Harvard University’s Berkman Center Releases Amber, a “Mutual Aid” Tool for Bloggers & Website Owners to Help Keep the Web Available [via Robustness and Archiving Community Group]

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is pleased to
release Amber, a free software tool for WordPress and Drupal that preserves
content and prevents broken links. When installed on a blog or website, Amber
can take a snapshot of the content of every linked page, ensuring that even if
those pages are interfered with or blocked, the original content will be
available.



“The Web’s decentralization is one of its strongest features,” said
Jonathan Zittrain, Faculty Chair of the Berkman Center and George Bemis
Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. “But it also means that
attempting to follow a link might not work for any number of reasons. Amber
harnesses the distributed resources of the Web to safeguard it. By allowing a
form of mutual assistance among Web sites, we can together ensure that
information placed online can remain there, even amidst denial of service
attacks or broad-based attempts at censorship.”

The release of Amber builds on an earlier proposal from Zittrain and Sir Tim
Berners-Lee for a “mutual aid treaty for the Internet” that would enable
operators of websites to easily bolster the robustness of the entire web. It
also aims to mitigate risks associated with increasing centralization of online
content. Increasingly fewer entities host information online, creating choke
points that can restrict access to web content. Amber addresses this by enabling
the storage of snapshots via multiple archiving services, such as the Internet
Archive’s Wayback Machine and Perma.cc.

Amber is useful for any organization or individual that has an interest in
preserving the content to which their website links. In addition to news
outlets, fact-checking organizations, journalists, researchers, and independent
bloggers, human rights curators and political activists could also benefit from
using Amber to preserve web links. The launch is the result of a multi-year
research effort funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the
Department of State.

“We hope supporters of free expression may use Amber to rebroadcast web
content in a manner that aids against targeted censorship of the original web
source,” said Genève Campbell, Amber’s technical project manager. “The
more routes we provide to information, the more all people can freely share that
information, even in the face of filtering or blockages.”

Amber is one of a suite of initiatives of the Berkman Center focused on
preserving access to information. Other projects include Internet Monitor, which
aims to evaluate, describe, and summarize the means, mechanisms, and extent of
Internet content controls and Internet activity around the world; Lumen, an
independent research project collecting and analyzing requests for removal of
online content; and Herdict, a tool that collects and disseminates real-­time,
crowdsourced information about Internet filtering, denial of service attacks,
and other blockages. It also extends the mission of Perma.cc, a project of the
Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School Library. Perma.cc is a service
that helps scholars, courts and others create web citation links that will never
break.

Amber is now available for sites that run on WordPress.org or Drupal. Find out
more and download the plugin at amberlink.org.



----------

This post sent on Robustness and Archiving Community Group



'Harvard University’s Berkman Center Releases Amber, a “Mutual Aid” Tool
for Bloggers & Website Owners to Help Keep the Web Available'

https://www.w3.org/community/irobar/2016/01/29/harvard-universitys-berkman-center-releases-amber-a-mutual-aid-tool-for-bloggers-website-owners-to-help-keep-the-web-available/



Learn more about the Robustness and Archiving Community Group: 

https://www.w3.org/community/irobar

Received on Friday, 29 January 2016 18:06:40 UTC