5 more torrents added to the antifa torrent seeding server this morning.
If you have or know of a good torrent for government data preservation, please send me a link!! The server has plenty of TB.
5 more torrents added to the antifa torrent seeding server this morning.
If you have or know of a good torrent for government data preservation, please send me a link!! The server has plenty of TB.
Workers expressed fear that #Trump’s cuts will threaten a collection of precious #art housed in federal buildings across the country, including Alexander Calder’s 1974 “Flamingo” at the John C. Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago & Michael Lantz’s 1942 “Man Controlling Trade” outside the Federal Trade Commission building in D.C.
The future of a vast collection of public #artwork is in doubt as the #Trump admin plans to fire workers who preserve & maintain more than 26m pieces owned by the US govt, including #paintings & #sculptures by renowned #artists, some dating to the 1850s. #FineArts & historic #preservation workers at the GSA said that ≧5 regional offices were shuttered & that more than half of the division’s approximately 3 dozen staff members were put on leave pending terminations.
#DOGE
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2025/03/11/gsa-fine-arts-layoffs-trump/
https://www.axios.com/local/richmond/2025/03/06/who-removed-richmond-mural “meant a lot to a lot of people that were there when things were happening” #RVA #BLM #PublicArt #Censorship #Preservation
So here is some exciting news:
As my previous posts regarding these string of events are on my old account - let me bring you up to speed: in 2022 I found an old RM ONE Mobile notebook with it's original ClassMate 5 install intact. Considering this is something of a rarity I jumped on the opportunity, then spent the next 3 years battling imaging the install onto a VirtualBox VM, which was won in October 2024.
The next few months was filled with me on and off sanitising the drive image and uninstalling problematic (or otherwise unneeded) applications - which has just been completed today! This VM's drive has been cleaned of the school work left by students and staff alike, and I've removed ClassMate 5's startup procedure to find a (non-existant) StoreBox and throwing up an error.
The VM is in a pretty good place now, and because RM Window Box, and by extension RM ClassMate, isn't archived (publicly) online: I'm hoping to be putting it onto archive.org by next week!
As I break out my 1990s scented letter writing paper and marvel at its still strong scent, I find myself wondering:
Does anyone out there know anything about the science behind scented stationery?
Even better, do we know if it affects the long term preservation of the paper?
Boost for reach!
Update. "Archivists Recreate Pre-Trump #CDC Website, Are Hosting It in Europe"
https://www.404media.co/archivists-recreate-pre-trump-cdc-website-are-hosting-it-in-europe/
"A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org, went live Tuesday and is currently being hosted in Europe."
Vanishing Culture: No Film Left Unscanned
"To think about film preservation is to think about much more than what we call movies."
By Rick Prelinger via @internetarchive
https://blog.archive.org/2025/03/05/vanishing-culture-no-film-left-unscanned/
Update. "Safeguarding Research & Culture — Distributing Cultural Memory"
https://safeguarding-research.discourse.group/about
"The destruction of knowledge and cultural heritage has happened, and therefore it can happen again. We are in the middle of that happening, whether it is caused by human action or natural causes…Safeguarding Research & Culture (#SRC) is creating an alternative #infrastructure for archiving and disseminating of cultural heritage and scientific knowledge…Together, we can ensure that our cultural, intellectual and scientific heritage exists in multiple copies, in multiple places, and that no single entity or group of entities can make it all disappear. Our archive is built according to the principles of #FAIR and #CARE, based on open technologies and standards, and resilient against loss via meaningfully distributed storage…Everyone, from individuals to institutions, can participate by accessing, contributing, and supporting these archival infrastructures."
Update. "EDGI Relaunches Federal Environmental Web Tracker"
https://envirodatagov.org/press-release-edgi-relaunches-federal-environmental-web-tracker/
"In response to the #Trump administration’s rapid dismantling of federal websites, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (#EDGI) has relaunched its Federal Environmental Web Tracker…The… Tracker makes records of significant changes to federal environmental websites publicly available in a searchable database…Since the first Trump administration, EDGI has monitored thousands of federal environmental webpages. Partners at the #InternetArchive download these webpages every day, and EDGI’s #OpenSource software compares versions of these webpages to identify differences."
