We show that state-of-the-art services for creating trusted timestamps in blockchain-based networks do not adequately allow for timestamping of web pages. They accept data by value (e.g., images and text), but not by reference (e.g., URIs of web pages). Also, we discuss difficulties in repeatedly generating the same cryptographic hash value of an archived web page. We then introduce several requirements to be fulfilled in order to produce repeatable hash values for archived web pages.
Eltgrowth @cite_13 outlines several judicial decisions that involve evidence (i.e., archived web pages) taken from the Internet Archive (e.g., court cases like Telewizja Polska USA, Inc. v. Echostar Satellite Corp, and St. Luke's Cataract & Laser Institute v. James C. Sanderson). The author mentions that there is an open question whether to consider an archived web page as a duplicate of the original web page at a particular time in the past. This concern might prevent considering archived web pages as evidence.
@cite_13
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This Note addresses the use of archived Internet content obtained via the Wayback Machine, a service provided by the Internet Archive that accesses the largest online digital collection of archived Web pages in the world. Given the dynamic nature of the World Wide Web, Internet content is constantly changed, amended, and removed. As a result, interim versions of Web pages have limited life spans. The Internet Archive indexes and stores Web pages to allow researchers to access discarded or since-altered versions. In the legal profession, archived Web pages have become an increasingly helpful form of proof. Intellectual property enforcers have recognized the value of the Internet Archive as a tool for tracking down infringers, but evidence from the Internet Archive has rarely been admitted at trial. This Note surveys the handful of judicial opinions and orders that comment on the admission of Internet Archive evidence and explores the conflict underlying these approaches. As an alternative to the courses they have taken, this Note urges courts to treat the introduction of archived Web pages as implicating a best evidence issue in addition to an authentication question. Under this approach, courts would decide using evidence sufficient to the purpose, but not necessarily admissible at trial, whether the archived page qualifies as a 'duplicate' of a page that once appeared on the Web. Beyond that, courts would apply authentication standards already developed to decide whether a reasonable jury could find, based only on admissible evidence, whether proffered evidence accurately represents the page stored on the Internet Archive server and, if necessary, whether the original page accurately represented material placed on the originating site by the site’s owner or operator. With this additional step, reliable evidence from the Wayback Machine can become as easily admitted as any other Internet-derived proof. With its seemingly limitless scope, the World Wide Web promises enormous advantages, along with enormous problems, to researchers who seek to use it as a source of data. Websites change continually and a high level of flux makes it challenging to capture a snapshot of the web, or even a cross-section of a small subset of the web. A web archive, such as those at the Internet Archive, promises to store and deliver repeated cross-sections of the entire web, and it also offers the potential for longitudinal analysis. Whether this potential is realized depends on the extent to which the archive has truly captured the web. Therefore, a crucial question for Internet researchers is: ‘How good are the archival data?’ We ask if there are systematic biases in the Internet Archive, using a case study to address this question. Specifically, we are interested in whether biases exist in the British websites stored in the Internet Archive data. We find that the Internet Archive contains a surprisingly small subset, about 24 , of the webpages of the website that we use for our case study (the travel site, TripAdvisor). Furthermore, the subset of data we found in the Internet Archive appears to be biased and is not a random sample of the webpages on the site. The archived data we examine has a bias toward prominent webpages. This bias could create serious problems for research using archived websites. The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocolwise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in the most common Web protocol, HTTP, prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a signicant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. This paper proposes the protocol-based Memento solution to address this problem, and describes a proof-of-concept experiment that includes major servers of archival content, including Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web. Web archives, such as the Internet Archive, preserve an unprecedented abundance of materials regarding major events and transformations in our society. In this paper, we present an approach for building event-centric sub-collections from such large archives, which includes not only the core documents related to the event itself but, even more importantly, documents describing related aspects (e.g., premises and consequences). This is achieved by identifying relevant concepts and entities from a knowledge base, and then detecting their mentions in documents, which are interpreted as indicators for relevance. We extensively evaluate our system on two diachronic corpora, the New York Times Corpus and the US Congressional Record; additionally, we test its performance on the TREC KBA Stream Corpus and on the TREC-CAR dataset, two publicly available large-scale web collections.