Web Archives at the Nexus of Good Fakes and Flawed Originals

Drexel CCI IS Department Distinguished Speaker Series, 2020-03-09
@phonedude_mln, @WebSciDL
Web Archives at the Nexus of
Good Fakes and Flawed Originals
Michael L. Nelson
Old Dominion University
Web Science & Digital Libraries Research Group
@WebSciDL, @phonedude_mln
With:
ODU: Michele C. Weigle, John Berlin, Mohamed Aturban, Sawood Alam
LANL: Martin Klein, DANS: Herbert Van de Sompel
Supported in part by The Andrew Mellon Foundation
and the National Science Foundation

"You’re in a desert walking along in the
sand when all of the sudden you look down,
and you see a tortoise..."
Supported in part by The Andrew Mellon Foundation
and the National Science Foundation
Michael L. Nelson
Old Dominion University
Web Science & Digital Libraries Research Group
@WebSciDL, @phonedude_mln
With:
ODU: Michele C. Weigle, John Berlin, Mohamed Aturban, Sawood Alam
LANL: Martin Klein, DANS: Herbert Van de Sompel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner
National Film Registry Induction, 1993: https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/94/9405/film.html
http://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/blade_runner.pdf
1982 1968

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwDdP88Dr54

We’re not going to review RS’s/PKD’s predictions
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/28/movies/blade-runner-predictions-2019-trnd/
https://twentytwowords.com/blade-runner-was-set-in-2019/
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/01/blade-runner-los-angeles-2019.html
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/01/blade_runner_today/

Common themes in the works of Phillip K. Dick
• identity
• self vs. the other
• memory
• humanity
• authenticity
• reality vs. simulacra
• unreliable narrator

Blade Runner in 279 characters

Voight-Kampff Test: distinguishing
authentic (humans) vs. fake (replicants)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic0PuvJbdu0
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down,
and you see a tortoise. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back.
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying
to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

Robots indistinguishable from humans,
off-world slaves, perpetually “dark and stormy”
Los Angeles – all good cyberpunk sci-fi tropes –
but that’s not our 2019, right?

The future is already here —
it's just not evenly distributed.
-- William Gibson (yes, I’m mixing sci-fi authors)
https://twitter.com/badnetworker/status/1093864777179430912
https://geekologie.com/2018/02/boston-dynamics-tests-door-opening-robot.php

“So when do we get to that part about
web archiving?”

Web archives are science fiction.
Web archives are enabling a reality, as
foreseen by PKD and other sci-fi authors,
where we can insert bespoke fakes
into our collective memory.

Web archives are like science fiction
because they’re a paradox:
We need a significant and continuous
technology investment today to be able to
say a page “used to look like this.”

Web archiving is not file backup.
Backup = prevent, detect, repair changes
Web archiving = continuous change to better simulate the past
Web archiving is a simulacrum of the past
https://makeagif.com/gif/blade-runner-jf-sebastians-toys-kaiser-and-bear-AFkWpp

The essence of a web archive
is to modify its holdings during replay
https://web.archive.org/web/19970626040823/http://www.drexel.edu/
Rewrite links so they
point back in the archive
Provide archival
metadata banner
(what, when, how many)
Relatively simple for the Web
of 1997. Today, it’s not so easy.

Or modify your environment to
better emulate the past
http://oldweb.today/ie4/19970101000000/www.drexel.edu
“Yo Dawg, I heard you like browsers…” https://imgflip.com/i/3rtfws
A browser inside
the browser, in this
case IE4 for
windows (typical for
1997). Network
requests trapped &
transformed instead
of pages.
Archival metadata
panel

Some modifications are to make yesterday’s
formats safe for / available to today’s browser
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/rosenthal/01rosenthal.html
Cf. https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/get-ready-to-say-goodbye-to-flash-in-2020/
http://web.archive.org/web/20100605013233/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aPPSIDr3Mc&feature=player_embedded/

Web archive software is continuously evolving, in part to
better realize a more authentic version of the past
https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/releases
https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb/releases

