rest hits bot detection even on first try

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

Did you have rate limits built in? Ultimately scraping tools will need to mimic humans. Ironic.

I wonder if bots/ai will need to build their own specialized internet for faster sharing of data, with human centered interfaces to human spaces.

fc417fc8025• 5 months ago

IPFS and IPNS already exist.

Havoc2• 5 months ago

Yeah it gets blocked literally on first fetch so not a rate limit issue.

zeagle3• 5 months ago

I mean why wouldn’t they? All their IP was scraped for at their own cost of hosting it for AI training. It further pulls away from their own business models as people ask the AI models the questions instead of reading primary sources. Plus it doesn’t seem likely they’ll ever be compensated for that loss given the economy is all in on AI. At least search engines would link back.

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

That is a good question. However, copyright exists (for a limited time) to allow for them to be compensated. AI doesn't change that. It feels like blocking AI-use is a ploy to extract additional revenue. If their content is regurgitated within copyright terms, yes, they should be compensated.

fc417fc8025• 5 months ago

The problem is that producing a mix of personalized content that doesn't appear (at least on its face) to violate copyright still completely destroys their business model. So either copyright law needs to be updated or their business model does.

Either way I'm fairly certain that blocking AI agent access isn't a viable long term solution.

szmarczak2• 5 months ago

Those countermeasures don't really have an effect in terms of scraping. Anyone skilled can overcome any protection within a week or two. By officially blocking IA, IA can't archive those websites in a legal way, while all major AI companies use copyrighted content without permission.

zeagle3• 5 months ago

For sure. There are many billions and brilliant engineers propping up AI so they will win any cat and mouse game of blocking. It would be ideal if sites gave their data to IA and IA protected it exactly from what you say. But as someone that intentionally uses AI tools almost daily (mainly open evidence) IMO blame the abuser not the victim that it has come to this.

sejje8• 5 months ago

This is a good thing, IMO.

I am sad about link rot and old content disappearing, but it's better than everything be saved for all time, to be used against folks in the future.

otterley4• 5 months ago

Consider the impact, though, on our ability to learn and benefit from history. If the records of people’s activities cannot be preserved, are we doomed to live in ignorance?

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

What's that famous quote - those who do not learn from history ...

BUT, it's hard to learn from history if there's no history to learn...

sejje8• 5 months ago

I don't think so. Most of my original creations were before the archiving started, and those things are lost. But they weren't the kind of history you learn and benefit from--nor is most of the internet.

The truly important stuff exists in many forms, not just online/digital. Or will be archived with increased effort, because it's worth it.

TheRealPomax• 5 months ago

Kind of the "think of the children" argument: most things that are worth archiving have nothing to do with content that can be used against someone in the future. But the raw volume is making it impossible to filter out the worthwhile stuff from the slop (all forms of, not just AI), even with automation (again, not AI, we've been doing NLP using regular old ML for decades now).

GaryBluto• 5 months ago

I am sad about link rot and old content disappearing, but it's better than everything be saved for all time, to be used against folks in the future.

I don't understand this line of thinking. I see it a lot on HN these days, and every time I do I think to myself "Can't you realize that if things kept on being erased we'd learn nothing from anything, ever?"

I've started archiving every site I have bookmarked in case of such an eventuality when they go down. The majority of websites don't have anything to be used against the "folks" who made them. (I don't think there's anything particularly scandalous about caring for doves or building model planes)

UltraSane• 5 months ago

Man I cannot disagree more. This is a terrible thing.

blell• 5 months ago

That’s good. I don’t like archival sites. Let things disappear.

braebo• 5 months ago

Yea.. I’ve noticed data hoarding largely resembles yet-another form of death denialism.

jruohonen• 5 months ago

It affects science too (and there you'd want solid archiving as much as possible). Increasingly, meta-data is full of errors and general purpose search engines for science are breaking down, including even things like Google Scholar. I suppose some big science publishers are blocking AI bots too.

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

I suppose some big science publishers are blocking AI bots too.

That's a travesty, considering that a huge chunk of science is public-funded; the public is being denied the benefits of what they're paying for, essentially.

galleywest200• 5 months ago

The public can still access the sites themselves.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

Google ruined its own search engine on top of that as well though.

We are increasingly becoming blind. To me it looks as if this is done on purpose actually.

salawat3• 5 months ago

It was. Advertising is incompatible with accurate data retrieval/routing. We've also implemented "obligation to deindex". So providing an unbiased index of the web as she is is essentially (in the U.S.) verboten.

terminalshort4• 5 months ago

Did Google ruin it, or did advesarial activity between Google's algorithm and SEO ruin it? The latter seems more likely because the incentives make sense, and also inevitable.

asdff• 5 months ago

Thank god for pubmed and deterministic search operators.

upboundspiral3• 5 months ago

If anyone wants the surreal experience of seeing blogs and websites made by real humans they should check out https://marginalia-search.com

It's far from perfect but it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet.

It recently got some NLNet funding and I hope to see it flourish - to my knowledge there aren't any other projects trying to claw back control of the internet towards the commons.

https://about.marginalia-search.com

g-b-r2• 5 months ago

This is awful, they need to at the very least allow private archivals.

Maybe the Internet Archive might be ok to keeping some things private until x time passes; or they could require an account to access them

_slih2• 5 months ago

There's a compliance angle to this that nobody's talking about. Regulatory frameworks like SOC 2 and HIPAA require audit trails and evidence retention. A lot of that evidence lives at URLs. When a vendor's security documentation, a published incident response, or a compliance attestation disappears from the web and can't be archived, you've got a gap in your audit trail that no auditor is going to be happy about.

I've seen companies fail compliance reviews because a third-party vendor's published security policy that they referenced in their own controls no longer exists at the URL they cited. The web being unarchivable isn't just a cultural loss. It's becoming a real operational problem for anyone who has to prove to an auditor that something was true at a specific point in time.

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

At some point Insurance is going to require companies to obtain paper copies of any documentation/policies, precisely to avoid this kind of situation. It may take a while to get there though. It'll probably take a couple of big insurance losses before that happens.

