Let's say there's a website that you want to make a local mirror of.  This means that you can refer to it offline, and you can make offline backups of it for archival.  Let's further state that you have access to some server someplace with enough disk space to hold the copy, and that you can start a task, disconnect, and let it run to completion some time later, with GNU Screen for example.  Let's further state that you want the local copy of the site to not be broken when you load it in a browser; all the links …

UPDATE - 20170302 - Added Firefox plugin for the Internet Archive.

UPDATE - 20170205 - Added Chrome plugin for the Internet Archive.

Note: This article is aimed at people all across the spectrum of levels of experience with computers.  You might see a lot of stuff you already know; then again, you might learn one or two things that hadn't showed up on your radar yet.  Be patient.

In George Orwell's novel 1984, one of his plot points of the story was something called the Memory Hole. They were slots all over the building in which Winston Smith worked, into which documents which the …

A couple of weeks ago my webhosting provider sent me a polite e-mail to inform me that I was using too much disk space. A cursory examination of their e-mail showed that they were getting upset about the daily backups of my site that I was stashing in a hidden directory, and they really prefer that all files in your home directory be accessible. I ran a quick check and, sure enough, about twenty gigabytes times two weeks of daily backups adds up to a fair amount of disk space. So, the question is, how do I keep backing up …

Set a Google Alert on the phrase "we take security very seriously" and leaf through it every time you get hits. Often, if a popular website gets compromised, they'll post about it on their blog a couple of days before the e-mail announcement hits your inbox. It may not buy you a lot of time but two days is better than none at all.

It came as something of a surprise to those of us following the defeat and subsequent cold storage of SOPA that, just a day later one of the largest file locker websites on the Net, megaupload.com was shut down by the FBI. Data centers in Virginia, Washington DC, New Zealand, and Hong Kong were raided by law enforcement and their cages in those centers were cleaned out. Every last server chugging away in those facilities was seized, and are in the queue for forensic analysis right now. Just a day after Megaupload went dark over a dozen others voluntarily …

Scarcely one year after the initial appearance of the Storm Worm and its resulting botnet, some heretofore untapped functionality's been pushed out in one update or another in just the past couple of days: Not only is the botnet sending out phishing-related spam but the phishing sites are hosted on the infected machines themselves. The information security community is speculating that it may now be possible for the controller of the botnet to partition it and assign different tasks to different segments of the infected net.population. As if that weren't problem enough, the domains that the phishing sites use …