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21 Jul 2015 - 11 Jan 2026
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About this capture
COLLECTED BY
Organization: Archive Team
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.

History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.

The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.

This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.

Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.

The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.

ArchiveBot is an IRC bot designed to automate the archival of smaller websites (e.g. up to a few hundred thousand URLs). You give it a URL to start at, and it grabs all content under that URL, records it in a WARC, and then uploads that WARC to ArchiveTeam servers for eventual injection into the Internet Archive (or other archive sites).

To use ArchiveBot, drop by #archivebot on EFNet. To interact with ArchiveBot, you issue commands by typing it into the channel. Note you will need channel operator permissions in order to issue archiving jobs. The dashboard shows the sites being downloaded currently.

There is a dashboard running for the archivebot process at http://www.archivebot.com.

ArchiveBot's source code can be found at https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot.

TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20170520183346/https://www.cnet.com/how-to/save-the-world-using-your-pc-or-phone/

Save the world using your PC or phone

By joining your machine to others around the world, you could help eradicate diseases or find alien life.

Software

Cure diseases and find alien life with your computer or phone

Your computer can link up with others around the world to solve life's mysteries.

by Iyaz Akhtar
2:09
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Volunteer computing is a way for people to get their computers or phones to link up to solve complicated modeling and calculations to aid in research projects. What's being volunteered is your machine's spare processing power. When multiple computers are a part of the same project, these separate machines act in concert to serve as a supercomputer.

BOINC Manager running on a Mac. Screenshot by Iyaz Akhtar/CNET

To get started with volunteer computing, download and install BOINC Manager for your computer or the BOINC app for Android. It will give you access to projects that are built on the open-source software for volunteer computing known as BOINC. BOINC stands for "Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing."

Choosing a project in BOINC Manager. Screenshot by Iyaz Akhtar/CNET

After installing BOINC Manager on a computer, it will give the user options of which projects to join. After clicking "Add project" on the right side of the window, a new window will pop up showing the many projects to join. There is a list on the left side. Selecting one will bring up its description on the right side of the window. Many of these projects require a username and password. If you are going to volunteer on a number of projects, take a look at an account manager to control everything from one site instead of juggling separate log-ins for separate projects.

Requirements to run BOINC projects are also pretty low. A Windows machine needs to possess a 500MHz processor or higher. Macs can be anything from a PowerPC G3 or higher. These projects by default run when you are not using your computer and when it is plugged into a power source. On an Android phone or tablet, the device must be connected to Wi-Fi and be plugged in with the screen off before the app will function. This way, you're not killing your battery life or data plan by accident.

SETI@home in action on a Mac. Ariel Nunez/CNET

Projects of note

  • Rosetta@Home: Run by the University of Washington, it models new proteins to take on diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, HIV, and malaria.
  • SETI@home: It searches through data from a radio telescope to find signs of extraterrestrial life. Millions of people are taking part in SETI@home right now.
  • MindModeling@Home: This project tries to make sense of the human mind.
  • World Community Grid: Takes on a number of subprojects including mapping cancer markers, making solar technology more efficient, and decoding genomes from a wide variety of organisms.

There are a lot more BOINC projects in many different fields, including astronomy and mathematics. Pick as many as you want. Enjoy contributing to the greater good. If you are concerned about security, check out BOINC's wiki for more information.

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