_slih2• 5 months ago

Insurance is already moving that direction for cyber policies. Some underwriters now require screenshots or PDF exports of third-party vendor security attestations as part of the application process, not just URLs. The carriers learned the hard way that 'we linked to their SOC 2 landing page' doesn't hold up when that page disappears after an acquisition or rebrand.

seanmcdirmid2• 5 months ago

Digital copies will also work I don’t understand why they just don’t save both the URL and the content at the URL when last checked.

layer82• 5 months ago

More likely, there will be trustee services taking care of document preservation, themselves insured in case of data loss.

mycall2• 5 months ago

Also, getting insurance to pay for cybercrimes is hard and sometimes doesn't justify their costs.

dahcryn• 5 months ago

We already require all relevant and referenced documents to be uploaded in a contract lifecycle management system.

Yes we have hundreds of identical Microsoft and Aws policies, but it's the only way. Checksum the full zip and sign it as part of the contract, that's literally how we do it

riddlemethat• 5 months ago

https://www.page-vault.com/ These guys exist to solve that problem.

mycall2• 5 months ago

Perhaps those companies should have performed verified backups of third-party vendor's published security policies into a secure enclave with paired keys with the auditor, to keep a trail of custody.

staticassertion9• 5 months ago

I've seen companies fail compliance reviews because a third-party vendor's published security policy that they referenced in their own controls no longer exists at the URL they cited.

Seriously? What kind of auditor would "fail" you over this? That doesn't sound right. That would typically be a finding and you would scramble to go appease your auditor through one process or another, or reach out to the vendor, etc, but "fail"? Definitely doesn't sound like a SOC2 audit, at least.

Also, this has never particularly hard to solve for me (obviously biased experience, so I wonder if this is just a bubble thing). Just ask companies for actual docs, don't reference urls. That's what I've typically seen, you get a copy of their SOC2, pentest report, and controls, and you archive them yourself. Why would you point at a URL? I've actually never seen that tbh and if a company does that it's not surprising that they're "failing" their compliance reviews. I mean, even if the web were more archivable, how would reliance on a URL be valid? You'd obviously still need to archive that content anyway?

Maybe if you use a tool that you don't have a contract with or something? I feel like I'm missing something, or this is something that happens in fields like medical that I have no insight into.

This doesn't seem like it would impact compliance at all tbh. Or if it does, it's impacting people who could have easily been impacted by a million other issues.

cj• 5 months ago

Your comment matches my experience closer than the OP.

A link disappearing isn’t a major issue. Not something I’d worry about (but yea might show up as a finding on the SOC 2 report, although I wouldn’t be surprised if many auditors wouldn’t notice - it’s not like they’re checking every link)

I’m also confused why the OP is saying they’re linking to public documents on the public internet. Across the board, security orgs don’t like to randomly publish their internal docs publicly. Those typically stay in your intranet (or Google Drive, etc).

yorwba3• 5 months ago

I feel like I'm missing something

You're missing the existence of technology that allows anyone to create superficially plausible but ultimately made-up anecdotes for posting to public forums, all just to create cover for a few posts here and there mixing in advertising for a vaguely-related product or service. (Or even just to build karma for a voting ring.)

Currently, you can still sometimes sniff out such content based on the writing style, but in the future you'd have to be an expert on the exact thing they claim expertise in, and even then you could be left wondering whether they're just an expert in a slightly different area instead of making it all up.

EDIT: Also on the front page currently: "You can't trust the internet anymore" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47017727

alexpotato• 5 months ago

Regulatory frameworks like SOC 2 and HIPAA require audit trails and evidence retention

Sidebar:

Having been part of multiple SOC audits at large financial firms, I can say that nothing brings adults closer to physical altercations in a corporate setting than trying to define which jobs are "critical".

- The job that calculates the profit and loss for the firm, definitely critical

- The job that cleans up the logs for the job above, is that critical?

- The job that monitors the cleaning up of the logs, is that critical too?

These are simple examples but it gets complex very quickly and engineering, compliance and legal don't always agree.

a13n• 5 months ago

depends, if you don’t clean up the logs and monitor that cleanup will it eventually hit the p&l? eg if you fail compliance audits and lose customers over it? then yes. it still eventually comes back to the p&l.

hsbauauvhabzb2• 5 months ago

And in the big scheme of things, none of those things are even important, your family, your health and your happiness are :-)

Ucalegon• 5 months ago

Thats when you reach out to your insurer and ask them their requirements as per the policy and/or if there are any contractual obligations associated with the requirements which might touch indemnity/SLAs. If it does, then it is critical, if not, then its the classic conversation of cost vs risk mitigate/tolerance.

lukeschlather2• 5 months ago

It's interesting to think about this in terms of something like Ars Technica's recent publishing of an article with fake (presumably LLM slop) quotes that they then took down. The big news sites are increasingly so opaque, how would you even know if they were rewriting or taking articles down after the fact?

int0x29• 5 months ago

This is typically solved by publishing reactions/corrections or in the case of news programs starting the next one with a retraction/correction. This happens in some academic journals and some news outlets. I've seen the PBS Newshour and the New York Times do this. I've also seen Ars Technica do this with some science articles (Not sure what the difference in this case is or if it will take some more time)

iririririr5• 5 months ago

This is new to me, so I did a quick search for a few examples of such documents.

The very first result was a 404

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/reports/

The jokes write themselves.

staticassertion9• 5 months ago

But how is this related to the internet being archivable? This sort of proves the point that URLs were always a terrible idea to reference in your compliance docs, the answer was always to get the actual docs.

sebmellen3• 5 months ago

I hate to say this, but this account seems like it’s run by an AI tool of some kind (maybe OpenClaw)? Every comment has the same repeatable pattern, relatively recent account history, most comments are hard or soft sell ads for https://www.awsight.com/. Kind of ironic given what’s being commented on here.

I hope I’m wrong, but my bot paranoia is at all time highs and I see these patterns all throughout HN these days.

linehedonist• 5 months ago

Agreed. "isn't just... It's becoming" feels to me very LLM-y to me.

Gigachad• 5 months ago

These days every green username is a chatbot.

dang2• 5 months ago

I've sent them an email and temporarily banned the account. We've been doing that lately in cases that are hard to classify and where the user might be a legit user who is misunderstanding the rules.

I guess we'll probably have to add this explicitly to the guidelines; le sigh.

lofaszvanitt2• 5 months ago

And for this we need cheapo and fast WORM, 100 TB/whatever archiving solutions.

tempaccount5050• 5 months ago

Your experience isn't normal and I seriously question it unless there was some sort of criminal activity being investigated or there was known negligence. I worked for a decent sized MSP and have been through crytptolock scenarios.

