Public Interest crusader and Internet Archive partner Sherwin Siy was reported to have passed on 7 July, 2021, at the age of 40. Through the span of his career, Sherwin Siy served as Public Knowledge‘s VP of Legal Affairs, helped shape the Public Policy of Wikimedia and had a long history of cooperating with the EFF.
Sherwin Siy’s contribution to the Internet Archive was making sense of how the Archive handled TV news, from a legal perspective, as reported by Lila Bailey, his former partner in law. Suffice to say, news archives on IA such as the Third Eye news chyron collection might have never came to be, were it not for his efforts.
Updates
Bluemaxima’s Flashpoint, the webgame preservation project/community, finally has a dedicated submission website at https://fpfss.unstable.life/web. Previously, game submissions were made through their Discord server and had to await a laborious approval/rejection process. Let us hope, that this change will make archiving efforts a whole lot easier. You can read more about the how-to of it here.
Again on the subject of Flashpoint, the community has taken it upon themselves to preserve interactive “YouTube games”. As known to our longtime readers, once upon a time YouTube had an annotation system which could be used to link videos together. Some folks went out of their way to make Choose Your Adventure styled games, where depending on your choices, you would be taken to another video. But after the feature’s removal in 2019, many channels unlisted their annotation-intensive videos and now with YouTube’s plans to forcibly private old unlisted videos, these games are at risk of extinction. To help out with the Flashpoint project to preserve these video games, head over to the #youtube-games channel on the Flashpoint Discord Server.
Click here to watch with annotations.
With 11 days to go before the delisting of unlisted videos, archivists are working around the clock to hunt down unlisted videos. All the projects we discussed last week are still in motion; from Archive Team’s metadata scraping on #[email protected], to subreddit frenzies for harvesting videos linked on the filmot.com index.
Another noteworthy project is the #youtube-unlisted project on the Distributed YouTube Archive. A major bottleneck for Archive Team, and other groups, has been archiving of raw video files, as the Internet Archive and Google Cloud are not suited for a sudden influx of large video files. The DYA project, aims to mitigate this by splitting the task of storage between contributors. If a video is requested for download, the contributors who have made a copy of that video share their copy. While this might seem like a tedious process, it means that anyone with spare space can contribute to the storage, without TBs of hardware.
Finally, Omniarchive is holding a competition to collect Minecraft related unlisted videos.
What do I get out of it?
HalfOfAKebab, Omniarchive Mod
We will be giving 1 month of Discord Nitro, as well as a unique Discord role, and credit on the Omniarchive index, to the three users who submit the highest number of unique, valid videos.
How can I help?
Simply all you need to do is post as many UNLISTED Minecraft videos uploaded on or before 31st December 2011 into #unlisted-videos as you can possibly find. That’s it. If you find an unlisted Minecraft video uploaded anywhere from 2009-2011, post it! We’ll handle the rest using a few scripts to filter out any duplicates and other unwanted links. Check out this link for a detailed guide on how you can find such videos: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HMeoH7XOpUvqBkUD1jBy5MfzgzK4X4wgUpzV2YIZ4Fs/view
Are you involved with an archiving project related to YouTube’s unlisted videos, or not? Reach out to us at [email protected] so we can give you a shoutout!
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If you remember playing a browser game in the past on an old computer or perhaps on a current computer, you may still have a copy of the game even you don’t realize it! Because browsers try to improve load times of games and websites, they store files on your computer in something called a cache. The Flashpoint Cache Dumper gathers information about the files in your cache, allowing you to share information that helps locate lost web games with the game preservation community!
The Flashpoint Cache Dumper is simple to run. Simply download the self-extracting EXE file to a USB stick and transfer it to the computer on which you wish to dump the cache (opening a browser to download it directly to the computer is not recommended because it may clear its cache). Extract the files to the desktop on each account from which you wish to dump your cache. Run FlashpointCacheDumper.bat and follow the prompts. You can then send the generated DumpedCacheInfo.7z file, which contains a list of the files in your cache, to #web-cache in the Flashpoint Discord server or send it privately to a Flashpoint staff member. If you have files belonging to a lost game, you may be asked to send the full DumpedCache.7z file. Note that whoever you send these files to will be able to see the websites you visited as well as your computer account username.
It is important to note that, because of the way browser caches work, you may not be able to find the game you were looking to recover using the Flashpoint Cache Dumper. The Flashpoint Database wiki page has recommendations for additional methods for recovering lost games.
For more information about recovering lost game files from your browser cache and more detailed instructions on how to use the Flashpoint Cache Dumper, see the wiki post on the Flashpoint Database.
]]>BlueMaxima hasn’t made a Medium post for this release, so here’s a brief summary of his Discord announcement:
- Tons of new games, over 4000 in fact! And over a 1000 animations to boot!
- BlueMaxima and DarkMoe present: The Newgrounds Auditorium! A complete copy of the entire Newgrounds repertoire of animations (Over 130 000!). The NG Auditorium isn’t brand new, it actually started a standalone project but has in this version been integrated into Flashpoint Infinity.
- Logos and screenshots! Enabled in Flashpoint Infinity by default; in grid view, the logos and screenshots for games/animations will now download automatically!
- Launcher improvements and more!
If you’re desperately in need of a nostalgia overload, now’s a better time than ever to install Flashpoint! But if you’re more interested in what happens behind the scenes, check out our community spotlight: