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by mewse-hn 1038 days ago
Peanut gallery reporting in. It always felt sort of weird that vice had a technology section, but I think there is space for tech coverage with a more edgy slant (eg. Beto O'Rourke and his hacker background).

Why would you name your website after a website error code? Appreciate the easter egg on the actual 404 page.

Not really direct feedback but when the Verge launched they made a big splash with in-depth, long form stories like "Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS" from 2012. I hope you guys could dig up some stories like this, and your commitment to filing FOIA requests seems promising.

1 comments

Naming the site was a big struggle sesh. Lots of good names are taken, weren't the right vibe, etc. We sort of made the joke "404 Media Company Not Found" to ourselves but, I think to be honest we:

1) Like how it sounds

2) People get it right away, even folks I know who don't care a lot about tech journalism or aren't super internet savvy (maybe they are even more likely to find themselves on 404 pages!)

3) This is a little pretentious and not the actual reason we chose it (i.e. we realized it later), but we really do want to tell stories from "hidden" parts of the internet / tech and the undercovered parts of it. 404 pages are full of easter eggs, and maybe it's just something about accidentally stumbling onto a community or wold you didn't previously know existed.

I guess it is also in the tradition of 2600 magazine to use a numeric code as your nameplate
404 has become a sign of censorship as we are seeing more pages taken down from Internet Archive and other places. I am excited to see you continue on surveillance and perhaps broaden into censorship and propaganda now that you are freed from some of the forces behind it.
Is there a Russian Internet Archive that doesn't comply with American takedown notices by any chance?
I am not sure about Russian hosted, but an alternative to archive.org is archive.is. Centralized services eventually get compelled or corrupted. I setup https://archivebox.io/ on my server. Some other options have been reported here.
There's something with your lazy img loader. Even if I disable uBo and FF's built-in protection, they don't come up.