Everyone here knows the importance of archive sites. They fill in the memory hole. That alone makes them incredibly valuable. But they're centralized, which means once they're down all that filling gets dug up again. Plus it costs money to host that much data.
What do you guys think of a program that essentially does the same thing as archive sites, but it downloads the archive to your computer instead? I'm a software developer and could create it myself rather easily.
Now I know what you're thinking: archive sites are valuable because they're probably not tampered with, because tampering means they can be dismissed by their opponents as fake. Local archives can be tampered with, making them useless. However, this program would encrypt the archives such that they can only be viewed if first unecrypted by that same program. The user would have zero power over the encrypted archives, and would act entirely as a host for them.
Considering how tightly the iron grip of progressivism has become around the throat of the internet, it's only a matter of time before archive sites are made illegal, or at least taken down under some bullshit excuse. Local archives would make this less of an issue, because each archive would continue to exist as long as at least one person still has it.
Do you think people would use such a tool? It would be completely free, but couldn't be open source for security reasons.
I know anyone can already just download a page and encrypt it themselves, but most people wouldn't even think to do that much less know how. This program would make encrypted local backups normie-friendly and standardized, because the important thing is having as many as possible.
ArchiveBox is probably the closest thing to this that exists today.
Instead of encrypting them I'd suggest signing the output/page. Then people can decide whether or not they trust the signer. Combine that with a web of trust public key infrastructure and it might be pretty slick.
The encryption is to make it so nobody can simply say "this was tampered with by nazis" when confronted with harsh reality. Archives are for people who know the memory hole exists, but they're also for normies who don't, and normies aren't going to trust anything the news didn't tell them to trust unless they're really sure about it.
You could argue it's an unnecessary level of validation, but going above and beyond is necessary when peoples' default reaction to anything you say is extreme distrust. You have to prove to them that you're not lying. It's unfair, but it's reality.
A signed hash of the file accomplishes the same thing though, and doesn't make the file unreadable by other programs/browsers.
The problem is this part:
They won't. They'll be told not to by Experts and Fact Checkers. And they don't know what a web of trust is, nor do they care. As long as you allow them to choose who to believe, they will choose "not you", because you're not on television. The idea is to not give them the choice in the first place. Sure, there will always be a subset of people who are so NPC that even a hundred different layers of security isn't enough for them, but those people can't be helped in the first place.
There is no way to prove it hasnt been tampered without the original source, unedited. It's all based on trust.
I use Archivebox and it works well enough for individual pages but not whole websites. Grab-site if good for that. Saving as a WARC is the closest you're going to get to proving authenticity since it saves request headers.