As a hobby historian (not really haha) I'm interested in old streets and names particularly.
Especially here in Europe / Germany, where entire quarters where bombed to rubbles newer streets do not match neither namely nor spatially.
I loved how you could "move back in time" in street view. I think that has been killed too? There is a lovely Twitter/X account for Detroit tho: https://x.com/DetroitStreetVu
You can still go back in time on Street View. There's a "See more dates" link next to the address info in the top left (at least on the desktop Maps interface) that when you click it opens a film strip of different dated captures for that location. Here's the 2007 capture of 1 Embarcadero (outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco) for example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ArrucFgus9uMvdSaA
It's just that in Europe the data is much more sparse to begin with. In many places Google didn't go multiple times, so there just can't be older data. On some streets however I see that if the data was really old (before ~2010/2012) Google probably decided that the quality was so bad – well, it really is – that they do not make it available. So even if there were multiple passes it is not a must that this feature comes available.
Very sad to see it gone. It was always some kind of last resort. Internet Archive is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it relies mostly on people actively queueing up sites to save.
So most of the time for more obscure sites where the bitrot was already in place and they aren't loading anymore you could use the Google cache to get something out of it – where IA had nothing.
I do worry about the future of IA. Simply because of some of their reckless moves with their book lending policy, they have opened themselves up to being bleed dry financially. That plus the amount of copyright infringement openly available on the site is just waiting to be attacked.
I am waiting for Nintendo to get wind of the huge ROM dumps on there, it is not going to pretty. No manner of 'moral high ground' will defend against lawyers.
They aren't really fighting it, because they never picked a winnable battle.
Rather, they overextended themselves massively in a blunder akin to just throwing themselves on their enemy's sword. They decided to go all-or-nothing on uncontrolled digital lending when there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that the current laws would give them any wiggle room. And unsurprisingly, it will give them a mortal wound.
"Pick a winnable fight" means the internet archive does not exist. Copyright in the US is very clear cut. There is no fight to "win" without changing the law.
That means advocacy. That sometimes means civil disobedience and getting society to fight for them. You want an internet archive? We need to reform copyright law.
The Internet Archive already pushed the boundaries and existed for long enough to make meaningful headway. They were winning the fight by picking the right battles and flying under the radar all the way up until they decided to completely overstep their mission and take on a fight that no one had any hope they would win.
I would agree, but IA did eventually add a mechanism for removing a site/copyrighted content entirely.
If they were straight up ignoring or rejecting DMCA takedown requests, then that would be a self-immolation that is similarly pyrrhic to the uncontrolled digital lending operation.
Sure, but the guy who would conceive and execute on this idea was never going to be a guy who would stop there.
Folks like this don’t aim at some point and then achieve it and stay there. They aim higher, land where they do, and continue to target the higher point. It’s how it is.
You can tell because how many of the rest of the people who would have stopped and flown under the radar have duplicated the Archive and served it without the taint of the ebook lending? Precisely zero.
Hm, what's that Carl Sagan quote, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Brewster Kahle's vision for the Internet Archive as an electronic repository for human knowledge is the former. His belief that he can just blithely tussle with the entire copyright regime in such a half-cocked manner is the latter. You should not confuse folly for audacity. Especially when it might completely jeopardize the former.
I'll believe it when the pragmatic someone will replicate the Archive in all but ebook lending. Exactly zero of these wise men have done anything which is what I expect from those who speak who never do.
Slavish "the man in the arena" worship isn't particularly audacious. Unquestioning support for audacity for the sake of it speaks to lack of discernment. And to parrot a HN truism- a failure to account for survivor bias.
By all means, romanticize recklessness even when it results in self-defeating catastrophe. Yet there are plenty of other worthier figures to lionize and archives to patronize- Alexandra Elbakyan and Sci-Hub, the anonymous samizdat dissidents and LibGen.