"...the government presented testimony from the office
manager of the Internet Archive, who explained how the
Archive captures and preserves evidence of the contents
of the internet at a given time. The witness also compared
the screenshots sought to be admitted with true and
accurate copies of the same websites maintained in the
Internet Archive, and testified that the screenshots were
authentic and accurate copies of the Archive’s records.
Based on this testimony, the district court found that the
screenshots had been sufficiently authenticated."
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/17-2479/17-2479-2018-07-02.html
Evidentiary use of “screenshots” of archived pages
United States v. Gasperini, No. 17-2479 (2d Cir. 2018)

Evidentiary use of “screenshots” of archived pages
United States v. Gasperini, No. 17-2479 (2d Cir. 2018)
"...the government presented testimony from the office
manager of the Internet Archive, who explained how the
Archive captures and preserves evidence of the contents
of the internet at a given time. The witness also compared
the screenshots sought to be admitted with true and
accurate copies of the same websites maintained in the
Internet Archive, and testified that the screenshots were
authentic and accurate copies of the Archive’s records.
Based on this testimony, the district court found that the
screenshots had been sufficiently authenticated."
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/17-2479/17-2479-2018-07-02.html
Screenshots matching IA’s records are not the
same thing as IA’s records matching the past…

So why is it so hard to recreate the past?
If we just had isolated, static pages
(jpegs, pdfs, mp3s, etc.)
then there’d be no problem.

personalization
Javascript
(modifying the page)
embedded resources
(possibly including other
HTML pages via iframes)
links
Real HTML pages are complex

Javascript
is why we can’t have nice (archival) things

Load the archived page, get an eagle
https://www.webharvest.gov/congress112th/20130119060624/http://www.fws.gov/

Hit “reload”, get a tiger

Hit “reload” again, get a mountain

“I've done questionable things.”

Actually, the fws.gov example was super easy;
most changes are much harder to trace
Mohamed Aturban, unpublished, memento:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130724144801/http://www.cnn.com/
Animated GIF: https://blog.dshr.org/2017/11/keynote-at-pacific-neighborhood.html

Embedded resources + Javascript =
Our simulation of what CNN.com looked
like then is flawed.
It will never be 2013 again, so in some
sense that page is lost.

Zombies: live web “leaking” into an archived page
http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2012/10/2012-10-10-zombies-in-archives.html
this page is
from 2008
this ad is
from 2012
(when this
screen shot
was taken)
As of late 2017, zombies
mostly no longer occur
https://blog.dshr.org/2017/09/attacking-users-of-wayback-machine.html

Temporal violations: reconstructing legitimately
archived resources into a page that never existed
http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2015/12/2015-12-08-evaluating-temporal.html
text (2004-12)
says rain,
image (2005-09)
is clear

Incorrectly replaying the 2004 weather forecast for
Varina, Iowa is hardly the stuff of dystopian cyberpunk.
But there are cases where temporal violations begin to look like tampering…

Remember the case of Joy Reid’s blog?
https://www.odu.edu/news/2018/5/michael_nelson
https://twitter.com/DrDanetteAllen/status/990228054952865793

https://twitter.com/phonedude_mln/status/990054945457147904
HTML archived
on 2006-01-11
JS archived
on 2006-02-07
Reid was a prolific blogger,
so a gap of nearly a month
is catastrophic for temporal
integrity.

Not always Javascript – cookies causes the web archive to store
the Urdu language page at the URL for the English page
https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2018/03/2018-03-21-cookies-are-why-your.html

https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2019/03/2019-03-18-cookie-violations-cause.html
Cookies + Javascript =
A combo Urdu / Portuguese / English page that never existed

Crawling & ingest errors could be exploited to
amplify an existing disinformation narrative
https://web.archive.org/web/20180302184025/https:/twitter.com/Emma4Change
“only a ‘crisis actor’ would
tweet in Slovak!”
Now imagine she gets fed up,
deletes her account, and then
someone applies the
“abandoned acct / archive” attack
Justin Littman described:
https://gwu-libraries.github.io/sfm-ui/posts/2017-11-06-vulnerabilities

Web archives are unreliable narrators.
Unreliable narrators cause us to question
everything we’ve been told.

