bulk downloading PDFs from a website using Edge

The Tip of the Night for October 28, 2022 discussed how to use the Linkclump extension for Chrome to bulk download multiple PDFs from a website. Note that the extension designed for Chrome can be used in the Edge browser which includes a setting that will help expedite the process of downloading many PDFs quickly.

Access the Edge browser settings for PDFs by going to: edge://settings/content/pdfDocuments  

Toggle the option to always download PDF files when they are opened in Edge.

If you browse to the page for the Linkclump extension in the Chrome store using the Edge browser:

. . . you will see that it gives you the option to install it in Edge.

With Linkclump activated, when you hold down 'z; on the keyboard and press the left click button on your mouse, you can drag an orange box over the links to PDFs you want to download. With Edge set to download PDF files automatically, they will be saved to your selected download folder in one step.

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 After pulling down an archived page, I never really gave the site much more thought other than to sometimes wonder about how the Internet Archive gets the resources to store so much data on its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.

Recommended internet speed for Zoom

Keep in mind that the recommended minimum internet speed for an online video conference is only about 4.0 to 5.0 megabytes per second - not very high by today's standards.

A technical guide posted here by Zoom, shows that you'll need a stronger speed for a group session, as opposed to a one on one video call. An audio call should be possible at 100 kilobytes per second, and screen sharing only requires about twice as much speed ~200 kbps.

The University of Chicago Data Science Institute conducted a test to measure the amount of bandwidth required for Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom video conferences and determined that they averaged about 1-2 mbps download, and 0.75-1.4 mbps upload. Teams tends to take up more bandwidth than the other applications.

Not much difference. However on a small local network when multiple video calls are active, choosing Zoom over its competitors can make a decisive difference.

Teams also took longer to recover from an interruption in a WiFi signal than Zoom or Meet.

The study also found that systems may give priority to the first call that is initiated.