It's not worship. It's an observation. Those who talk, say they would stop at a precise stopping point, but they never start. Those who do, almost always overshoot this precise stopping point that the talkers refer to. An IA that has the precise stopping point is possible today. But zero people have made it. This is not unique.
In fact, I'll tell you what, you make it and I will dedicate my ArchiveTeam Warrior to your project instead for a year.
You don't have to play the part of a disgruntled groupie that hard. Perhaps we can talk once you've calmed down a little, but now seems like a bad time.
You guys both broke the site guidelines in this tit-for-tat spat. Please avoid those in the future. It's not what this site is for, destroys what it is for, and is tedious.
Great! Until then, I will simply accept that you are someone with valid fears, but based on your insistence on ignoring abundant evidence, is arguing on bad faith.
You guys both broke the site guidelines in this tit-for-tat spat. Please avoid those in the future. It's not what this site is for, destroys what it is for, and is tedious.
But the arena for that fight is legislation. Weed didn't become legal through lawsuits, it became legal because laws were repealed. I hope IA prevails but it's long shot, even more with the Heritage infestation of the courts.
The “problem” is that society doesn’t see Nintendo/Disney/et al as copyright trolls - instead they’re successful businesses who made content and profit. Connecting those dots to archival work and historic preservation is a long slow process and won’t be successful in courts without legal changes.
We have to stop prioritizing it over everything else. You can't compete in the global playground if you have impossible to implement entitlement programs. Priority has to be new work not existing work and definitely not the work of dead people. We have countless similar schemes were people are to be rewarded for things done long ago. One can't pretend it isn't slowing everything down.
Everyone just ignoring bad laws and contradicting them can remove laws too. But of course this is a niche topic that would never get such broad support.
A lot of people smoking weed is certainly a component for the prohibition to fail at some point.
Writing mails to legislative members isn't enough if you don't have any form of leverage.
Jury nullification is the real mechanism for We The People when we don't consent to be held to laws passed by They The Wealthy/Bribed Lawmakers
It requires that people refuse plea deals and demand jury trials, and that the jury is educated on what jury nullification is but when prosecutors can't get a conviction regardless of much evidence they have of guilt the laws will get changed or at least they stop being enforced.
AFAIU the jury doesn't have final say in civil trials so this would only work partially (copyright infringement can be both a civil dispute as well as a criminal matter).
They risked one of the greatest public goods in the history of humanity on a battle that everyone knew they would lose.
That's not an admirable underdog fight and it's not a glorious martyrdom, it's at best a naive slip up and at worst an ignoble organizational suicide attempt.
Change isn't going to happen because people recklessly throw themselves against the draconian laws and get annihilated by them—it will happen when people strategically set up a battle that they can win or persuade Congress to fix it.
On a related note: Those ships are highly sought after. At some point there will probably a startup using this data to salvage all these ships.
Why? Because it was before the nuclear bomb and all the other desasters that followed which actually permanently raised our background radiation levels.
And because these ships were and still are underwater, they have been largely unaffected by this.
It might not seem much but apparently the radiation difference is enough, so for things that go into your body (like after an operation) only this old steel is used.
Since we've stopped nuclear testing, though, it's returned pretty close to normal, and such steel is no longer as sought after.
> World anthropogenic background radiation levels peaked at 0.11 mSv/yr above natural levels in 1963, the year that the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted. Since then, by about 2008, anthropogenic background radiation has decreased to 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels.
There is nothing left of those remains. The flesh was gone between a few days to a year or so depending on the water temperature. Microorganisms feed on the collagen binding the inorganic matrix, reducing the bones to dust within 10 years at the most.
> Naval shipwrecks are granted sovereign immunity under international law and remain the property of their nations, in this case Japan. These protections makes it illegal to destroy them without permission from Tokyo.
By your logic, any random long-urbanized space on Earth should remain untouched because at some point it was the site of people's (often violent) deaths.
These ships weren't memorial vessels, they were just ships doing work and there's nothing wrong with salvaging them. Cemeteries are a different story. They represent places where people specifically chose to bury their dead for the sake of memorializing them.
