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by palmotea 120 days ago
> When I noticed it, it seemed like such a minor change, but with these latest revelations, it doesn't seem so minor anymore.

That doesn't seem nefarious, though. It makes sense they wouldn't want to reveal whatever accounts they use to bypass blocks, and the logged-in account isn't really meaningful content to an archive consumer.

Now, if they were changing the content of a reddit post or comment, that would be an entirely different matter.
2 comments
TehCorwiz 120 days ago
If it's not nefarious why isn't it documented as part of their policies? They're not tracking those changes and making clear it was anonymization, why not? If they're not tracking and publishing changes to the documents what's to say they haven't edited other things? The short answer is that without another archived copy we just don't know and that's what's making people uncomfortable. They also injected malicious JS into the site. What's to stop them from doing that again? Trust and transparency are the name of the game with libraries. I could care less about the who they are, but their actions as steward of a collection for posterity fail to encourage my trust.
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zymhan 120 days ago
Editing what is billed as an archive defeats the purpose of an "archive".
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palmotea 120 days ago
> Editing what is billed as an archive defeats the purpose of an "archive".

No, certain edits are understandable and required. Even the archive.org edits its pages (e.g. sticks banners on them and does a bunch of stuff to make them work like you'd expect).

Even paper archives edit documents (e.g. writing sequence numbers on them, so the ordering doesn't get lost).

Disclosing exactly what account was used to download a particular page is arguably irrelevant information, and may even compromise the work of archiving pages (e.g. if it just opens the account to getting blocked).

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ajam1507 120 days ago
The relevant part of the page to archive is the content of the page, not the user account that visited the page. Most sane people would consider two archives of the same page with different user accounts at the top, the same page.
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maxloh 120 days ago
Don't be surprised by this, there are a lot more edits than you think. For example, CSS is always inlined so that pages could render the same as it was archived.
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raincole 120 days ago
CSS inlining happens during the process of archiving, no?

The issue here is to edit archived pages retrospectively.

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