As always, the audience makes the soundtrack! as the shape of the Great Room makes it easy for participants to hear one another’s comments. Come prepared to identify places, people and events, to ask questions and to engage in spirited real-time repartee with fellow audience members, and look for hints of San Francisco’s future in the shape of its lost past.
The Wayback Machine Chrome browser whatsapp lead extension helps make the web more reliable by detecting dead web pages and offering to replay archived versions of them. You can get it here.
For the past 20 years, the Internet Archive has recorded and preserved web pages, and hundreds of billions of them are available via the Wayback Machine. This is good because we are learning the web is fragile and ephemeral. For example a 2013 Harvard study found that 49% of the URLs referenced in U.S. Supreme Court decisions are now dead. Those decisions affect everyone in the U.S., and the evidence the opinions are based on is disappearing.
When previously valid URLs don’t respond, but instead return a result code of 404, we call that link rot. The Wayback Machine Chrome extension is designed to help mitigate against link rot and other common web breakdowns.
By using the “Wayback Machine” extension for Chrome, users are automatically offered the opportunity to view archived pages whenever any one of several error conditions, including code 404, or “page not found,” are encountered. If those codes are detected, the Wayback Machine extension silently queries the Wayback Machine, in real-time, to see if an archived version is available. If one is available, a notice is displayed via Chrome, offering the user the option to see the archived page.