By your logic, any random long-urbanized space on Earth should remain untouched because at some point it was the site of people's (often violent) deaths. These ships weren't memorial vessels, they were just ships doing work and there's nothing wrong with salvaging them. Cemeteries are a different story. They represent places where people specifically chose to bury their dead for the sake of memorializing them.
They don't need to have been underwater; the steel just has to have been made pre-1945. The steelmaking process incorporates of lot of gases into the final product.
Nah, they don’t use low-rad steel for medical implants. Mostly for scientific instruments that would thrown off by even a small rise in background radiation.
IIRC the bulk of the supply came from the scuttled German fleet at Scapa Flow, where the ships involved were not graves - they were intentionally scuttled by the crew, who got off and were rescued.
I still don't understand why ore dug up out of the ground and made into steel is more effected by this than this steel. (Edit, made into steel, not iron)
Steelmaking is the combination of iron ore and carbon (from coked coal) with huge amounts of forced air or direct oxygen to form the alloy of carbon and iron we call steel.
One notable form of radioactive contamination is Carbon-14, which is what makes radiocarbon dating after ~1950 unreliable. Though of course since the carbon in coal is itself primordial, that isn't the principle route of steel contamination.
Best I can make out it's radioactive isotopes in the air itself which increase the radiation background of post-WWII steel, with several sites mentioning Cobalt-60. Substances used in the post-smelting processing of steel (welding rods and the like) may also introduce contamination.
Given the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty which has halted most atmostpheric nuclear testing, radiation levels have fallen to the point that current steel is largely similar to pre-WWII "low-emissivity" steel in terms of background radiation.
When you turn iron ore into steel with blast furnaces and steel making (e.g. basic oxygen process) you blast it with atmospheric air (or oxygen made from atmospheric air), and tiny amounts of impurities in the air (such as fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing) get embedded in the steel.
Yes, this is the same air you're breathing. No, the levels are not high enough to be a health issue. But it's an issue for very sensitive scientific instruments and such.
Also to note that, in theory, you could use purified oxygen for the forging and create new steel similar to low-background radiation steel, but it would be ridiculously expensive given how much oxygen is used.
mostly because steel is used for things like particle accelerators that are understandably very sensitive to contamination - as a sibling comment noted this is not much of an issue anymore.
> At some point there will probably a startup using this data to salvage all these ships.
FFS, yes this is HN and all, but why does everything have to be a "startup"?
FWIW, there's lots of under-the-radar (apparently mostly Chinese) companies that are hard at work breaking up these ships and selling them for scrap. Considering many of those wrecks are war graves, a lot of people are kind of upset by this.
Seriously though, it's no longer starting a small business or even a business. It's a startup. Is this just a change in the language, or is there an appreciable difference between a new salvage business and new salvage startup?
There's a value to scrap steel but it's not all that great, and the low-rad steel isn't as much in demand as it used to be. Many of these ships are likely in such deep water that they aren't worth salvaging.
There is another kind of wreck used for extreme low background physics experiments. These experiments (put deep underground) need even lower background than medical equipment. They use lead for shielding, but any modern lead is contaminated with Pb-210, an isotope with a half life of 22 years. This contamination comes from the radioactive decay of uranium in the lead ore.
These experiments have come to use lead that's been underwater, in wrecks, for centuries, so almost all the Pb-210 has decayed away.
There is a very good book by the french journalist Florence de Changy about MH370, which "solves" all the issues with most of the theories out there and proposes what really happened.
So far I've not come across a more sophisticated theory that still passes Occam's Razor.
US shooting down a civilian passenger liner because of hypothesized secret cargo headed for China, and successfully covering it up for 10 years doesn't sound like something that passes Occam's Razor at all -- sounds like the very opposite, in fact.
One should look for theories with less sophistication, not more.
I obviously don't believe anything but deliberate murder-suicide by the pilot.
But just know that these things did happen.
