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.
See this reply. If you have the time and resources you can defeat anything, but it would be far more complex than a simple redirect. There is physically no way to solve this problem while also achieving absolute data security, so the options are a program that's good enough or no program at all.
The key would have to be baked into the code in order for this system to be totally local, i.e. not relying on a webserver. It obviously wouldn't just be a string stored somewhere. It would be obfuscated many times over, including during encryption/decryption. Again, there's no such thing as literally tamperproof software, but if it's enough of a pain in the ass nobody is going to bother.
The other alternative would be a program that sends a request to a server that does all this for you, but then you have no way of proving that the server didn't tamper with the results somehow, or that whoever's hosting the server isn't just fabricating data. It's arguably worse than a purely local solution because it's less trustworthy, and trustworthiness is the entire point.