Internet Archive

Archive.org or Internet Archive (or shortly IA) is a multimedia library website that provides free access to images, videos, softwares, websites, audio and print materials. Internet Archive also provides the Wayback Machine, the Wayback Machine archive or crawls websites and to go "back in time" to a certain point of a website.
The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital materials, but most of it's data comes of web crawlers, which works to preserve most of the web as possible.
==Wayback Machine==
The Internet Archive capitalized on the popular use of the term "WABAC Machine" from a segment of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon (specifically, Peabody's Improbable History), and uses the name "Wayback Machine" for its service that allows archives of the World Wide Web to be searched and accessed."A Library as Big as the World"
This service allows users to view some of the archived web pages. Hundreds of billions of web sites and their associated data (images, source code, documents, etc.) are saved in a database. The service can be used to see what previous versions of web sites used to look like, to grab original source code from web sites that may no longer be directly available, or to visit web sites that no longer even exist.
==Book collections==
As of November 2008, when there were approximately 1 million texts, the entire collection was greater than 0.5 petabytes, which included raw camera images, cropped and skewed images, PDF files, and raw OCR data. "Books Scanning to be Publicly Funded" (May 23, 2008)"Bulk Access to OCR for 1 Million Books" (July 9, 2013)
The material digitized by others includes more than 300,000 books that were contributed to the collection, between about 2006 and 2008, by Microsoft through its Live Search Books project, which also included financial support and scanning equipment directly donated to the Internet Archive."Book search winding down"
==Media collections==
Media_reader_at_Internet_Archive.jpg|Media reader
Unrelated_Microfilm.jpg|Microfilms at the Internet Archive
Videocassettes_and_VCRs_at_Internet_Archive.jpg|Media reader
In addition to web archives and book collections, Internet Archive also has a collection of media uploaded by its employers and multiple users. It maintains extensive collections of digital media, which contain media uploaded by internet users, to be in the public domain in the United States or licensed under a license that allows redistribution, such as Creative Commons licenses.
Media are organized into collections by media type, such as moving images, audio, text, etc., and into sub-collections by various criteria. Each of the main collections includes a "Community" sub-collection (formerly named "Open Source") where public contributions are stored.
==Other services==
Internet Archive also provides other services, such as:
*Physical media - a device used to voice a strong reaction to the idea of books. It was inspired by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
*Software - Internet Archive also had downloadable software in its database. The Internet Archive has created an archive of what it describes as "vintage software", as a way to preserve them."The Internet Archive Classic Software Preservation Project"
*Wayforward Machine - a satirical, fictional website covered with pop-ups asking for personal information. It was launched on September 30, 2021."Imagine the future of the Internet" - Internet Archive
==History==
Internet Archive was founded in May 1996 with the goal is to and preserve the World Wide Web in large amounts. The archived content became more easily available to the general public in 2001, through the Wayback Machine.
In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the web archive, beginning with the Prelinger Archives. Now, the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of other projects: the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It, and the wiki-editable library catalog and book information site Open Library. Soon after that, the Archive began working to provide specialized services relating to the information access needs of the print-disabled; publicly accessible books were made available in a protected Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) format.https://archive.org/details/printdisabled
In August 2012, the Archive announced that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for more than 1.3 million existing files, and all newly uploaded files.https://web.archive.org/web/20120808212731/https://torrentfreak.com/internet-archive-starts-seeding-1398635-torrents-120807/
On November 6, 2013, the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco's Richmond District caught fire, destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments.https://web.archive.org/web/20170131190737/http://richmondsfblog.com/2013/11/06/part-of-internet-archive-building-badly-burned-in-early-morning-fire According to the Archive, it lost a side-building housing one of 30 of its scanning centers; cameras, lights, and scanning equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; and "maybe 20 boxes of books and film, some irreplaceable, most already digitized, and some replaceable".https://web.archive.org/web/20131107150230/http://blog.archive.org/2013/11/06/scanning-center-fire-please-help-rebuild/
An overhaul of the site was launched as beta in November 2014, and the legacy layout was removed in March 2016.https://blog.archive.org/2014/11/05/redesign/ 
In November 2016, Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was building the Internet Archive of Canada, a copy of the Archive to be based somewhere in Canada.
Beginning in 2017, OCLC and the Internet Archive have collaborated to make the Archive's records of digitized books available in WorldCat.https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/12/syncing-catalogs-with-thousands-of-libraries-in-120-countries-through-oclc/
Since 2018, the Internet Archive visual arts residency, which is organized by Amir Saber Esfahani and Andrew McClintock, helps connect artists with the Archive's over 48 petabytes of digitized materials.https://web.archive.org/web/20190402184848/https://archive.org/~tracey/mrtg/du.html
In June 2020, during COVID-19 pandemic, four libraries, John Wiley & Sons, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House, sued Internet Archive over their attempt to create a “National Emergency Library” by uploading countless e-books, or scanned versions of printed books, for users to “borrow” while bookstores and libraries across the nation were shuttered due to the pandemic. All four libraries that sued accused IA of being a pirate site. Nearly two years later, Internet Archive lost the case and required permission from the publishers as the copyright holders.https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/internet-archive-copyright-infringement-lawsuit-1234703776/
During the week of May 27, 2024, The Internet Archive suffered a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that made its services unavailable intermittently, sometimes for hours at a time, over a period of several days.https://www.pcmag.com/news/internet-archive-hit-with-ddos-attackhttps://cybersecuritynews.com/internet-archive-under-ddos-attack/https://www.engadget.com/the-internet-archive-has-been-fending-off-ddos-attacks-for-days-035950028.html
In September 2024, Google and the Internet Archive signed a partnership to allow people to see previous versions of websites on Google Search that uses the Wayback Machine, without linking the Google Cache yet.
===Cyberattacks===
On October 9, 2024, the site again suffered major DDoS attacks which caused a significant disruption and made its services temporarily unavailable. It had 31 million passwords being stolen, which affect a huge number of user accounts, and compromised in a file called "ia_users.sql", dated September 28, 2024. The Internet Archive's team, including archivist Jason Scott and security researcher Scott Helme, confirmed the DDoS attack alongside a data breach. A hacktivist group called SN_BlackMeta again claimed responsibility for the attacks.
As of October 10, 2024, the website is still offline for "prioritizing keeping data safe at the expense of service availability." On October 11, 2024, Kahle said that the data is safe, and will bring the service back to normal "in days, not weeks." On October 13th, 2024, the Wayback Machine was put back up, albeit in a "provisional, read-only manner".
On October 21, Internet Archive went back online as a read-only site. On October 22, all Internet Archive services temporarily went offline, but later that same day, only the Wayback Machine, Archive-It, and blog.archive.org were resumed. On October 23, archive.org, the Wayback Machine, Archive-It, and the Open Library services all resumed with some features, such as logging in, still unavailable."Guess what's back. Yes, http://archive.org and http://openlibrary.org are back, as well as http://web.archive.org (Wayback Machine) and all those amazing items. Some of the features are not up yet, but rest assured we're working on it and our tired devs will prevail" - Scott, Jason [@textfiles] (October 23, 2024). Retweeted by internetarchive.
On October 28, 2024, a blog was posted on the Internet Archive, announcing that more features, including Save Page Now, would be fully operational.
==References==
Category:Websites
Category:Websites registered in 1996
Category:Websites with the .org domain
Category:Tool websites