Let’s prove Lester Holt did not “fudge the tape”!
https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1035124642456002565https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1035120511259500544
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/ne5x3d/trump-lester-holt-james-comey-nbc

The May, 2017 NBC interview
is not archived until August, 2018
(and even then, the video itself is not archived)
https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/pres-trump-s-extended-exclusive-interview-with-lester-holt-at-the-white-house-941854787582?v=raila
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/pres-trump-s-extended-exclusive-interview-with-lester-holt-at-the-white-house-941854787582?v=raila
https://web.archive.org/web/20180825094239/https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/pres-trump-s-extended-exclusive-interview-with-lester-holt-at-the-white-house-941854787582?v=raila
Clicking through to the video reveals a loop of postal
carrier slipping on ice; not the Lester Holt interview.

Errors in crawling and playback are hard
to distinguish from tampering
https://twitter.com/katestarbird/status/911257133231910913
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/10/managing-the-cultural-record-in-the-information-warfare-era
I want to explicitly note here the difference between the
act of quietly rewriting the record and enjoying the results
of the rewrites that are accepted as truth and that of
deliberately destroying the confidence of the public
(including the scholarly community) by creating compromise,
confusion, and ambiguity to suggest that the record cannot
be trusted.

Disinformation applied to web archives
doesn’t necessarily mean you have to
insert a specific narrative into the archive.
You just need to cast doubt on the
archive as our collective memory.

note:
“…both the live Web and the Wayback
Machine [...] are reasonably reliable for
everyday use”
https://blog.dshr.org/2020/03/guest-post-michael-nelsons-response.html
https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2020/03/2020-03-07-at-nexus-of-cni-keynote-and.html

We’re unaware of any cases where web
archive content has been hacked or faked
for any substantive goal.
However, web archives are not immune.
It’s just the theater of conflict has yet to
expand to include web archives.

Twitter then and now
http://inventorspot.com/articles/top_ten_twitterati_tweet_above_rest_31806
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/19/16504510/ten-gop-twitter-russia

Facebook then and now
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/975013825010458624
https://web.archive.org/web/20090722095954/http://facebook.com/zuck
See also: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-old-posts-mark-zuckerberg-disappeared-2019-3

Gmail then and now
http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-launches-gmail.html
https://www.avanan.com/resources/gmail-exploit-allows-dnc-email-attack

Web archives then and soon
https://web.archive.org/web/20020601134105/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2002/tc20020228_1080.htm
?

Why do we expect things to be different
for web archives?
Our trust model for web archives is still
rooted in the 1980s / early 90s.

My chronology with Unix
Late 80s: 1 computer, many users
Used an X terminal to access Cray, Convex supercomputers
90s: 1 computer, 1 user
My Sun IPX workstation was the first www.larc.nasa.gov
now: many computers, 1 user
I’m not even sure how many computers I have access to

From brewster@wais.com Sun Apr 25 00:03:19
1993
Received: from express.larc.nasa.gov by
blearg.larc.nasa.gov with SMTP
(5.65.2/server2.4) id AA28277; Sun,
25 Apr 93 00:00:26 -0400
Received: from wais.wais.com by
express.larc.nasa.gov with SMTP id BA21157
(SMTP/Lite-1.15) for
<m.l.nelson@larc.nasa.gov>; Sun, 25 Apr 93
00:00:20 -0400
Received: by wais.wais.com (4.1/SMI-
4.1/Brent-911016)
id AA14369; Sat, 24 Apr 93 20:47:54
PDT
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 93 20:47:54 PDT
Message-Id:
<9304250347.AA14369@wais.wais.com>
From: Brewster Kahle <brewster@wais.com>
To: abc@concert.net
To: admin@ds.internic.net
To: akers@fiddle.oit.unc.edu
To: anders@ifi.uio.no
To: anders@munin.ub2.lu.se
…
To: m.l.nelson@LaRC.NASA.GOV
…
To: root@ds.internic.net
To: root@ncgia.ucsb.edu
To: root@fiddle.oit.unc.edu
To: root@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu
To: root@samba.acs.unc.edu
To: root@spk41.usace.mil
To: root@stone.ucs.indiana.edu
To: root@sunsite.unc.edu
To: root@uniwa.uwa.oz.au
To: root@uva.ci.uv.es
To: root@nic.funet.fi
…
WAIS server maintainers,
As you probably know through wais-discussion, we are announcing
the commercial WAIS server this thursday. There is a big press
event and showcase at the WAIS Inc offices.
Thank you, everyone, for making it possible for us to pull off a
startup company.
We are considering running a special price for a limited time for
those that know and understand WAIS already. We would like to
discuss this with those that might be interested in it, and would
like to help us determine how it should work. Most people will
continue to use the freeware, and that is fine, this is for those
that might be interested in a commercial version. At this time,
we will not be discussing the differences between things or other
products.
Given that the press has started to call and ask for information
before hand (to scoop this story, you know the press...), we have
had to keep a very quiet profile.
On the other hand, we need the help from all of you. Generally,
this is done with a signed non-disclosure basis, but this wont
work on the Internet and not in time.
What I was thinking was to ask anyone that would like to discuss
this, to send an "email non-disclosure" to non-disclosed-
waisites-request@wais.com.
I wish this weren't so baroque, but you could not believe some of
the members of the press I have talked to. If one reporter
publishes early, it can spoil things (and get it wrong).
(please dont email to me. At this point, my cup floweth over. I
will dig out after the showcase!)
-brewster
TMC->WAIS Inc->AOL->Alexa->IA