Insurance pays as long as you aren't knowingly grossly negligent. You can even say "yes, these systems don't meet x standard and we are working on it" and be ok because you acknowledged that you were working on it.

Your boss and your bosses boss tell you "we have to do this so we don't get fucked by insurance if so and so happens" but they are either ignorant, lying, or just using that to get you to do something.

I've seen wildly out of date and unpatched systems get paid out because it was a "necessary tradeoff" between security and a hardship to the business to secure it.

I've actually never seen a claim denied and I've seen some pretty fuckin messy, outdated, unpatched legacy shit.

Bringing a system to compliance can reasonably take years. Insurance would be worthless without the "best effort" clause.

kryogen1c• 5 months ago

If your soc2 or hipaa references the internet archive, you probably deserve to fail.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

The Financial Times, for example, blocks any bot that tries to scrape its paywalled content, including bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and the Internet Archive

But then it was not really open content anyway.

When asked about The Guardian’s decision, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said that “if publishers limit libraries, like the Internet Archive, then the public will have less access to the historical record.”

Well - we need something like wikipedia for news content. Perhaps not 100% wikipedia; instead, wikipedia to store the hard facts, with tons of verification; and a news editorial that focuses on free content but in a newspaper-style, e. g. with professional (or good) writers. I don't know how the model could work, but IF we could come up with this then newspapers who have gatewalls to information would become less relevant automatically. That way we win long-term, as the paid gatewalls aren't really part of the open web anyway.

JumpCrisscross7• 5 months ago

it was not really open content anyway

Practically no quality journalism is.

we need something like wikipedia for news

Wikipedia editors aren’t flying into war zones.

fc417fc8025• 5 months ago

Statistically, at least a few of them live in war zones. And I'm sure some of them would fly in to collect data if you paid them for it.

ghaff• 5 months ago

Well, and it would be considered "original research" anyway which some admin would revert.

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

Wikipedia relies on the institutional structure of journalism, with newsroom independence, journalistic standards, educational system and probably a ton of other dependencies.

Journalism as an institution is under attack because the traditional source of funding - reader subscriptions to papers - no longer works.

To replicate the Wikipedia model would need to replicate the structure of Journalism for it to be reliable. Where would the funding for that come from? It's a tough situation.

riquito• 5 months ago

we need something like wikipedia for news content

Interesting idea. It could be something that archives first and releases at a later date, when the news aren't as much new

fc417fc8025• 5 months ago

a news editorial that focuses on free content but in a newspaper-style

Isn't that what state funded news outlets are?

zozbot2342• 5 months ago

Well - we need something like wikipedia for news content.

The Wikipedia folks had their own Wikinews project which is essentially on hold today because maintenance in a wiki format is just too hard for that kind of uber-ephemeral content. Instead, major news with true long-term relevance just get Wikipedia articles, and the ephemera are ignored.

nananana9• 5 months ago

The silver lining is that it's increasingly not worth being archived as well.

Flavius• 5 months ago

Agreed. It’s mostly just disposable clickbait masquerading as journalism at this point. Outside of feeding people's FOMO, there's little content worth preserving for history.

idiotsecant• 5 months ago

We really lucked out existing at a time when the internet was a place for weirdos and enthusiasts. I think those days are well and done.

JuniperMesos4• 5 months ago

The internet can't simultaneously be a place for weirdos and enthusiasts, and a vital part of the economy that everyone uses for a huge number of disparate things in daily life. Parts of the internet can be places for weirdos and enthusiasts, but spaces that cater to weirdos and enthusiasts are by necessity not popular or viral spaces.

RajT882• 5 months ago

Proposed solution:

Sell a "truck full of DAT tapes" type service to AI scrapers with snapshots of the IA. Sort of like the cloud providers have with "Data Boxes".

It will fund IA, be cheaper than building and maintaining so many scrapers, and may relieve the pressure on these news sites.

atrus• 5 months ago

Even sites with that option already (like wikipedia) still report being hammered by scrapers. It's the full-funded aligned with the incompetent at work here.

digiown3• 5 months ago

IA has always been in legal jeopardy without offering paid access. For that to work we need to get rid of copyright first.

RajT882• 5 months ago

Or offer it in countries with lax copyright. The industry will find ways to work around it.

But - as another poster pointed out - Wikipedia offers this, and still gets hammered by scrapers. Why buy when free, I guess?

JumpCrisscross7• 5 months ago

Let’s be honest, one of the most-common uses of these archive sites has been paywall circumvention. An academics-only archive might make sense, or one that is mutually-owned and charges a fee for lookup. But a public archive for content that costs money to make obviously doesn’t work.

lurking_swe2• 5 months ago

if that’s the real motive, why don’t they allow access to scrape content after some period? when that news is not as relevant. For example after 6 months.

JumpCrisscross7• 5 months ago

why don’t they allow access to scrape content after some period? when that news is not as relevant. For example after 6 months

I belive many publications used to do this. The novel threat is AI training. It doesn't make sense to make your back catalog de facto public for free like that. There used to be an element of goodwill in permitting your content to be archived. But if the main uses are circumventing compensation and circumventing licensing requirements, that goodwill isn't worth much.

otterley4• 5 months ago

Enabling research is a business model for many publications. Libraries pay money for access to the publishers’ historical archives. They don’t want to cannibalize any more revenue streams; they’re already barely still operating as it is.

zachlatta• 5 months ago

The death of trust on the cloud.

f33d5173• 5 months ago

So instead of scraping IA once, the AI companies will use residential proxies and each scrape the site themselves, costing the news sites even more money. The only real loser is the common man who doesn't have the resources to scrape the entire web himself.

I've sometimes dreamed of a web where every resource is tied to a hash, which can be rehosted by third parties, making archival transparent. This would also make it trivial to stand up a small website without worrying about it get hug-of-deathed, since others would rehost your content for you. Shame IPFS never went anywhere.

fartfeatures• 5 months ago

IPFS was an attempt at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

lukeasch21• 5 months ago

Coincidentally most of the funding towards IPFS development dried up because the VC money moved onto the very technology enabling these problems...

Seattle35032• 5 months ago

Is there a good post-mortem of IPFS out there?

