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Category Archives: Deep Linking

The Internet Is Rotting

The Atlantic – Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. By Jonathan Zittrain – “This absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization, with no easy gating points through which to remove or label malicious work not under the umbrellas of the major social-media platforms, or to quickly identify their sources. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on. Links work seamlessly until they don’t. And as tangible counterparts to online work fade, these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge…

It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has “billions of books and no central filing system.” Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web….”

RCFP urges Delaware court to reject hyperlink republication argument

“The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a coalition of 23 news organizations are urging a Delaware court to reject a defamation claim that could threaten the use of hyperlinks in news stories. In a friend-of-the-court brief, filed on Dec. 19 by Reporters Committee attorneys and David L. Finger of Finger & Slanina… Continue Reading

November 2019 issue of LLRX

Nov 2019 – 5 new articles and 5 new columns on LLRX.com® – the free web journal on law, technology, knowledge discovery and research for Librarians, Lawyers, Researchers, Academics, and Journalists. Founded in 1996, 2020 Guide to Web Data Extractors – This guide by Marcus P. Zillman is a comprehensive listing of web data extractors,… Continue Reading

Linking Liability

Inside Higher Education – Sci-Hub, a repository for pirated research papers, is widely acknowledged to be illegal. But is sharing a link to the site illegal, too? “There is little dispute that Sci-Hub, the website that provides free access to millions of proprietary academic papers, is illegal. Yet, despite being successfully sued twice by major… Continue Reading

EFF – EU copyright ruling has far reaching impact on copyright and deep linking

EFF – “In a case which threatens to cause turmoil for thousands if not millions of websites, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided today that a website that merely links to material that infringes copyright, can itself be found guilty of copyright infringement, provided only that the operator knew or could reasonably… Continue Reading

Temple U – Databases, Sources and Database Search Results for Statistical Data Compilations and Publications

Temple University Libraries – STATISTICS: Databases, Sources and Database Search Results for Statistical Data Compilations and Publications: Database Search Results for Statistical and Demographic Data FROM United States Government Agencies “This research guide provides links to databases focused on statistical data content, sources of statistical data on the internet and beyond, and search results via… Continue Reading

Paper – The Quest to Replace Passwords

The Quest to Replace Passwords: A Framework for Comparative Evaluation of Web Authentication Schemes, by Joseph Bonneau, Cormac Herley, Paul C. van Oorschot, Frank Stajano. “We evaluate two decades of proposals to replace text passwords for general-purpose user authentication on the web using a broad set of twenty-five usability, deployability and security benefits that an… Continue Reading

Understanding the Federal Government’s “IT Insecurity” Crisis

February 5, 2015 Report From the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers – “U.S. taxpayers have paid $59 billion for data protection since Fiscal Year 2010, including $10.3 billion in the most recent year under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). This week, the Obama Administration proposed a $14 billion cybersecurity budget for… Continue Reading

Link Rot Undermines Scholarly Web Research

Information science. Going, going, gone: lost Internet references. Dellavalle RP, Hester EJ, Heilig LF, Drake AL, Kuntzman JW, Graber M, Schilling LM, Science (subscription only), October 31, 2003, 302: 787-788. “The use of Internet references in academic literature is common, and Internet references are frequently inaccessible. The extent of Internet referencing and Internet reference activity… Continue Reading