From brewster@wais.com Sun Apr 25 00:03:19
1993
Received: from express.larc.nasa.gov by
blearg.larc.nasa.gov with SMTP
(5.65.2/server2.4) id AA28277; Sun,
25 Apr 93 00:00:26 -0400
Received: from wais.wais.com by
express.larc.nasa.gov with SMTP id BA21157
(SMTP/Lite-1.15) for
<m.l.nelson@larc.nasa.gov>; Sun, 25 Apr 93
00:00:20 -0400
Received: by wais.wais.com (4.1/SMI-
4.1/Brent-911016)
id AA14369; Sat, 24 Apr 93 20:47:54
PDT
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 93 20:47:54 PDT
Message-Id:
<9304250347.AA14369@wais.wais.com>
From: Brewster Kahle <brewster@wais.com>
To: abc@concert.net
To: admin@ds.internic.net
To: akers@fiddle.oit.unc.edu
To: anders@ifi.uio.no
To: anders@munin.ub2.lu.se
…
To: m.l.nelson@LaRC.NASA.GOV
…
To: root@ds.internic.net
To: root@ncgia.ucsb.edu
To: root@fiddle.oit.unc.edu
To: root@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu
To: root@samba.acs.unc.edu
To: root@spk41.usace.mil
To: root@stone.ucs.indiana.edu
To: root@sunsite.unc.edu
To: root@uniwa.uwa.oz.au
To: root@uva.ci.uv.es
To: root@nic.funet.fi
…
WAIS server maintainers,
As you probably know through wais-discussion, we are announcing
the commercial WAIS server this thursday. There is a big press
event and showcase at the WAIS Inc offices.
Thank you, everyone, for making it possible for us to pull off a
startup company.
We are considering running a special price for a limited time for
those that know and understand WAIS already. We would like to
discuss this with those that might be interested in it, and would
like to help us determine how it should work. Most people will
continue to use the freeware, and that is fine, this is for those
that might be interested in a commercial version. At this time,
we will not be discussing the differences between things or other
products.
Given that the press has started to call and ask for information
before hand (to scoop this story, you know the press...), we have
had to keep a very quiet profile.
On the other hand, we need the help from all of you. Generally,
this is done with a signed non-disclosure basis, but this wont
work on the Internet and not in time.
What I was thinking was to ask anyone that would like to discuss
this, to send an "email non-disclosure" to non-disclosed-
waisites-request@wais.com.
I wish this weren't so baroque, but you could not believe some of
the members of the press I have talked to. If one reporter
publishes early, it can spoil things (and get it wrong).
(please dont email to me. At this point, my cup floweth over. I
will dig out after the showcase!)
-brewster
When computers were $$$, an email to “root” could be expected
to be received by someone entrusted with the necessary $$$
to responsibly administer the machine.
IOW, “root” was almost always a white hat.
It hasn’t been like that for a long time.
Web archives are like the Unix mainframes of today.
TMC->WAIS Inc->AOL->Alexa->IA

How well do you know root@archive.org?
As in, could you call/email him right now and expect a response?
Our entire national digital preservation strategy is predicated on
Brewster Kahle “not being evil”™
If he is leading a 25+ year sleeper cell, we’re doomed.