Operyl• 5 months ago

They already are, I've been dealing with Vietnam and Korea residential proxies destroying my systems for weeks, I'm growing tired. I cannot survive 3500 RPS 24/7.

raincole• 5 months ago

Even if the site is archived on IA, AI companies will still do the same.

CqtGLRGcukpy• 5 months ago

The AI companies won't just scrape IA once, they're keeping come back to the same pages and scraping them over and over. Even if nothing has changed.

This is from my experience having a personal website. AI companies keep coming back even if everything is the same.

giancarlostoro• 5 months ago

Weird, considering IA has most of its content in a way you could rehost it all idk why nobody’s just hosting a IA carbon copy that AI companies can hit endlessly, and then cutting IA a nice little check in the process, but I guess some of the wealthiest AI startups are very frugal about training data?

This also goes back to something I said long ago, AI companies are relearning software engineering poorly. I can think of so many ways to speed up AI crawlers, im surprised someone being paid 5x my salary cannot.

iririririr5• 5 months ago

The AI companies won't just scrape IA once, they're keeping come back to the same pages and scraping them over and over. Even if nothing has changed.

Maybe they vibecoded the crawlers. I wish I were joking.

zmmmmm2• 5 months ago

yeah, they should really have a think about how their behavior is harming their future prospects here.

Just because you have infinite money to spend on training doesn't mean you should saturate the internet with bots looking for content with no constraints - even if that is a rounding error of your cost.

We just put heavy constraints on our public sites blocking AI access. Not because we mind AI having access - but because we can't accept the abusive way they execute that access.

_zagj• 5 months ago

The AI companies won't just scrape IA once, they're keeping come back to the same pages and scraping them over and over. Even if nothing has changed.

Why, though? Especially if the pages are new; aren't they concerned about ingesting AI-generated content?

nickpsecurity• 5 months ago

It can be 10,000 requests a day on static HTML and non-existent, PHP pages. That's on my site. I'd rather them have Christ-centered and helpful content in their pretraining. So, I still let them scrape it for the public good.

It helps to not have images, etc that would drive up bandwidth cost. Serving HTML is just pennies a month with BunnyCDN. If I had heavier content, I might have to block them or restrict it to specific pages once per day. Maybe just block the heavy content, like the images.

Btw, anyone tried just blocking things like images to see if scaping bandwidth dropped to acceptable levels?

dawnerd2• 5 months ago

It’s insane actually how fast to re-request the same pages, even 404s. They’re so desperate for data they’re really hurting smaller hosts. One of our clients site became unusable when one of the ai bots started spamming the Wordpress search for terms that I’m guessing users were searching for but were unrelated to the sites content. Instead of building a search index they’re just hammering sites directly. So annoying.

demetris2• 5 months ago

I don’t believe resips will be with us for long, at least not to the extent they are now. There is pressure and there are strong commercial interests against the whole thing. I think the problem will solve itself in some part.

Also, I always wonder about Common Crawl:

Is there is something wrong with it? Is it badly designed? What is it that all the trainers cannot find there so they need to crawl our sites over and over again for the exact same stuff, each on its own?

ccgreg9• 5 months ago

Many AI projects in academia or research get all of their web data from Common Crawl -- in addition to many not-AI usages of our dataset.

The folks who crawl more appear to mostly be folks who are doing grounding or RAG, and also AI companies who think that they can build a better foundational model by going big. We recommend that all of these folks respect robots.txt and rate limits.

toomuchtodo• 5 months ago

AI browsers will be the scrapers, shipping content back to the mothership for processing and storage as users co browse with the agentic browser.

pigggg• 5 months ago

AI companies are _already_ funding and using residential proxies. Guess how much of those proxies are acquired through being compromised or tricking people into installing apps?

golem14• 5 months ago

Does anyone know if Teslas do this? I noticed Tesla cars want to have access to local WiFi and eat up oodles of bandwidth …

Aurornis• 5 months ago

So instead of scraping IA once, the AI companies will use residential proxies and each scrape the site themselves, costing the news sites even more money.

News websites aren’t like those labyrinthian cgit hosted websites that get crushed under scrapers. If 1,000 different AI scrapers hit a news website every hour it wouldn’t even make a blip on the traffic logs.

Also, AI companies are already scraping these websites directly in their own architecture. It’s how they try to stay relevant and fresh.

dawnerd2• 5 months ago

Hello hi, I work on a news site and we absolutely notice and it does mess up traffic logs.

shark_laser• 5 months ago

I've sometimes dreamed of a web where every resource is tied to a hash, which can be rehosted by third parties, making archival transparent. This would also make it trivial to stand up a small website without worrying about it get hug-of-deathed, since others would rehost your content for you. Shame IPFS never went anywhere.

You've just described Nostr: Content that is tied to a hash (so its origin and authenticity can be verified) that is hosted by third parties (or yourself if you want)

Hendrikto• 5 months ago

With Nostr you can host your content anywhere, but for it to actually be discoverable, you need to declare that host. Third parties therefore cannot really solve the problem for you, without your help.

zaphirplane2• 5 months ago

We don’t lack the technology to limit scrapers, sure it’s an arms race with AI companies with more money than most. Why can’t this be a legal block through TOS

terminalshort4• 5 months ago

But don't you have to sign a license agreement that prohibits scraping in order to purchase a subscription that allows you to bypass the paywall?

lxgr4• 5 months ago

But hey, paywalled sites might be getting 2-3 additional subscriptions out of it!

nerdponx• 5 months ago

It's almost as if this isn't about scraping and more about shutting down a "free article sharing" channel that gets abused all the time.

j45• 5 months ago

Blocking the internet archive sounds like non-tech leadership making decisions without understanding how ubiquitous and moot it is to simply get it another way.

Kind of sucks because the news are an important part of that kind of an archive.

WalterBright• 5 months ago

I've sometimes dreamed of a web where every resource is tied to a hash, which can be rehosted by third parties, making archival transparent.

I wrote a short paper on that 25 years ago, but it went nowhere. I still think it is a great idea!

jeron• 5 months ago

The only real loser is the common man who doesn't have the resources to scrape the entire web himself.

definitely, this is going to hurt those over at /r/datahoarder

Denatonium• 5 months ago

It would be nice if IA could create a browser extension or TLS-intercepting proxy that end users can run over their own computers and connections, allowing crowd-sourced scraping. It would need an allow/deny-listing feature for sites to passively crawl, and I'm not sure how you could prevent data poisoning, but it would at least get around the issues of blocking.

