Building Onramps for Emergency Web Archiving in Ukraine and Beyond
Quinn Dombrowski
DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · Main Stage
In the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a critical but often overlooked battlefront emerged: the preservation of Ukraine's digital cultural heritage. Quinn Dombrowski, an academic technology specialist at Stanford, delivered a compelling talk detailing the rapid, volunteer-driven efforts to archive Ukrainian websites and digital artifacts before they could be destroyed, altered, or lost amidst the conflict. This initiative, known as Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (**SUCHO**), evolved from an urgent, decentralized response to a sophisticated, multi-faceted project addressing both digital and physical preservation needs.
AI review
A genuinely moving humanitarian project with real operational lessons in distributed archiving, grassroots mobilization, and resilience under fire — but it's a DEF CON talk that never quite earns its room. The content is substantive and honest, the speaker clearly did the work, but the technical ceiling is low and the audience fit is awkward.