Is the Wayback Machine Showing Frozen Moments in Time?

Nearly all litigation support professionals and paralegals have had occasion to use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It's very common for deposition or trial exhibits to be prepared which rely on the versions of web pages archived at https://web.archive.org/ . After pulling down an archived page, I never really gave the site much more thought other than to sometimes wonder about how the Internet Archive gets the resources to store so much data on its servers.

This past week, I tuned into a Lexbe webinar conducted by Nicholas Taylor, who is the Deputy Group Leader for Technology Strategy and Services with the Research Library at Los Alamos National Laboratory. For a subject on a topic I had assumed there was not much to learn about, Taylor's presentation proved to be very informative.

Most attorneys and legal professionals have likely assumed that the images stored in the Wayback Machine simply show a webpage from a particular moment in time. This is not necessarily the case.

If you search for the web page: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and select one of the dates on which the webpage was periodically archived . . .

. . . you will be taken to a version of the page with the selected date clearly listed in IAWM banner.

However, you may have missed the small drop down menu captioned, 'About this capture' at the right. Click there and you'll see a long list indicating the multiple elements which comprise the page were captured at different times.

As Taylor demonstrates in the webinar, this 'temporal incoherence' can mean that different parts of the web page being shown together on the IAWM, were never actually meant to be viewed together. The example he gives shows how an archived image from the Weather Underground site shows a text caption listing weather conditions in an American town at 8:54 AM in the morning, but a radar graphic from 5:34 PM does not show the rain which the caption indicates took place that morning.

You'll also notice that the 'About this capture' information shows that the archived image was collected using Archive-IT - a service provided by the Internet Archive which outside parties used. An individual user can save any web page at their own initiative at: https://web.archive.org/save/

This is certainly a helpful resource to use for evidence preservation that anyone working for a law firm can easily access. It's not even necessary to create an account. The Internet Archive is actually working with many hundreds of outside parties to build its archive - some of these focus on capturing content they deem to be particularly important.

IAWM also has a redline tool which will allow you to compare how two different versions of a web page have changed. The 'Changes' option uses a color scheme to show how much change took place between successive dates on the calendar:

Select two different times for the same page, and the IAWM will show in yellow where text was removed, and in blue where text was added:

Taylor has his own site, nullhandle.org, which I encourage everyone to check out. Please watch the Lexbe webinar carefully. He includes the results of his own research into how many federal district and circuit courts will or will not allow for Internet Archive evidence to be admitted by judicial notice; expert witness testimony; affidavits; or by fact testimony by a witness with personal knowledge of a site.

The amount of data archived by IAWM truly is extensive - even my own one-man blog has been archived - see: https://web.archive.org/web/20250119082936/http://www.litigationsupporttipofthenight.com/   - and I promise this was done by some service I am not associated with.

Portable keyboard and mouse to use with iPhone

The Tip of Night for December 16, 2024 discussed how to use the VM Ware app for an iPhone. As mentioned, if you really want to get work done on the run, you'll need a keyboard that you can use with your phone. Today I received the Samsers folding keyboard and mouse - available here on Amazon - and was able to successfully pair via BlueTooth. I'm writing this post on my iPhone from within VM Ware using the keyboard and mouse now.

You certainly wouldn't want to work for more than a couple of hours this way, but if you need to find something on a network drive for an attorney, or make limited edits to a spreadsheet, you can do so without needing to head back to the office or to wherever you have a laptop.

The Samsers keyboard folds up, and comes with a case in which you can store both it and the mouse.

Don't miss that you'll need to flip the switch on the side at the top of the keyboard to power it on, and the mouse will not work until you have turned on Assistive Touch in your iPhone settings.

You can also use the keyboard and mouse by connecting a USB-A receiver hidden in the bottom of the mouse if you have a device with the necessary port, or if you've got a USB-C to A converter. It personally drove me a little nuts that pushing up on the scroll button moved the screen down, and vice versa. This is caused by the iPhone's assistive touch function, which reverses the direction of the wheel, and apparently there is not a way to fix it.

Above the numberpad, you'll see a key with a battery icon. Tap this to find out the charge remaining for the keyboard - a little red light will flash 4 times when the charge is 100%; 3 times for 75%; 2 times for 50% and 1 time for 25%.

I really didn't have any trouble smoothly typing on the keyboard. It felt quite natural.

Activate the Zoom feature for an iPhone under the Accessibility settings so you can get a window at the best possible visibility. In this mode when you doubletap with three fingers, you'll be able to use a scrollbar to adjust the zoom setting.

Relativity Study on AI

Relativity commissioned a study last year on how lawyers are using artificial intelligence. Here are some key points that I found interesting:

1. While 38% of law firm study participants used AI software, significantly more — 50 % — of government employees did.

2. AI software was most often used by legal teams for document review.

3. Two-thirds of study participants have implemented training programs to help employees learn how to use AI.

4. Paralegals actually use AI more often than lawyers.

5. AI is more often used as a way to automate low-level tasks, and with the goal of cutting costs - two times more frequently than as a means to enhance risk compliance or legal analysis.

6. There was more concern about the loss of confidential data, than there was about misleading AI hallucinations.

7. IT professionals tend to be concerned about the loss of confidential data that is input into large language models (LLMs).

8. Law firms were twice as likely to use in-house proprietary models or software provided by vendors as they were to rely on publicly available AI software.