WesBrownSQL• 5 months ago

As someone who has been dealing with SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 9001, etc., for years, I have always maintained copies of the third-party agreements for all of our downstream providers for compliance purposes. This documentation is collected at the time of certification, and our policies always include a provision for its retrieval on schedule. The problem is when you certify their policy said X and were in compliance, they quietly change that and don't send proper notification downstream to us, and captain lawsuit comes by, we have to be able to prove that they did claim they were in compliance and the time we certified. We don't want to rely on their ability to produce that documentation. We can't prove that it wasn't tampered with, or that there is a chain of custody for their documentation and policies. If I wanted to use a vendor that wouldn't provide that information, then I didn't use them. Welcome to the world of highly regulated industries.

tadfisher• 5 months ago

What does this have to do with news sites blocking AI scrapers and the Internet Archive?

Are you a bot?

Brian_K_White2• 5 months ago

Time for a crowd source plugin that relays copies of what individuals view right from the browser.

Users control what sites they want to allow it to record so no privacy worries, especially assuming the plugin is open source.

No automated crawling. The plugin does not drive the users browser to fetch things. Just whatever a user happens to actually view on their own, some percentage of those views from the activated domains gets submitted up to some archive.

Not every view, just like maybe 100 people each submit 1% of views, and maybe it's a random selection or maybe it's weighted by some feedback mechanism where the archive destination can say "Hey if the user views this particular url, I still don't have that one yet so definitely send that one if you see it rather than just applying the normal random chance"

Not sure how to protect the archive itself or it's operators.

digiown3• 5 months ago

SingleFile does the archiving fairly well.

no privacy worries

This is harder than you might expect. Publishing these files is always risky because sites can serve you fingerprinting data, like some hidden HTML tag containing your IP and other identifiers.

Brian_K_White2• 5 months ago

oof good point

8bitsrule2• 5 months ago

SingleFile does the archiving fairly well.

As does Tranquility Reader, if you're interested only in the primary content of the page ... and, usually, in a much smaller footprint ... with a PDF option.

devsda• 5 months ago

collecting from multiple sources to find and scrub out the differences may make fingerprinting somewhat ineffective ?

nerdsniper• 5 months ago

For a historical archive, the issue with this is that it could be difficult to ensure that the data being sent from users' devices wasn't modified in some way, leading to an inaccurate archival copy.

armchairhacker• 5 months ago

Cross-reference. When a site is archived by one client (who visited it directly), request a couple other clients to archive it (who didn’t visit it directly, instead chosen at random, to ensure the same user isn’t controlling all clients).

cdrnsf2• 5 months ago

This is a natural response to AI companies plundering the web to enrich themselves and provide no benefit to the sites being scraped.

CivBase• 5 months ago

Seems more like an easy excuse to shut down a means for people to bypass their paywalls. It would be trivial for AI companies to continue getting this data without using the Internet Archive.

cdrnsf2• 5 months ago

I imagine that's a consideration, but there's plenty of pushback against AI companies scraping outside of this.

upboundspiral3• 5 months ago

I feel like a government funded search engine would resolve a lot of the issues with the monetized web.

The purpose of a search engine is to display links to web pages, not the entire content. As such, it can be argued it falls under fair use. It provides value to the people searching for content and those providing it.

However we left such a crucially important public utility in the hands of private companies, that changed their algorythms many times in order to maximize their profits and not the public good.

I think there needs to be real competition, and I am increasingly becoming certain that the government should be part of that competition. Both "private" companies and "public" governement are biased, but are biased in different ways, and I think there is real value to be created in this clash. It makes it easier for individuals to pick and choose the best option for themselves, and for third independent options to be developed.

The current cycle of knowledge generation is academia doing foundational research -> private companies expanding this research and monetizing it -> nothing. If the last step was expanded to the government providing a barebones but useable service to commodotize it, years after private companies have been able to reap immense profits, then the capabilities of the entire society are increased. If the last step is prevented, then the ruling companies turn to rentseeking and sitting on their lawrels, turn from innovating to extracting.

LPisGood• 5 months ago

The government having the power to curate access to information seems bad. You could try to separate it as an independent agency, but as the current US administration is showing, that’s not really a thing.

upboundspiral3• 5 months ago

The idea is that the government is biased towards hiding certain information and private companies are biased towards hiding a different set.

While unlikely, the ideal would be for the government to provide a foundational open search infrastructure that would allow people to build on it and expand it to fit their needs in a way that is hard to do when a private companies eschews competition and hides its techniques.

Perhaps it would be better for there to be a sanctioned crawler funded by the government, that then sells the unfiltered information to third parties like google. This would ensure IP rights are protected while ensuring open access to information.

JuniperMesos4• 5 months ago

And in a world where running a Google-like search engine is just one of the many jobs the US federal government has, why shouldn't how the government runs that search engine be a national-level political question decided by elections, just like the management of all the other things the US federal government does is? Regardless of how the government curated access to information, a huge chunk of the US electorate would be mad about how they were doing it, reflecting very real polarization among the population.

digiown3• 5 months ago

We can start by forcing sites to treat crawlers equally. Google's main moat is less physical infrastructure or the algorithms, and more that sites allow only Google to scrape and index them.

They can charge money for access or disallow all scrapers, but it should not be allowed to selectively allow only Google.

charcircuit• 5 months ago

It's not like only allowing Google actually means that only Google is allowed forever. Crawlers are free to make agreements with sites to allow themselves to crawl easier or pretend they are a regular user to bypass whatever block they are trying to do.

underlipton• 5 months ago

I'm feeling it. Addressing the other reply: zero moderation or curation, and zero shielding from the crawler, if what you've posted is on a public network. Yes, users will be able to access anything they can think of. And the government will know. I think you don't have to worry about them censoring content; they'll be perfectly happy to know who's searching for CSAM or bomb-making materials. And if people have an issue with what the government does with this information (for example, charging people who search for things the Tangerine-in-Chief doesn't want you to see), you stop it at the point of prosecution, not data access. (This does only work in a society with a functioning democracy... but free information access is also what enables that. As Americans, with our red-hot American blood, do we dare?)

JuniperMesos4• 5 months ago

However we left such a crucially important public utility in the hands of private companies, that changed their algorythms many times in order to maximize their profits and not the public good.

