WEBVTT

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23 major news outlets are blocking the Internet Archive's incredibly useful Wayback Machine

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from crawling their sites. We cannot, in fact, have nice things anymore. USA Today just recently

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used the Wayback Machine to call out ICE for altering detention stats, and then immediately

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blocked the archival tool from crawling their own site. Just rude. The news outlets say this

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is necessary to stop AI crawlers from treating their sites like an all-you-can-scrape buffet.

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The Guardian's director of business affairs said that the Wayback Machine's API is a real AI risk,

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so they are only going to be blocking that. Maybe don't attack them on social media.

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Wayback's director Mark Graham responded, calling those AI fears unfounded and restating how much

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effort they put into preventing possible abuses of the crawler. Groups like Fight for the Future

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and Electronic Frontier Foundation are rallying journalists to publicly back the Archive,

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and over 100 of them have signed a letter thanking the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine for

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being a part of it.

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Being an essential and critical tool.