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.
You would probably need to decentralize it further, by having people hosting nodes of this program and majority nodes will determine trustworthiness or something similar, I'm uncertain if you can encrypt it to such a degree that it cannot be modified in runtime memory, I presume the weak point would be to attack during the download process and in between the encryption in which you could then "modify the content", alternatively what about just feeding it wrong data and then claim it is correct?
What is your threat model - who is trying to censor the content you're archiving? Is it Facebook, Google, Amazon, governments, etc? If so, don't you think that these tech companies might be able to outvote you with raw computing power?
This program would only support connections with TLS, which isn't a problem considering every site relevant to the problem the program is solving supports it. We'd mostly be targeting news sites and social media. TLS certificates can be spoofed, of course, but that alone should deter most attackers.
That wouldn't be the only check, of course, but assuming I do end up making this program, the less said the better. TLS is a pretty obvious feature though.
Unfortunately if someone is dedicated enough, there's nothing you can do to make it one hundred percent secure. But the idea is that if you can make it secure enough, it lends an implied level of trust to the final content. Not even Fort Knox is 100% secure, but it's close enough for the government to store most of its gold there.
Yes, someone could potentially create their own fake Twitter server complete with a darknet certificate and spoofed IP address, not to mention a slew of other ways to defeat the program's validation checks, all so they can create a fake archive of a fake tweet, but that's a pretty insane degree of dedication for something that probably wouldn't amount to much.
You could create an archive of a site and then put it on LBRY (/Odysee). Once it's published any modifications to the content leaves a transaction record on the LBC blockchain.