No one "left" a crucially important public utility in the hands of private companies. Private companies developed the search engine themselves in the late 90s in the course of doing for-profit business; and because some of them ended up being successful (most notably Google), most people using the internet today take the availability of search engines for granted.

dredmorbius• 5 months ago

Rather famously in at least the case of Google and others, with government funding:

"Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance" (January 28, 2025)

The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.

The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) ... program's stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley. This type of public-to-private innovation system helped launch powerful science and technology companies like Qualcomm $QCOM +1.61%, Symantec, Netscape, and others.

<https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...>

The Internet itself (particularly its precursor, ARPANET), was also government funded, as was development of the World Wide Web (CERN). Oracle, the database company, grew out of the CIA's Project Oracle.

CIA Reading Room Project Oracle

<https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp80-01794r000...>

"Oracle's coziness with government goes back to its founding / Firm's growth sustained as niche established with federal, state agencies" (2002)

<https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/oracle-s-coziness-wit...>

Surveillance has been baked in since their founding.

heavyset_go3• 5 months ago

The same should apply to LLMs. If you're going to train on the sum total of all of humanity's creative work, from the beginning of history into perpetuity, and train on the sum total of all current intellectual property, the result should exist for the public's education, research and benefit.

It would also be in the spirit of the fair use doctrine's first and fourth considerations:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

If that doesn't happen, increasing amounts information and human creativity will be siloed and never made publicly accessible in a way that it can be consumed and reproduced as slop.

mellosouls• 5 months ago

editorialised. Original title (submitted previously a few times correctly by others):

News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns

notepad0x90• 5 months ago

The internet isn't so simple anymore. I think it's important to separate commercial websites from non-commercial ones. Commercial sites shouldn't be expected to be achievable to begin with, unless it's part of their business model. A lot of sites (like reddit), started of as ad-supported sites, but now they're commercial (not just post-IPO, but accept payments and sell things to/from consumers). Even for ad-supported sites, there is a difference between ad-supported non-profit, and sites that exist to generate revenue from ads. As in, the primary purpose of the site is to generate ad-revenue, the content is just a means to that end.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The main issue is not design patterns, but lack of acceptable payment systems. The EU with their dismantling of visa and mastercard now have the perfect opportunity to solve this, but I doubt they will. They'll probably just create a european wechat.

yellowapple• 5 months ago

Framing this as some anti-AI thing is wild. The simpler, more obvious, and more evidenced reason for this is that these sites want to make money with ads and paywalls that an archived copy tends to omit by design. Scapegoating AI lets them pretend that they're not the greedy bad guys here — just like how the agricultural sector is hell-bent on scapegoating AI (and lawns, and golf courses, and long showers, and free water at restaurants) for excess water consumption when even the worst-offending datacenters consume infinitesimally-tiny fractions of the water farms in their areas consume.

JuniperMesos4• 5 months ago

Yeah I assume what the news publishers actually care about is the thing where, when someone posts a paywalled news article on hacker news, one of the first comments is invariably a link to an archive site that bypasses the paywall so people can read it without paying for it.

just like how the agricultural sector is hell-bent on scapegoating AI (and lawns, and golf courses, and long showers, and free water at restaurants) for excess water consumption when even the worst-offending datacenters consume infinitesimally-tiny fractions of the water farms in their areas consume.

When I learned about how much water agriculture and industry uses in the state of California where I live, I basically entirely stopped caring about household water conservation in my daily life (I might not go this far if I had a yard or garden that I watered, but I don't where I currently live). If water is so scarce in an urban area that an individual human taking a long shower or running the dishwasher a lot is at all meaningful, then either the municipal water supply has been badly mismanaged, or that area is too dry to support human settlement; and in either case it would be wise to live somewhere else.

bmiekre• 5 months ago

Explain it to me like I’m 5, why is ai scraping the way back machine bad?

colesantiago• 5 months ago

I fear that these news publishers would come after RSS next as I see hundreds of AI companies misusing the terms of the news publishers's RSS feed for profit on mass scraping.

They do not care and we will be all worse off for it if these AI companies keep continuing to bombard news publishers RSS feeds.

It is a shame that the open web as we know it is closing down because of these AI companies.

daniel31x134• 5 months ago

I maintain an open-source project called Linkwarden and this exact discussion is one of the reasons why it exists, teams needed a way to preserve referenced URLs reliably without having to depend on external services.

It stores webpages in multiple formats (HTML snapshot, screenshot, PDF snapshot, and a fully dedicated reader view) so you’re not relying on a single fragile archive method.

There’s both a hosted cloud plan [1] which directly supports the project, and a fully self-hosted option [2], depending on how much control you need over storage and retention.

[1] https://linkwarden.app

[2] https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden

iririririr5• 5 months ago

Neat. How does the archive.org integration works?

Does it just POST the url to them for them to fetch? Or is there any integration/trust to store what you already fetched on the client directly on their archives?

daniel31x134• 5 months ago

Does it just POST the url to them for them to fetch?

Correct.

raybb• 5 months ago

Linkwarden is awesome and with the singlefile extension it's pretty easy to store things you can see but the scraper gets blocked on.

One question, what's your stance on adding a way to mark articles as read or "archive" them like other apps that are branded a bit more as storing things to read later. You can technically do something similar with tags but it's a bit clunky of a UX.

daniel31x134• 5 months ago

Thanks! At the moment we’re focused on archiving rather than read-later workflows, but this is great feedback. I’ve already added it to the feature requests list.

lxgr4• 5 months ago

with the singlefile extension it's pretty easy to store things you can see but the scraper gets blocked on

FWIW, at least on iOS, it's possible to inject Javascript into the web site being currently displayed by Safari as a side effect of sharing a web link to an app via the share sheet.

Several "read it later" style apps use this successfully to get around paywalls (assuming you've paid yourself) and other robot blockers. Any plans for Linkwarden to do this (or does it already)?

