Given that the Internet Archive is the de facto standard way to cite material as seen on a given date — they’re a trustworthy party that will probably persist for a long time — that’s going to make it harder to cite content on Reddit.
Don’t forget, Reddit is legally allowed to train on your content, but not the other way around. It’s consistent with US law, where corporate tax is half of income tax.
It’s important for people writing papers and such who need to cite material.
I wonder if there’s some way to use the TLS certificate to get a cryptographically-signed copy of a webpage with timestamp that someone could later validate as having been downloaded on that date. I don’t know if existing TLS libraries are capable of that. Like, Web browser menu option “Store cryptographically-signed webpage”. Absent a later certificate compromise, I’d think that that’d at least provide people a way to credibly say “this is really what was on that webpage on August 15th, 2026”. Like, you’d have to save a copy of the TLS session and then have libraries that could read and validate an already-generated session. The timestamp is already embedded in the session.
Some protocols, like OTR, are designed to specifically not allow that, but AFAIK, TLS could.
EDIT: Well, technically the timestamp is gonna be during the handshake, not tied to the HTTP request internal to the TLS session. It might be possible to game that by establishing a TLS session, holding it open without activity, and issuing a request much later. I’d think that that’d potentially be disallowed by Web servers one way or another, since otherwise you could probably do a denial-of-service attack by holding open a lot of sessions for a long time.
EDIT2: Oh, wait, no, shouldn’t be an issue, because the HTTP Date response header is gonna have a timestamp tied to the response.
Given that the Internet Archive is the de facto standard way to cite material as seen on a given date — they’re a trustworthy party that will probably persist for a long time — that’s going to make it harder to cite content on Reddit.
Damn, guess if you want reddit data to train your AI that you’ll need to pay Spez for access.
Don’t forget, Reddit is legally allowed to train on your content, but not the other way around. It’s consistent with US law, where corporate tax is half of income tax.
It’s important for people writing papers and such who need to cite material.
I wonder if there’s some way to use the TLS certificate to get a cryptographically-signed copy of a webpage with timestamp that someone could later validate as having been downloaded on that date. I don’t know if existing TLS libraries are capable of that. Like, Web browser menu option “Store cryptographically-signed webpage”. Absent a later certificate compromise, I’d think that that’d at least provide people a way to credibly say “this is really what was on that webpage on August 15th, 2026”. Like, you’d have to save a copy of the TLS session and then have libraries that could read and validate an already-generated session. The timestamp is already embedded in the session.
Some protocols, like OTR, are designed to specifically not allow that, but AFAIK, TLS could.
EDIT: Well, technically the timestamp is gonna be during the handshake, not tied to the HTTP request internal to the TLS session. It might be possible to game that by establishing a TLS session, holding it open without activity, and issuing a request much later. I’d think that that’d potentially be disallowed by Web servers one way or another, since otherwise you could probably do a denial-of-service attack by holding open a lot of sessions for a long time.
EDIT2: Oh, wait, no, shouldn’t be an issue, because the HTTP Date response header is gonna have a timestamp tied to the response.