India blocks Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

India blocks Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

Wayback Machine is one of the oldest digital archives of the World Wide Web, enabling users to access archived or deleted web pages

Several Internet service providers and telecom operators in the country have blocked the Wayback Machine, a dig ital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco.

The development was first reported on Tuesday by Medianama, after which several users complained on Twitter that they were getting a note saying the site “has been blocked as per the directions received by the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India“.

Among the operators that appeared to have blocked access to the site include BSNL, MTNL, Airtel, Aircel, and Tikona, as pointed out by the report and various screenshots shared by users on Twitter. There is currently no information on why the site has been blocked.

The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine in 2001, and the service enables users to access web pages across time, which the archive calls a “three-dimensional index“.

The tool has become useful to dodge government censorship as it allows users to access archived or deleted web pages. Many a time, authoritarian countries remove contentious content or change existing web pages, which is when people turn to the Wayback Machine for help.

In 2015, the Russian government blocked the Wayback Machine in an effort to curtail access to a single saved webpage that criticised the government. 

Source | Mumbai Mirror | 9 August 2017

Regards 

Pralhad Jadhav  

Senior Manager @ Knowledge Repository  

Khaitan & Co 

Upcoming Lecture | ACTREC - BOSLA Annual lecture series (125th birth anniversary of father of library science, Padmashree Dr. S. R. Ranganathan) on Saturday, 12th August 2017 at Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer (ACTREC), Kharghar, Navi Mumbai.  (Theme | 'MakerSpace')

Blog | http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/  

Website | https://sites.google.com/site/pralhadjadhavlib/home

Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978