TechPlasma• 5 months ago

I literally just came across and installed your project on my server today. It's fantastic and with it I was able to cancel my readwise subscription. Great work!

holoduke• 5 months ago

The end of traditional news sites is coming. At least for the newspaper websites. Future mcp like systems will generate on the fly newstites in your desired style and content. Journalists will have some kind of paid per view model provided by these gpt like platforms which of course take a too big of a chunk. I can't imagine a WSJ is able to survive.

gosub100• 5 months ago

But wait, I thought AI was so great for all industries? Publishers can have AI-generated articles, and instantly fix grammar problems, And translate it seamelessly to every language, and even use AI-generated images where appropriate to enrich the article. It was going to make us all so productive? What happened? Why would you want to _block_ AI from ingesting the material?

xannabxlle• 5 months ago

My first impression is that news companies don't want their content scraped for copyright reasons, and roundaboutly scapegoating AI

spiderfarmer• 5 months ago

As a website owner I hate the fact that more than 90% of my traffic is now bots, fake bots, bots masquerading as real visitors and real visitors who try try to use my platform to spam others.

Now AI companies are using residential proxies to get around the obvious countermeasures, I have resorted to blocking all countries that are not my target audience.

It really sucks. The internet is terminally ill.

wildrhythms• 5 months ago

Every day we inch closer to a 'digital passport' gatekeeping system.

sunaookami• 5 months ago

Yeah sure, "AI scraping concerns". No, they don't want to get caught secretly editing and deleting articles.

IshKebab• 5 months ago

It's obviously not that, or they would have done this years ago. It very clearly is AI scraping concerns. Their content has new value because it's high quality text that AI scrapers want, and they don't want to give it away for free via the internet archive.

They will announce official paid AI access plans soon. Bookmark my works.

tl2do• 5 months ago

The issue of digital decay and publishers blocking archiving efforts is indeed concerning. It's especially striking given that news publishers, perhaps more than any other entity, have profoundly benefited from the vast accumulation of human language and cultural heritage throughout history. Their very existence and influence are built upon this foundation. To then, in an age where information preservation is more critical than ever (and their content is frequently used for AI training), actively resist archiving or demand compensation for their contributions to the collective digital record feels disingenuous, if not outright shameless. This stance ultimately harms the public good and undermines the long-term accessibility of our shared knowledge and historical narrative.

zmmmmm2• 5 months ago

Dear news publications - if you aren't willing to accept an independent record of what you published, I can't accept your news. It's a critical piece of the framework that keeps you honest. I don't care if you allow AI scraping either way, but you have to facilitate archival of your content - independently, not under your own control.

germandiago• 5 months ago

First thing that came to my mind went along the same reasoning.

zeta0134• 5 months ago

The second thing that came to mind was paywall evasion. Any time a news article behind a paywall gets posted here, someone in the comments has the archive link ready to go, because of course they do.

The incentives for online news are really wacky just to begin with. A coin at the convenience store for the whole dang paper used to be the simplest thing in the world.

sejje8• 5 months ago

I don't know even one news source I "trust." I expect them to push an agenda.

I also don't think they care even a bit. They're pushing agendas, and not hiding it; rather, flaunting it.

undeveloper2• 5 months ago

"everyone is stupid but me" is a bit too prevalent in the tech industry

bsder2• 5 months ago

Is it more likely that no one is speaking the truth, or, more likely, to you, the truth looks like an agenda?

SirensOfTitan• 5 months ago

I consider almost all news to be entertainment unless I need its perspective to make a decision (which is almost never). It is a lot safer to remain uninformed on a subject as it settles than to constantly attempt to be informed.

Information bias is unfortunately one of the sicknesses of our age, and it is one of the cultural ills that flows from tech outward. Information is only pertinent in its capacity to inform action, otherwise it is noise. To adapt a Beck-ism: You aren't gonna need it.

ks2048• 5 months ago

People need to abandon the notion of "trust" being a single axes between trustworthy to untrustworthy.

Every source has it's biases, you should try to be aware of them and handle information accordingly.

bawolff2• 5 months ago

Persinally i think people harp on news bias too much.

I think the real problem is that they often dont put events in context, which leads people to misunderstand them. They report the what not the why, but most events don't just happen one day, they are shaped by years or even decades of historical context. If you just understand the literal event without the background context, i dont think you are really informed.

scoofy• 5 months ago

The records already exist. Check your local library. The entire point of this is the scrapers undermine the business model.

If anything, we should simply me asking archive.org to limit their access to humans.

salawat3• 5 months ago

To hell with contempt of business model. Business models aren't sacred. Besides which, with business models owners capture the newsroom anyway.

awakeasleep2• 5 months ago

Libraries dont keep all periodicals and dont keep them forever. And microfilm is really lossy, unreliable, and difficult to search.

p-e-w3• 5 months ago

I have seen zero evidence that independent archives “keep news media honest”. In fact, I have on several occasions noticed news media directly contradicting their own stance from just a few years prior, with no mention of the previously published account at all. This is true even for highly respected newspapers of record.

I can indeed find clear records of that in the archives. But what do I do with them? How do I use that evidence to hold news media to account? This is meaningless moral posturing.

wizzwizz45• 5 months ago

But what do I do with them? How do I use that evidence to hold news media to account?

Contact their rivals with the story, have them write a hit piece. "Other newspaper is telling porkies: here's the proof!" is an excellent story: not one I'd expect a journalist to have time to discover, but certainly one I'd expect them to be able to follow up on, once they've received a tip.

Brybry• 5 months ago

Contact the journalist of the new article with the contradicting article? Letters to the editor? Submit an opinion article?

I've contacted multiple journalists over the years about errors in their articles and I've generally found them responsive and thankful.

Sometimes it's not even their fault. One time a journalist told me the incorrect information was unknowingly added by an editor.

I get that it's popular on HN and the internet to bash news media, and that there are a lot of legitimate issues with the media, but my personal experience is that journalists do actually want to do a good job and respond accordingly when you engage them (in a non-antagonistic manner).

zaphirplane2• 5 months ago

How is the publisher supposed to fund their operations let along make a profit. How about a 1 year lock on the archive pages. There are many ways of keeping that record but not taking views undermining the business model

dakolli• 5 months ago

Maybe it would be better if these news operations had to find better ways to sustain themselves than the current paradigms. Also, the internet archive is not the only archive, and there will be more. This ins't something they can really stop.

terminalshort4• 5 months ago

It's a great question, but they didn't seem to have a problem with this before AI, so I have to assume that the presence of a free available copy wasn't really impacting their revenue.

Joker_vD• 5 months ago

How is the publisher supposed to fund their operations let along make a profit.

There used to be plenty newspapers sponsored by wealthy industrialists; the latter would cover the former's gaps between the costs and the sales, the former would regularly push the latter's political agenda.

The "objective journalism" is really quite a late invention IIRC, about the times of WW2.

