Updates from the Internet Archive
Visit blog.archive.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Sep 2011 – Sep 2026
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“Universal access to all human knowledge is within our grasp. Our job is to put the best our world has to offer within the reach of our children.” —Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive Digital Librarian Every time you search the Wayback Machine or explore a collection at the Internet Archive, you are accessing a global…
What just happened on archive.org today, as best we know: Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon's AWS services. (Even by web standards,10’s of thousands of requests per second is a lot.) This activity brought archive.org down for all…
Great news for everyone concerned about the Flash end of life planned for end of 2020: The Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations, games and toys in our software collection. In the early 1990s, web browsers were incredibly powerful compared to what came before - with simple files written in HTML that could…
Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. From the leasing business model of mega publishers to physical device evolution to format obsolescence, digital books are fragile…
Like many bits of Internet Culture, this simple image of an empty series of rooms represents a deep-repressed or recently-remembered memory of a common Internet Legend, or it's just a shot of nothing. If the answer is that it's a shot of nothing, let's get you up to speed. This image floated around message boards
Cloudflare now populating and using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in its content distribution network application Cloudflare and the Internet Archive are now working together to help make the web more reliable. Websites that enable Cloudflare’s Always Online service will now have their content automatically…
On October 22, 2025, the Internet Archive celebrated an extraordinary milestone: 1 trillion web pages preserved and available for access via the Wayback Machine. Event Recaps & Recordings | Photos | Impact Stories | Support the Internet Archive | Press Kit Since 1996, the Internet Archive has worked with libraries and…
Thirty years ago, Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive with an ambitious goal: Universal Access to All Knowledge. Today, that mission continues to grow with an exciting new chapter: the launch of the Internet Archive Switzerland, a non-profit foundation based in St. Gallen. The Internet Archive Switzerland…
As part of the Internet Archive's aim to build a better Web, we have been working to make the Web more reliable -- and are pleased to announce that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the Wayback Machine. 22 Wikipedia Language Editions with more than
We've heard you: "Fix the Wayback Machine!" Here's what's going on. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we've put protections in place to keep the service running. One recent change: we rewrote the message you see when a request is blocked with a 429 error…
Last week the Internet Archive upped our bandwidth capacity 30%, based on increased usage and increased financial support. Thank you. This is our outbound bandwidth graph that has several stories to tell… A year ago, usage was 30Gbits/sec. At the beginning of this year, we were at 40Gbits/sec, and we were handling it…
In the past few weeks, governments around the world have renewed their efforts to restrain free expression online. In Canada, a revised "Online Streaming Act" comes as the latest in a long-running attempt to bring streaming under a restrictive regulatory regime. In the UK, a new "Online Safety Bill" seeks to censor…
CORRECTION: This post previously identified the sender of the 550 falsely identified URLs as Europol's EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). The sender was in fact, the French national Internet Referral Unit, using Europol's application, which sends the email from an @europol.europa.eu address. The EU IRU has informed…
Another few thousand DOS Games are playable at the Internet Archive! Since our initial announcement in 2015, we've added occasional new games here and there to the collection, but this will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago…
Late Friday, some of the world’s largest record labels, including Sony and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive and others for the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records that are 70 to 120 years old. As a non-profit library, we…
The history of libraries is one of loss. The Library of Alexandria is best known for its disappearance. Libraries like ours are susceptible to different fault lines: Earthquakes, Legal regimes, Institutional failure. So this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in…
A Library of Everything As a young man, I wanted to help make a new medium that would be a step forward from Gutenberg's invention hundreds of years before. By building a Library of Everything in the digital age, I thought the opportunity was not just to make it available to everybody in the world,
Yesterday, the Internet Archive filed our response to the lawsuit brought by four commercial publishers to end the practice of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), the digital equivalent of traditional library lending. CDL is a respectful and secure way to bring the breadth of our library collections to digital learners…
The Internet Archive has asked a federal judge to rule in our favor and end a radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, that aims to criminalize library lending. The motion for summary judgment, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the Electronic Frontier…
Looking for a research paper but can’t find a copy in your library’s catalog or popular search engines? Give Internet Archive Scholar a try! We might have a PDF from a “vanished” Open Access publisher in our web archive, an author’s pre-publication manuscript from their archived faculty webpage, or a digitized…
We have observed some confusion about the Internet Archive’s removal of links to a BBC documentary about Indian PM Narendra Modi ("India: the Modi Question"). Internet Archive can confirm that it has removed links in response to DMCA takedown requests from the BBC.
Last Tuesday we launched a National Emergency Library—1.4M digitized books available to users without a waitlist—in response to the rolling wave of school and library closures that remain in place to date. We’ve received dozens of messages of thanks from teachers and school librarians, who can now help their students…
On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and…
Brewster Kahle shares his thoughts about how libraries have been bringing older books to digital learners and the lawsuit trying to stop it.
It's time to add another family of emulated older technology to the Internet Archive.The vast majority of platforms within what we call The Emularity happens because of the work of MAME Team, which has spent over 25 years adding support for tens of thousands of machines, platforms, and tools to their breathtaking…
[press: boingboing] The Internet Archive is now leveraging a little known, and perhaps never used, provision of US copyright law, Section 108h, which allows libraries to scan and make available materials published 1923 to 1941 if they are not being actively sold. Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a copyright scholar at Tulane…
The Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web, has reached a landmark with 400 billion webpages indexed. This makes it possible to surf the web as it looked anytime from late 1996 up until a few hours ago. Let’s take a trip back in time and visit some sites. Yahoo (Captured way back
Robots.txt files were invented 20+ years ago to help advise “robots," mostly search engine web crawlers, which sections of a web site should be crawled and indexed for search. Many sites use their robots.txt files to improve their SEO (search engine optimization) by excluding duplicate content like print versions of…
Dear Supporters of the Archive, In the last year, the number of people using the Internet Archive has increased to two million people every day, and our collections of free books, music, video, and web pages have also grown by twenty to twenty-five percent. This is great news, but we are doing it all
Some recent press stories (1, 2) have discussed archived blog posts of a prominent journalist, Joy Ann Reid, in the Wayback Machine and her claims that some of these posts were “manipulated” by an “unknown, external party”. This past December, Reid's lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog…