I used to work at a startup called Blue Ripple. When I mention it, I like to put in a link to the Blue Ripple website. Because it is a failed startup, the website is no more. So I would link to its archived version at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. If you’ve never used it, it is an amazing thing, storing old copies of websites for posterity (for example, they have the Lotus homepage from November 1996).

Recently, though, the Wayback Machine stopped showing me the Blue Ripple website, instead claiming that access to http://blueripple.com has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt. Huh? Blocked? By the site owner? Sure enough, a domain squatter has slurped up blueripple.com, and has excluded the Internet Archive from visiting with a robots.txt file.

Doesn’t it kind of defeat the whole purpose of the Internet Archive if some crappy-ass domain squatter can prevent access out-of-hand? And why should a robots.txt today prevent the archive from displaying previously crawlable content?

In any case, I’ve put up my own archive of the Blue Ripple site, in case anyone is interested.