There's lots of indications that surfaced recently that the Israeli air force secretly shoot down Itavia Flight 870 in 1980 to stop a transport of nuclear technology to Iran. They had mistaken the correct flight because their intelligence in France (were the uranium was being produced for Iran) pointed them in the wrong direction.
A very interesting book on the topic has been recently released with a deep and thorough investigation across France, Italy and Israel and it is to date the most credible and documented explanation for who shoot down the flight.
The book has been followed by quite a lot of investigative journalism in Italy that gives this theory lots of credit.
"In 2023, former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato said that France downed the plane while targeting a Libyan military jet in an attempt to kill Muammar Gaddafi. Amato said that Italy tipped off Libya about the planned assassination and consequently Gaddafi did not board the Libyan military jet"
To be honest, this theory of mistaken identity sounds much more plausible than anybody shooting down (or bombing) a random passenger plane flying an Italian domestic flight on purpose. Whether the presumably Libyan plane they actually targeted was transporting nuclear material or Gaddafi, I have no idea. Shame on them anyway for covering it up.
That is an old theory that has been largely debunked by the book I suggested and the evidence that has surfaced recently. Not only that, but Israel was the only country in the planet that successfully showed to be able to traverse the mediterranean while avoiding completely radar detection flying thousands of miles at extremely low altitudes in Operation Wooden Leg[1] and some others.
Also Amato's words are quite meaningless as he never had an idea, and he was not prime minister at the time.
This reportage[2], albeit in Italian, aired by Italian state tv last year, starts by interviewing the person you quote Giuliano Amato, and he clearly points out that the government has never had a clear idea on who shoot it down. It goes into huge detail on all the elements behind the Israeli thesis and it's the only credible one for which he have substantial proofs, from the fact that France used civilian airplanes to transport uranium, to the fact that special cargo was indeed used on the very same flight (but in a different date), interviews with Israeli and French officials and Italian civilians that had seen fighter jets above the cost of Calabria and all pointed to Israeli fighters (albeit, not the F15s used in Operation Wooden Leg).
Can't say that I've had a bad experience. Love eSIMs!
In my iPhone I have one physical SIM for my private number and an eSIM for my business number. Works great. When traveling I disable the business number and instead use Airalo.
So far it's much more pleasant than a "real" SIM, especially when traveling. No hassle of getting a card etc.
It is bug ridden, with a long standing crufty code base nobody really knows how to interact with. It is getting some love nowadays, yes, but I think it will take some ages for it to be modern enough to have more devs willing to work on it.
Also TB does not support conversations (think of GMail), so you don't a full thread view. Pointless for operation.
I still use it, but just because Outlook is far worse.
Which software/apps are your favorites? I love Goodnotes, but not having infinitve canvas is a problem for me indeed. A bit weird to have physical constraints employed on a device living in the digital world where it should not apply.
Concepts.app right now. My only gripe is shortcut bindings are not arbitrarily configurable and for color selection I have to tap a pretty darn small target area.
But no others have infinite canvas that I could find.
Otherwise the standard notes app is good. I don't need fluff.
It has been a while, but I've used Notability for teaching purposes over the pandemic. I can't recall why, but there was an exodus from Notability to Goodnotes at some point, so you may already have insight into the two.
Well, because I'm paying. I get that free tiers need some kind of "rate limiting" (because essentially this is that, as well). So even if I am a bot: I payed for the service.
Apart from that: The experience is shitty. Do not shove Captchas in my face.
It’s a wonderful resource but they neglect the pagetitle element which is set to “McMaster-Carr” on every page. Links opened in tabs/windows all get the same title and bookmark titles need to be manually edited to be useful.
Why do developers of otherwise great websites neglect page titles?
Especially here in Europe / Germany, where entire quarters where bombed to rubbles newer streets do not match neither namely nor spatially.
I loved how you could "move back in time" in street view. I think that has been killed too? There is a lovely Twitter/X account for Detroit tho: https://x.com/DetroitStreetVu