Aren’t you basically just describing FOSS and framing it as a complaint? Valve for example has a vested interest in improving their software stack, and they do just that by donating both money and engineers to various projects. If these open source projects did not exist, they would have to spend the same or even more money on a proprietary licensed alternative, or to develop their own solution.

There is a specialized player for that. Just run this command:

cat podcast.ogg >> /dev/null

Gets rid of all the uninteresting parts of any podcast!

I’m not 100% following, but if this is content that’s gone from being publicly viewable, uploading it to archive.org seems appropriate (but don’t take my word for it). Though if you do upload, it sounds like just the “part files” or just the “full files” would be enough. You could then also seed the torrent there.

The imgur links you might try uploading to ArchiveTeam’s imgur-grab project. Looking at the tracker, the archival seems currently half dead, but I’m sure they’ll get around to saving what’s left. (Unless it’s dead because imgur made it nigh impossible, which I can definitely imagine)

If you store it in compressed chunks (or on a file system that supports compression, I guess), that should be a great deal smaller, being text only.

They supposedly never delete good stuff, just make it unavailable, as you said. Maybe we’ll get them in a hundred or so years!

ArchiveTeam’s uploads also don’t have torrent files (anymore). Their wiki says that they disabled it to lighten the load on IA’s servers, as creating a .torrent file for a 10+GB upload takes considerable time, especially if it has to be redone.

Ah I see now that the image you posted was from tineye as well! Sadly I could only find similar covers, not that exact one. Archiveteam grabbed many gigabytes of stuff from the site, but this picture was not among them.

The one from fangamer seems good but if you’re looking for specifically that image, it should be in there: https://tineye.com/search/51d526a53a45339dbff6f0501f0cdee0b6417766?sort=size&order=desc&page=1

edit: just noticed this post is old, whoopsie :)

They are about to double the rate lmit, so it should be a little better…

Yeah, that’s what I’m getting now, too. Hopefully they take the deadline into account for rate limiting… Still good to have warriors ready to retrieve, I guess.

Not sure. They don’t mention 4 being in beta or anything. Though they don’t list much advantage of using it over 3 either.

Still just read-only!

I can only theorize, but I doubt this specifically was the will of the malicious actors :)

Something definitely went wrong on their part, maybe even because of a DOS attack. Javascript-infested sites are anything but trivial to preserve anymore, but mixing it up like this is very unusual.

There is no IA community, so I thought you all might be interested.