How well do you know these roots?
Many more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiatives

Up until now, we’ve only looked at failures
or edge cases in crawling and replay.
What about deliberate fakes?

Cut-n-paste / mashup “fakes” for humor
Victorian Photo Collage
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2010/victorian-photocollage
“The Flying Saucer” (1956)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer_(song)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCrn6QXvHLg
Brian Williams Raps ‘Gin & Juice’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlGLhYFrv6w

We’ve always had “fakes”, the most convincing of
which require significant skills, knowledge, and
physical access
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94461486

“deep learning” + “fake” = deepfakes
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x799b/selling-ai-generated-fake-porn-is-probably-a-good-way-to-get-sued
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ev5eba/ai-fake-porn-of-friends-deepfakes

Becoming more mainstream:
https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/1090349932266094593 https://deepfakesapp.online/
A “safe for work” example:
No longer buried in
the dark corners of Reddit:

Not just porn or novelties: just better
revoicing?
“Deepfake technology has
helped us scale campaign
efforts like never before,”
Neelkant Bakshi, co-incharge
of social media and IT for BJP
Delhi, tells VICE. “The Haryanvi
videos let us convincingly
approach the target audience
even if the candidate didn’t
speak the language of the voter.”
https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/jgedjb/the-first-use-of-deepfakes-in-indian-election-by-bjp

That deepfakes are even possible forces
us to recalibrate our information literacy
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/03/deepfake-gabon-ali-bongo/
“But when Gabon’s
government
released the video, it raised
more questions than it
answered. ... One week after
the video’s release, Gabon’s
military attempted an ultimately
unsuccessful coup— the
country’s first since 1964—
citing the video’s oddness as
proof something was amiss
with the president.”

Or perhaps deepfakes are just the next Photoshop,
and skepticism vs. gullibility is more about us
and not of the media itself
If a fake email can
cause this much impact,
then it is fair to ask are
deepfakes and fake
provenance via web
Archives even necessary?
https://twitter.com/i/events/1230892474140430337

“Detecting” deepfakes will happen.
“Preventing” deepfakes won’t happen; they’re here to stay:
Mementos, even of a fake past, are core to the human condition.
“Did you get your precious photos?” “Implants. Those aren't your memories,
they're somebody else's. They're
Tyrell's niece's.”
http://deepemotions.free.fr/theme_1.html
Real photos, fake memories: replicants attach significant value to photos,
even when they know the memories are fake.

Next Thanksgiving dinner,
liven up the discussion with your extended family
1. Extract just 0:23—0:26 of the
Obama/Peele video
2. Embed in an HTML page
3. Use Javascript to rewrite the
banner and browser URL
– Datetime: 2016-11-09
– URL:
www.whitehouse.gov/totally
NotFake
4. Claim the deep state deleted
the page from the live web
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=43&v=cQ54GDm1eL0#t=0m23s

Archives have vulnerabilities.

Inserting fakes into real archives
Here’s an actual page in the IA “proving”
Brian Williams released “Gin and Juice” in 1992, a full year before Snoop Dogg.
John Berlin, MS Thesis, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3QTcJZdFfs
(actual URI-R & URI-M have also been obscured in the video to hide the technique)
The content is clearly fake, but it demonstrates that it’s possible
to write Javascript that attacks the archive’s playback capability.
It takes an archiving expert to tell the difference.

We’ve known about these & other attacks
since 2017
http://labs.rhizome.org/presentations/security.html#/
https://acmccs.github.io/papers/p1741-lernerAT3.pdf
https://blog.dshr.org/2017/06/wac2017-security-issues-for-web-archives.html
https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2018/04/2018-05-01-high-fidelity-ms-thesis-to.html

There are other ways, presumably still
hypothetical, to attack the archives
https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/596768668756774914
https://xkcd.com/538/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/05/planes-trains-and-fake-names-the-trail-left-by-skripal-suspects
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/22/middleeast/saudi-operative-jamal-khashoggi-clothes/index.html
“Planes, trains and fake names:
the trail left by Skripal suspects”
“Surveillance footage shows
Saudi 'body double' in
Khashoggi's clothes after he was
killed, Turkish source says”
Before you say “that will never happen!”
Reminder: agents, dissidents, journalists have all disappeared;
they won’t mind adding a librarian/sysadmin to the list