Update. "Wayback Machine Saves Thousands of Federal Webpages Amid Purge of Government Data Under Trump"
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/28/internet_archive_trump_admin_data_purge
"Thousands of informational government webpages have been taken down so far in the second #Trump administration, including on public health, scientific research and LGBTQ rights. Amid this mass erasure of public information, the #InternetArchive is racing to save copies of those deleted resources."
Update. "How the Wayback Machine is preserving outdated government websites."
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/how-the-wayback-machine-is-preserving-outdated-government-websites/
"The #WaybackMachine is helping preserve the record of government websites before they were changed by the TTrump administration. CBS News Confirmed's Rhona Tarrant reports."
Update. "The fight to preserve federal government data."
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2025/feb/04/the-fight-to-preserve-federal-government-data/
"Despite the Trump administration restricting access to these government sites and its underlying data, organizations and individuals have been working to preserve this data. Here are just a few of the efforts that part of an ongoing effort to preserve public information."
Update. "Federal data is disappearing. Meet the teams working to rescue it and learn how you can help."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiZuKA-o4V4
"Since the start of the new #Trump administration, hundreds of federal data sets and government websites have gone offline without warning, sometimes returning with major changes and sometimes not returning at all. On February 13th, #MuckRock hosted an event with organizations that are helping lead the efforts to preserve the public’s data."
This is a video of the event.
Update. "The cost of losing government webpages and public data"
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/the-cost-of-losing-government-webpages-and-public-data/
"Jack Cushman, director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab [@harvardlil], has been preserving sites and data that went dark after executive orders from President #Trump. He underlines the importance of keeping digital copies or risk parting with “our cultural memory.”
Update. "A Renewed Call for Preservation of At-Risk Government Data"
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/about/cms/6103
"The directors of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research (#ISR) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (#ICPSR) are emphasizing the critical need for preserving government data that may be at risk due to recent policy shifts....Through #DataLumos, an ICPSR archive for valuable government data resources, ICPSR is helping the data community to preserve, document, and disseminate thousands of files from agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control [#CDC] and the Department of Education [#DOE]."
Dear Fedi: please help me to help you. With all the clusterf*cks and fascist coup happening in the US: what data is important to preserve and keep spreading?
Already have been seeding the CDC dataset and Wikipedia dumps into oblivion (couple of hundreds of TBs of traffic) - but I'd like to do more.
If you know important projects that need this kind of help - preferably less than a TB in size - please share!
(boosts appreciated for visibility)
Update. "While we at the #PEGI Project [Preservation of Electronic Government Information] have been aware of the potential for a crisis like this since the start of our project in 2017, both the pace and extent of the removals and changes have been astonishing to witness. What has also been astonishing (and heartening!) is the willingness of a broad community to join together in quick action to save content, particularly data that cannot be easily captured as part of the End of Term Archive. The Public Environmental Data Partners, a project launched by the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), has been working on collecting and preserving hard-to-crawl environmental data for the past couple of months. In the past two weeks, a coalition has formed to launch the Data Rescue Project, which then debuted its Data Rescue Tracker. They also have a helpful (and well-vetted!) list of Resources that can guide individuals and organizations wanting to contribute to this work."
https://www.pegiproject.org/blog/2025/2/14/pegi-project-urges-preservation-of-public-federal-data
Update. "Here’s why and how Public Environmental Data Partners [#PEDP] and others are making sure that the #climate science the public depends on is available forever."
https://theconversation.com/how-to-find-climate-data-and-science-the-trump-administration-doesnt-want-you-to-see-249321
Update. "As the US government removes health websites and data, here’s a list of non-government data alternatives and archives"
https://journalistsresource.org/home/as-the-us-government-removes-health-websites-and-data-heres-a-list-of-non-government-data-alternatives/
"There’s no perfect alternative to the government databases, but some non-governmental organizations have their own datasets, which can be useful to journalists. Several #journalism associations have also been downloading government data and making them available to their members. To help journalists with their continued reporting, we have curated a list of non-government websites that have health data, although some use government data to create their reports. We’ll continue to update this list. If you have a suggestion for a database, please email us."
h/t @kdnyhan