Note: This post was originally quite long and mostly a duplicate of things I wrote elsewhere, so I replaced it with this summary piece.

Micro-Project Summary

While troubleshooting NPTv6 on my router, I stumbled across a dead link to unique-local-ipv6.com, which generated IPv6 ULAs. Taking a look around, I found the site was perfectly-preserved in the Wayback Machine - at least, a version of it was before some spammer bought the original domain.

Feeling slighted by the scourge of spam on the internet (and wanting to reduce the number of dead links in the world), I bought the domain and set upon recreating the site. I picked through the original site and its dependencies, polished a couple of errors out, and rehosted it on my preferred storage + CDN. It’s now available at unique-local-ipv6.com for all your ULA-generating needs. I also wrote up an About page which explains the site’s history and how it was restored.

To be clear, the organization doing the important work here is the Internet Archive, who crawled and preserved the site throughout the years. Recreating it from existing material and rehosting it is trivial. I am a recurring donor to the Internet Archive and if it is possible for you to support IA financially or otherwise, they greatly deserve it in my opinion.

Reflections on Other Work

While restoring unique-local-ipv6.com, I noticed the original owner left an obscure copyright in the footer - the copyright seal was placed next to the site’s domain, rather than an individual or organization. I have some suspicions about who the original copyright holder might be, but little concrete information. Throughout the site the original copyright holder didn’t appear to grant any license for use, modification, or redistribution – so I thought to myself, was I doing the right thing by modifying redistributing their work?

Reflecting on my own sites, I realized that someone else in the future would read my blog in the very same way. Some work had been licensed under a Creative Commons license, but not all of it - typically “data” was licensed but not “posts” or “writing.” After reviewing from an outside perspective, I realized this was unnecessarily complex. Anyone who will copy my site maliciously (ex. SEO, spam, etc.) will not check for or obey license information anyway, but someone looking to build upon my work could be off-put by the complexity if I wasn’t around to clarify. I will die eventually, y’know!

So as of January 2022, my entire blog has been relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. The full text is available here. For anyone in the future who might build upon the ashes of my website or works - fished out of the Way-Way-Wayback Machine in the Galactic Internet Catacombs - godspeed to you. <3