KNOW YOUR MEME AND THE HOMOGENIZATION OF WEB HISTORY

Know Your Meme (KYM) is a website devoted to compiling histories, definitions, and examples of internet memes. In the last decade, KYM has become popular among researchers, educators, and day-to-day Web users to understand memes and their meanings. As a result, it has become instrumental in establishing dominant histories of memes on the Web. This paper uses a discursive interface analysis of the KYM website along with the examples of Pepe the Frog, OK Boomer, and niche Facebook meme groups to demonstrate how the website constructs itself as a cultural authority to define and classify memes, and that an overreliance on KYM can have significant stakes. It may overlook entire uses of the meme, potentially downplay harmful ideologies, and generally imply the possibility for a meme to have a single primary meaning. I argue that an overreliance on KYM without acknowledging its limitations tends to overlook the essential plurality of the Web and instead implies a singular history of memes as an element of internet culture. However, KYM can still be a useful resource and to that end, ultimately, I conclude that we should move toward defining KYM as, “a curated collection of user-submitted meme instances and partially crowdsourced definitions.” While KYM is undeniably a useful resource, it is important that those of us who study the histories of the Web are mindful about how we lean upon this particular website and situate it within our work.

Arquivos da web como fonte historiográfica

Este trabalho, trata-se da resenha crítica do livro BRUGGER, Niels, MILLIGAN, Ian (org.) The SAGE handbook of web history. SAGE Publications Limited, 2018. Qual é a memória digital que preservamos agora para futuros usuários e suas respectivas pesquisas? Os artefatos preservados são o que nos permitem (re)construir ou (re)criar a memória, seja ela individual, coletiva ou organizacional. O que fazemos hoje em termos de preservação digital impactará nas fontes de pesquisa que estarão disponíveis e, em uma sociedade que produz crescentes volumes de informação, em múltiplas plataformas, o desafio é constante. Este desafio não se configura somente em termos tecnológicos, mas também nas possibilidades de uso retrospectivo dos conteúdos digitais.

The haunting of GeoCities and the politics of access control on the early Web

Yahoo’s purchase of make-your-own-website platform GeoCities in 1999 and subsequent implementation of a new Terms of Service agreement led to one of the most notable boycotts in Web history. During the “Haunting,” GeoCities users stripped their homepages of color and content, replacing blinking GIFs with excerpts of the offending Terms of Service. In this landmark battle over content rights and access control, protestors used the platform antagonistically, disrupting the value of user-generated content and undermining the company’s strategic vision for the platform. Within a week, the Haunting of GeoCities successfully forced Yahoo to acquiesce to protestor demands and set enduring standards for Terms of Service that preserved greater rights for content creators. This case study from the early Web demonstrates how access is always bound up in a struggle over control and offers a timely reminder of how users have been—and can be—vital agents of platform politics.

WEB ARCHIVES IN RECONSTRUCTING HISTORY OF VIRTUAL MUSEUMS: POTENTIAL AND LIMITATIONS

Web archives are repositories of unique sources on the history of the information society, including the cultural segment of the World Wide Web. The relevance of studying the web history of museum information resources refers to the need to understand the past and contemporary processes of the development of the museum's digital environment in order to more effectively build strategies for future advancement with a valuable impact on society. The article, for the first time, attempts to assess the information potential of web archives for studying the web history of virtual museums and discusses the limitations that prevent the reconstruction of their web history. Web archives are designed to observe web pages and web sites saved at a certain point in time; they analyze the structure and content of the museum web, interpret the visual aids and sections' titles, and track statistics of publication activity. Tracing changes in the role and significance of the digital environment in museum activities, as well as trends in the development of museums, and predicting future trajectories are possible based on the analysis of the dynamics of museums' web content. At the same time, the peculiarities of search engines in web archives, technical restrictions, incompatibility of modern software with earlier formats, limits on scanning information on the World Wide Web to save it, uneven preservation by domain zones in the Internet Archive, and the lack of specialized web preservation programs at national and regional levels restraint the possibility of a comprehensive study of the history of virtual museums. The author concludes that it is necessary to expand national web archiving programs in favour of a more detailed preservation of the cultural segment of the web as a digital cultural heritage, as well as the content of social networks and mobile applications, for future use by researchers.

Risks Mitigation of Defacement Attack Vectors on Educational Institution Websites by Using OWASP and Risk IT Frameworks

According to an article published by The Hacker News in 2006 [1] 21.549 websites defaced by Turkish hacker team, Iskorpitx. It was the largest defacement in web history. Zone-h, the largest defaced website archives [2] listing 11.107.846 websites became the victims of defacement attack. So how about educational institution websites? Are they become the target of defacement attack? In point of fact, University of Maryland, North Dakota University, Butler University, Indiana University and Arkansas State University became the victims of data breach by malicious attacker, the data breach was larger than data breach attack on Sony [3]. After analysing the data filtered from Zone-h archives, we retrieved that the defaced websites belong to educational institution in ASEAN countries; Indonesia (11.615 websites), Malaysia (3.512 websites), Singapore (312 websites), Vietnam (3.294 websites), Thailand (9.860 websites), Brunei Darussalam (30 websites), Cambodia (65 websites), LAO PDR (9 websites), Myanmar (6 websites), Philippines (978 websites) have been efaced in 2015. This paper will analyse the motive, attack methods, risks, impacts and mitigations of defacement attack in educational institutions. MECEES, OWASP and Risk IT will be used as framework. Hacked educational institutions will lead to critical risks .