Could be worse.

Could be MovieCD.

As the censoring and deletion of the past continues interest will increase in any published material from the past.

Yes, I actually contacted Divx's customer support two years ago, because I found and purchased a Divx movie. Was told that Divx as a company has changed ownership twice since the Divx players were a thing and that the present company has no original employees nor even access to the source code for the encoding and playback software used for the Divx movie disc releases. So yes, they are sadly a truly dead media... at least until someone figures out how to crack them, if that ever happens.

I completely agree with you. It's tragic to see so much useful data content being literally erased from existence, which is precisely what's happening. It's like the fiasco with Macromedia/Adobe Flash Player, which has rendered thousands of live and Web Archived websites un-viewable. We all knew Google/Adobe kept issuing notices that Adobe Flash was going to no longer be supported, but I never imagined, nor apparently did anyone else, that they literally possessed a 'kill switch' to force everyone's computers to either uninstall or permanently disable Flash Player, but they did!

And I ask, what purpose did that even serve? Why was it a priority on the part of Google to literally kill millions of installations of a program they abandoned? If anything that should have been a wake up call that Google exerts far to much control over the computers of everyone using their software.

I'd be terribly worried about continuing to publish public documents in the Adobe PDF format were it not for the fact there are, thankfully, several different 3rd-party PDF file reader programs freely available.

I've been thinking about the stuff I was able to find in the past about collecting etc and those sites are totally gone.
This explains a little why that has happened.

There were some great sites with great info that has been lost to the interweb and will be gone until those people if still alive can
post again or new people can find those reference magazines or books to post again.

I said this exact same thing but those stupid tech geeks can't respond to that with anything except "they warned you for months"

Yeah they talked about it being "no longer supported" and/or "discontinued", not literally f***ing kill-switching it

The only way you can still view/play them is with an external debugger app that you can download, which doesn't help with website embedded content.

I straddle the fence on the whole Flash thing, as I'm a stickler for media preservation but I also work in security. From the latter perspective, Flash was a giant liability, and the internet is generally a safer place when you have to go out of your way to use Flash. But yes, the whole kill-switch thing is a s****y way to go about it. As tempting as it is (from a security standpoint) to imagine a world where Flash vanishes immediately, or Windows XP is banished 100% to sandboxed environments with no production data all at once, it isn't cool to mess with people's software installations like that.

I do think there's a lot of good news on the horizon for people who want to preserve Flash content. The Flashpoint project has games virtually covered for offline use (and has the entire Homestar Runner site basically perfectly preserved with an included offline browser). That one uses native Flash, but the installation has its own copy of Flash Player that Adobe can't touch. I understand the emulation scene is also moving along. All this just to say that all hope is not lost.

Isn't this the same as Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy from the Vogons??
Not our fault you couldn't read when it was happening