I’ve got good news and bad news:
Setting up a web archive is not as difficult
nor expensive as it used to be.
OpenWayback, WAIL, pywb, et al. + cloud storage =
you can have a web archive running in about the same time
it took to generate the Steve Buscemi / Jennifer Lawrence deepfake.
https://github.com/iipc/openwayback
https://github.com/N0taN3rd/wail
https://machawk1.github.io/wail/
https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb

Inserting fakes into fake archives
breitbart.com/wayback/*/whitehouse.gov/totallyNotFake
infowars.com/web/*/whitehouse.gov/totallyNotFake
iluv.aynrand.org/*/whitehouse.gov/totallyNotFake
InternetResearchAgency.ru/whitehouse.gov/totallyNotFake
How well do you know root at these archives?
Are they really four different archives, or one root for all of them?
What if 99.9% of the time they faithfully replay pages?

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/rosenthal/11rosenthal.html
What if we start off with > (n/2)+1
archives compromised?

What if the archives were targeted to amplify a
specific disinformation narrative?
And what if the archives had no choice but to
cooperate?

The University of Farmington is fake
DHS strong armed a “.edu” registration, they could do the same to IA & others too
https://twitter.com/nwarikoo/status/1090726638034276352
https://web.archive.org/web/20161023170733/https://universityoffarmington.edu/
First capture: 2016-10-23

Blockchain to the rescue!!!
<lasers>
<sirens>
<disco-thumping-soundtrack>
nope.
https://www.multichain.com/blog/2015/11/avoiding-pointless-blockchain-project/
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf
https://blog.dshr.org/search/label/bitcoin

There is no shortage of
deepfake vs. blockchain stories
https://www.wired.com/story/the-blockchain-solution-to-our-deepfake-problems/
https://www.longhash.com/news/the-coming-war-between-deepfakes-and-blockchain

A Voight-Kampff Test for deepfakes
now seems around the corner
https://twitter.com/TechCrunch/status/1009556795965296642
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611726/the-defense-department-has-produced-the-first-tools-for-catching-deepfakes/

Are we prepared for the
unintended consequences?
“Enforcing digital signatures for all
cameras and video devices would
offer the same capability in reverse.
Suddenly every photograph and video
shared online could be traced back to
its original owner. Security services in
a repressive regime could scour social
media for all videos depicting them in
a negative light and trace them back
to the precise individuals who captured
the video, arresting them en masse.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/09/09/why-digital-signatures-wont-prevent-deep-fakes-but-will-help-repressive-governments/

On the other hand, “blockchaining” our pets is a study in
incompatibility, so tracking photos may never happen
https://www.aspca.org/about-us/aspca-policy-and-position-statements/microchips
https://moviepaws.com/2017/10/22/owls-snakes-and-unicorns-the-animals-of-blade-runner/
In Blade Runner, synthetic pets
have serial numbers
(real pets are unavailable
to all but the richest).
“While most of the world has
accepted these standards,
North America has not. The
primary problem is a competitive,
technological one involving the
compatibility of the microchips
and the readers that are used
by shelters and veterinary clinics.”

As for blockchains and web archives…

This is not what you think it is…
https://petertodd.org/2017/carbon-dating-the-internet-archive-with-opentimestamps

This is not what you think it is…
https://petertodd.org/2017/carbon-dating-the-internet-archive-with-opentimestamps
“…right now you can get timestamps for every book,
movie, song, computer program, legal document,
etc. in the thousands of collections in the archive.
In the future we hope to be able to work with the
Internet Archive to extend this to timestamping
website snapshots…”

That’s never going to happen.
(at least not 3rd party through the playback interface)

Archives Aren’t Magic Web Sites
They’re Just Web Sites.
https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2019/08/2019-08-30-where-did-archive-go-part1.html
https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2019/09/2019-09-10-where-did-archive-go-part-2.html

Archive URI-Ms
-----------------------------
perma-archives.org 182
bibalex.org 199
webarchive.org.uk 349
bac-lac.gc.ca 351
proni.gov.uk 469
digar.ee 488
webharvest.gov 712
internetmemory.org 979
nationalarchives.gov.uk 994
stanford.edu 1222
archive-it.org 1383
archive.is 1396
web.archive.org 1566
arquivo.pt 1569
webcitation.org 1585
vefsafn.is 1589
loc.gov 1594
-----------------------------
Total 16627
Sample 16k+ Mementos from 17 Web Archives
https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03836

Periodically Replay Each Archived Page
Above example: http://perma-archives.org/warc/20170101182813/http://umich.edu/
35 times, from Nov. 2017 – Oct. 2018
For each replay, we download both the rewritten version and the “raw” version (where possible).

