hpcalc.org being shut down?

[Garth Wilson]

pier4r, I have noticed that they censor. They wouldn't have any reason to censor vintage calculator stuff though; and in the case of hpcalc.org, they have over a thousand backups.  That doesn't sound like limited resources.  But yes, things that need passwords may not be accessible, nor videos, nor certain other things.

[EdS2]

It's not censorship, it's patchy coverage (especially of forums and fancy web 2.0 sites).

[Garth Wilson]

It seems pretty clear to me that they are censoring health information that runs contrary to the profits of the corrupt pharmaceutical industry.  Google started implementing an algorithm in 2016 to do this in their search engine too.

[pier4r]

What I wanted to say was: archive.org is awesome, but relying only on it can hurt in the long run. Having decentralized mirrors helps.

[BruceH]

(01-24-2023 08:47 PM)pier4r Wrote:  

(01-23-2023 08:42 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  archive.org keeps archives of most things, and has lots of copies you can look up by date. 

Yes and no. Archive.org can go down on their own (one wrong ransomware opening, and that's it). Archive removes contents quickly if you flag them, they cannot risk unclear content. They have too much content for the amount of resources they have to verify things twice or thrice.

Further they may crawl a site but not properly, case in point, try: clanbase. Clanbase was a large, and I mean really large and active website about tournament organization for esports in europe. They messed up and they closed around 2014 (now they have the newer version online).

Try to find it on Archive.org and browse it. Is it there? yes, it is there with all the leagues, cups and data? No.

Especially things that require registrations to see more, they are there only partially.

Remember also that Eric prepares a USB thumb-drive of his entire site and sells it (to cover the cost of the 256GB drive) online and at the HHC, HPCC and Allschwil conferences. So there are at least 40+ copies, up-to-date as of September 2022, out there in enthusiasts' hands, all acting as backups.