8organicbits• 5 months ago

The LWN model feels practical here:

We ask that you grant LWN exclusive rights to publish your work during the LWN subscription period - currently up to two weeks after publication.

News is valuable when it is timely, and subscribers pay for immediate access.

https://lwn.net/op/AuthorGuide.lwn

bawolff2• 5 months ago

The same way they did back in the day, where libraries still existed that allowed people to read newspapers for free.

I kind of doubt that internet archive is really taking very much business away from them. Its a terrible UI to read the daily news.

Razengan• 5 months ago

Reconfigure human society so that services like news don't need to make a profit and still remain credible.

ninjagoo19• 5 months ago

If an independent press is critical to open societies, perhaps some sort of citizen directed funding is needed to maintain independence from both capital and government?

throw10920• 5 months ago

It's pretty easy to hold publications accountable without forcing them to publish content - just make them publish hashes of their content.

They won't, of course, because they don't want accountability.

humanji• 5 months ago

I’m coming at this from a founder/product angle, not a technical one, so excuse the naive framing.

What worries me isn’t scraping itself, but the second-order effects. If large parts of the web become intentionally unarchivable, we’re slowly losing a shared memory layer. Short-term protection makes sense, but long-term it feels like knowledge erosion.

Genuinely curious how people here think about preserving public knowledge without turning everything into open season for mass scraping.

bsimpson• 5 months ago

This partially feels like an intentional pendulum swing from Twitter/Facebook cancel culture and other forms of policing.

I'm thinking in particular about the rise of platforms like Discord where being opaque to search/archiving is seen as a feature. Being gatekept and ephemeral makes people more comfortable sharing things that might get a takedown notice on other platforms, and it's hard for people who don't like you in the future to try to find jokes/quotes they don't like to damage your future reputation.

Clearly very different than news articles going offline, but I do think there's been a vibe shift around the internet. People feel overly surveilled in daily life, and take respite in places that make surveillance harder.

GeoAtreides• 5 months ago

<richevans>How does it feel to live long enough to see all your favorite sites go down in flames?</richevans>

nxobject2• 5 months ago

Brewster’s concerns about the historical record are real and will eventually affect news orgs: their journalism may as well be ephemeral now without separate archiving. If a Wikipedia contributor, for example has to jump through extra hoops to get a stable link of a Times article, why wouldn’t they end up choosing an equally reliable WaPo article instead?

Tragedy of the commons.

Mindwipe• 5 months ago

Given the Times and the Guardian are British they will be archived by the British Library, as it's a legal obligation.

That doesn't mean anything American library that doesn't pay authors Public Lending Right fees gets to.

ccgreg9• 5 months ago

Prof. Jeff Jarvis speaking about copyright for news in front of Congress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX26ijBQs2k

fn-mote• 5 months ago

Too little, too late. AI scrapers are better and better at acting human. AI scrapers already have a massive corpus; the marginal value of today’s need is low and will remain so long after access is cut off. When they manage to block archive.is too then I will believe they are at least a little serious.

visarga2• 5 months ago

I think people forget one thing - LLMs don't even need to scrape, we copy paste and put articles and documents right into their mouth, they only need to keep the mouth open. Copy pasted content is also preselected manually, might filter out some garbage as well.

A subscriber opens the FT, reads an article about semiconductor export controls, pastes it into Claude to ask "what does this mean for my portfolio?" - the FT's content just entered a model's reasoning process, got synthesized with other knowledge, and produced derivative value. No scraper was involved. The paywall was respected. The subscriber paid. And yet the publisher's content was "consumed" by an AI in exactly the way they're trying to prevent.

RsAaNtDoYsIhSi• 5 months ago

BitCoin fixes this.

cmiles74• 5 months ago

Isn't the real problem here the unscrupulous AI scrapers? These sites want to be paid for their content to be used for AI training, if this same content is scraped by the Internet Archive the AI companies can get the content for free.

It's unfortunate that this undermines the usefulness of the Internet Archive, I don't see an alternative. IMHO, we'll soon see these AI scrapers cease to advertise themselves leading to sites like the NY Times trying to blacklist IP ranges as this battle continues. Fun times ahead!

anjel• 5 months ago

Punishing archive.org for archive.today's sins

lofaszvanitt2• 5 months ago

The problem with the Internet Archive is that site owners are not presented the data by the archive who, when and what did they access from their archive. This must be an absolute must.

So if you own monkey.com, then after showing site ownership you must have access to every access data related to your site. Problem solved.

a2128• 5 months ago

This is terrible for transparency and record keeping. X has also blocked internet archive access under similar concerns, but the end result was that now it's very difficult to tell who said what and when, posts can be deleted or edited, and no public figure can be held accountable for something wrong they said, or making contradictory statements over time, via a trustworthy archive.

You just have to rely on screenshots that may or may not have been fabricated, and maybe nobody's even captured a screenshot. If it's a public figure you normally trust, versus some random people's screenshots, of course you're gonna dismiss the screenshots as fake. It feels almost intentional to bring the platform into the dark ages.

nurettin• 5 months ago

The current scraping schemes look inane. IA and other data vendors would probably much prefer if slop companies simply paid them to divert logs to on-site machines instead. Less harmful than scraping, IA gets paid and slop gets what it wants.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 months ago

"Currently, however, the Internet Archive does not disallow any specific crawlers through its robots.txt file, including those of major AI companies. As of January 12, [2026,] the robots.txt file for archive.org read: "Welcome to the Archive! Please crawl our files. We appreciate it if you can crawl responsibly. Stay open!" Shortly after we inquired about this language, it was changed. The file now reads, simply, "Welcome to the Internet Archive!""

throwaway_20357• 5 months ago

If news sites opt out of being archived by the Internet Archive, are their archives available anywhere or just lost? Will there be no way to access the headlines of a certain day or the reporting about a certain topic in the past even for research or scientific purposes?

gymbeaux• 5 months ago

I’m seeing more and more (re)CAPTCHAs as time goes on. It’s a shame because programmatic access to web content is very nice to have. There must have been a point, many moons ago now, when the internet had as much freely accessible data as it’s probably ever going to have. Probably the day before Zillow blocked all web scraping and API access without forking up $$$. Reddit is a more recent example of how arbitrarily restricting data that was once freely available purely for $$$ has made the world and the internet worse.

News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns

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