Partial archive outage because
of security / maintenance upgrade

Post-upgrade, replay is variable.

More Archived Pages Changed Every Time
Than Never Changed
(yes, this experiment used “raw” mode)
Never changed:
2007 URI-Ms (1 in 8)
Always changed:
2773 URI-Ms (1 in 6)
Fixity-based approaches, including blockchain, will not work.

“Hash the screen shot, not the HTML!”
That doesn’t work either.

1 WARC file, 2 Wayback Machines, 3 Browsers
= 6 different replays
http://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130106140348/http://www.harvard.edu/
http://web.archive.org/web/20130106140348/http://www.harvard.edu/
see also: https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2016/12/2016-12-20-archiving-pages-with.html

Why not create a LOCKSS for web archives?
“The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying
to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”

Web archives are not especially interoperable.
There are many issues regarding
interoperability, but generational loss is a good
demonstration of incompatible assumptions
about simulating the past.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180501125952/https:/twitter.com/phonedude_mln/status/990054945457147904

http://archive.is/PaKx6

https://perma.cc/3HMS-TB59

http://www.webcitation.org/77RhNeyoZ

https://web.archive.org/web/20190407024654/https://perma.cc/3HMS-TB59

https://web.archive.org/web/20190407031659/http://www.webcitation.org/77RhNeyoZ

Web archiving interoperability: a metaphor
(non-synthetic pets, possibly microchipped)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQudKvrwDAU

To summarize:
Existing, trusted archives can be compromised by:
1) crawling malicious pages, or
2) attacking facilities / personnel
3) court orders
Lowered resource threshold for archives allows:
1) “long game” archives: faithful now, corrupt later,
2) “sock puppet” archives: surreptitiously cooperating
archives
The nature of web archives is to change content –
current fixity based approaches will not help.

Looking forward:
We need new models for web archiving
and verifying authenticity.
The Heritrix / Wayback Machine
technology stack, while successful, has
limited our thinking.

“Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60
percent of web traffic is human; … For a period of time in
2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube
traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high
that employees feared an inflection point after which
YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would
begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake.
They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.””
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
In the IA: robots outnumber humans 10:1 in sessions, 5:4 in HTTP connections, ca. 2012
http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4016
https://giphy.com/gifs/harrison-ford-blade-runner-sean-young-yjB2fwqjv5rry/media

I suspect the core of the new model will have a lot
in common with click farms
https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1072114511212109824

Record what we saw at crawl time as a baseline,
then we need a distance measure for crawl time and replay time
http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i112.8097
https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2013/05/2013-05-25-game-walkthroughs-as.html
Documenting instead of archiving…
1)Robotic witnesses
2)New Nielsen families

Some of you might be thinking
“but I don’t like Blade Runner – what can I take
away from this talk?”
(my wife refers to the film as “serious white guys talking”)
Two methods for passing the
Voight-Kampff Test for Blade Runner fandom

1) Is Deckard a replicant?
In the book, he’s definitely human. In the seven (!) versions of
the movie, it ranges from “ambiguous” to “replicant”.
https://moviepaws.com/2017/10/22/owls-snakes-and-unicorns-the-animals-of-blade-runner/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themes_in_Blade_Runner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner#Versions (Hello, FRBR)

2) “Tears in Rain” – Greatest monologue in sci-fi?
Or greatest monologue of all time?
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire
off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark
near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time,
like tears in rain. Time to die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hDo80ddn4Q
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM54jXndyvQ

2) “Tears in Rain” – Greatest monologue in sci-fi?
Or greatest monologue of all time?
I've crawled things you people wouldn't believe. Clickjacking attacks
off the x-frame-options: sameorigin. I watched ajax requests redirect
at the aggregator TimeGate. All those pages will be lost in time,
like tears in rain. Time to lie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hDo80ddn4Q
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM54jXndyvQ

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