Mirror As You Link

Mirror As You Link (MAYL) addresses one of the most persistent problems on the Internet: content frequently disappears, seemingly at random. This can happen for a variety of reasons, from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and state-sponsored censorship, to the more mundane yet all-too-common cases of server failure, “Slashdotted” websites, and intentional revisions by the content owner. It has long been recognized that the solution to the problem of information loss is to obey the LOCKSS (“Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe”) principle, making multiple backups of content that is at risk of disappearing. Yet if we consider all the ways that content can be lost, it’s clear that all content is at risk of disappearing. Indeed, even the centralized backups and archives that we make of content are at risk (hence the importance of “lots” of copies).

Mirror As You Link (MAYL) is as simple as the name implies: when a website uses MAYL, every time it links to another site, it automatically creates a mirror of the linked portion of the site at the time the link is created. This mirror is housed on the linking website’s server, and is accessible at any time through an icon that appears beside the link itself. Most of the time, this mirror will be unobtrusive, and users will click through the regular link to get to the linked website itself. However, if the linked website were to go down, or perhaps change in some way that made it no longer relevant for the originally linked purpose, the reader would not be presented with a dead-end, but instead would have an accessible copy of the content that was originally linked to.

For more information, please visit http://mirrorasyoulink.org/