Weekly Summary 03/02/2020

Get ready to dramatically throw off your coats, and say "welcome" to spring! As a wise man once said: "Spring is the time of plans and projects", everyone (including us here at Data Horde) has a few things in the works so get hyped!

But first, it's worth mentioning a couple of websites that are expected to shutdown within this month:

The self-proclaimed "tech tabloid" the inquirer and the music database FreeDB are scheduled for shutdown on the 31st of March. Both sites are slowly becoming more and more unusable but a good portion of the inquirer survives as Wayback Machine snapshots and there are a few freeDB mirrors, although a few programs which are hard-coded to access freeDB directly are expected to break.

Moving onto more hopeful news...

The brave web-browser is adding in a new built-in feature for detecting websites that have gone offline, so that's the good old 404 and its siblings. Upon receiving an appropriate error, brave will offer a button which will take you to the Wayback Machine to see if it can find any snapshots. In a world where one-click Google and Wikipedia are almost expected to be bundled with everything, we can only hope this built-in feature will inspire change industry to make all of our lives better.

You can read more details about this on the Internet Archive Blog: https://blog.archive.org/2020/02/25/brave-browser-and-the-wayback-machine-working-together-to-help-make-the-web-more-useful-and-reliable/

Finally there's been a recent status update by BlueMaxima of Flashpoint. His Medium article, starts with a big thank you to all the media outlets and people online covering the project.

"As a result. Flashpoint broke several records in terms of things like monthly unique visits. In fact, we had more unique people visit Flashpoint’s website in this month than the entirety of 2019. My servers were so stressed from people downloading Flashpoint that an automatic abuse switch flipped in my web hoster. That was fun to deal with!"

The rest of the article talks a whole bunch of things, ranging from technical improvements to rarities added to the collection such as the Late Chuck Jones' Thomas Timberwolf. The full article is a must read:
https://medium.com/bluemaximas-flashpoint/flashpoint-status-update-march-2020-6b1bd57e5df0

That's about it for this week...

Stay tuned for next week's summary, where we'll hopefully see each other again same time next week at EST 9 AM!