Video download link | md5sum 9330cf26212d9aa4fb000e652d7a121c Internet and Web Rot, the Mandriva and Novell Story Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: The Web is vanishing rather fast along with facts and data contained in the Web (corporations and news sites going offline); to make matters worse, once-legitimate domains are being taken over by scammers

THIS morning I was told that years -- maybe about a decade -- after Mandriva had gone bankrupt "all the sites and pages under *.mandriva.com are long gone and the URLs redirected to domain squatters". This is a familiar scenario. It happens a lot, but that rarely attracts any media attention. We're meant to think the Web is just fine when things "age" this way... when in fact there are serious security ramifications. Once-thriving and busy sites can turn into scams and the domain registrars simply don't care as long as they can bag some more money. What an awful system, a for-profit power grab.

"Unlike libraries with literature (that has references to other literature, with many copies in many libraries/homes), the Web has a very short memory. We should strive for something better."The above video shows what happened to mandriva.com and then shows novell.com as well. A lot of history is gone and many articles we wrote in the distant past rely on some pages being online at both mandriva.com and Novell's official site. Consider the time Microsoft bribed Nigerians to attack GNU/Linux and spurn a Mandriva deal. It was only 14 years ago and now one struggles to find a copy of what Mandriva's chief executive, Francois Bancilhon, actually wrote. This benefits the corrupt 'victors', who got away with the bribery. Back in 2006 we wrote blog posts to show how shortly after Novell had signed the patent deal with Microsoft the Windows- or Microsoft-critical pages in novell.com were watered down or completely removed. With the Wayback Machine there's some remote chance of recovering the evidence, but there are no guarantees, especially if one does not register the old (and long-deprecated) URLs.

Unlike libraries with literature (that has references to other literature, with many copies in many libraries/homes), the Web has a very short memory. We should strive for something better.

"One of the biggest differences between paper and Web is that Web is centralised and you never actually own or possess the copy you read," an associate reminds us. "So there is only one single location where something bad has to happen, either through action or inaction, for access for the entire world to vanish."

"Microsoft exploits that a lot to try to rewrite history in its favor, and replace facts with lies and innuendo." ⬆