I'll admit they have some powerful enemies, but I can't imagine who specifically would be behind this. Maybe it's not a conventional attack but some wealthy idiots trying to clone the archives to feed their dumb hobby.
I was briefly able to get to https://archive.org/donate - I’m going to kick them a few bucks and recommend anyone else who can afford to also do so.
There’s also this, copied verbatim from the site:
Other ways to donate
Mail your donation to: Internet Archive C/O Philanthropy Department 300 Funston Avenue San Francisco, CA 94118-2116
In order to ensure you receive an acknowledgement of your gift as quickly as possible, please include an email address with your mailed donation.
We regret that we cannot accept cash or check donations in currencies other than USD.
Stock or Wire Transfer: If you would like to make a stock or wire transfer gift, please contact us at [email protected]
I say we go full Streisand effect on whatever dickhead is trying to censor them.
As someone who doesn't have head above water, and has no financial room to donate even a penny, I feel bad. But I can at least thank YOU for donating. So thanks!
What I like about Lemmy is, I can see not only score, but also up AND downvotes. On reddit, I can see the score. On Lemmy, If I see you have a score 7, I can also see you have 10 upvotes and 3 downvotes. 10-3=7, and I can get a better idea if a comment is controversial, or popular.
Your post, that I'm replying to has 69 (nice) upvotes, and zero downvotes. THIS IS HOW IT MUST STAY!!!!!
Reddit also has vote fuzzing where you can get the number of votes, but it's always manipulated for some reason.
I don't understand the point, and tbh it's a serious case of social media mind fuckery. It's a real problem for anyone who creates an incredibly specific subreddit for use by a group and then everyone is left wondering who keeps downvoting them. That can have real life consequences for anyone who doesn't understand what is happening.
I'm working on a protocol that makes information quite hard (I won't say impossible because nothing probably is) to take down, because I believe in both information shouldn't be censored and that everyone should be able to share what they want (yes moral stuff like a song).
I'd love meeting like-minded people to learn more about what other people do and think about stuff like that :-)
I mean there are ways to get around ddos or the "great" firewall of china for example. So why not do it?
Tried to reach out on matrix and some niche communities but they were very (very) small, so I'm still looking for some melting pot.
Thanks! Inter Planetary File System, no less! I do love the cool/very cheezy name :-)
I actually do know IPFS and how it works, (DHT).
It was IMO one of the first great tries to make data distributed in a decentralised manner. I stumbled onto it in 2016 IIRC.
What I think it is lacking is that it's not possible to change your data without ruining your link/"uri" and that it is based on benevolent links to publish your data. Stepping stones and all that.
I know they are trying to fix the link problem and for me it seems they traded convenience for centralisation.
Would love to hang out somewhere chatting about stuff like that.
Download & copy the binaries (setup, 10f, listener) in two different folders, run the setup, configure to 127.0.0.1 and some port, do it again (in the other folder, with another port), run the listeners and start sharing in a little microcosm. 10f has inbuilt help, for configuring and sharing.
The source code is Python, FOSS and there to check out too.
BitTorrent is awesome, but your link is only for one data.
You wouldn't be able to publish your website with this protocol, because when you update your website you must republish the (new) torrent and people won't have the latest one except if it's all distributed through some centralised service (like torrent tracker sites).
"The data is not affected." You know, that's an interesting thing to point out. The attackers clearly want to restrict access to information, possibly specific information, possibly information in general.
However, whoever is in charge of this DDoS is clearly fulfilling a directive of "prevent access to it." And they clearly don't realize that a DDoS is temporary. Do they have a plan for when it's back up? They can't just DDoS forever, unless they plan on DDoSing the entire internet. And I don't see them having the resources literally the rest of the world has.
Not "clearly" at all. It could be as simple as someone new to coding doing it accidentally, probably using masking of their request origins (granted, this does not seem very likely at all...:-D).
Also, it forces the archive to expend resources that they could have allocated elsewhere - which would have longer-term consequences far beyond the short-term duration of the attack. Enough attacks like these could cause the archive to deprioritize something else that they had wanted to do, or drop something they used to support but won't be able to continue to do so in that case.
Or, why does a bully hit someone? That too offers purely short-term pain, until the next attack. Yet they do it anyway, and often it works to cow the victim into submission so that future attacks aren't even necessary, and instead the mere threat of one may be sufficient for the bully to get their way.
Also, does the entire rest of the world submit funding to the internet archive? I don't know anything about their finances, but compared to those of e.g. Russian disinformation sources or corporate profit-seeking, surely they are tiny in comparison?
The only thing "clear" here is that the attacker seems to be using the Might Is Right principle, as they are stepping outside the bounds of society to take on this vigilante effort by themselves.
If each request simply came from the same IP address then yeah, all the recipient has to do is block that one and the whole attack is over.
But what if piracy websites were trying to stream content directly from the internet archive rather than make a copy of it first, and messed up to cause this attack. So intentional to cause the traffic but unintentional to cause this amount of it. Or even if those websites first opened the door, and then someone tried to DDoS them, which propagated onwards to the internet archive, whether knowingly or otherwise.
Anyway, I was just postulating that it was theoretically possible... and odder things have and continue to happen all the time so who knows?:-P
I think it depends on the circumstances. I work for a publisher and submitted a request for one of my clients copyrighted books to be removed from the archive, and they took it down the same day.
It's both. I'm sure Puff Daddy, and R Kelly would rather we forget all the horrible things they've done rather than make money off of it. At the same time the NYTimes and the Atlantic would love to make money off their articles about those two people.
Addition to what others have stated. He is in trouble for more than just one woman. There are many claiming, but Cassie was the first (I think) that accused him and got paid to not say anything. That made his civil suit with her go away, but the feds built up a case and busted on human trafficking amongst other things. His old employee has a bunch of recordings of illegal stuff.
................did I just find a time traveler from the 1950s??? It's been pretty well established since the 1970s that the government CONSTANTLY lies and witholds information. Or did we ever find those WMDs in iraq? And maybe Carter was the one who freed the hostages? And maybe Reagan wasn't selling weapons to banned countries? Whats a watergate? It sure would be crazy to get a blowjob in the white house,. Too bad nobody ever has, or ever will. Hell, even during the opening stages of covid, until Biden got elected, trump was trying to say covid was a hoax that would be gone by April. Then May. Then it didn't matter. Then it was a hoax, until Biden was elected.
I doubt this has to do with "powerful people". A DDOS attack does not remove anything from the net, but only makes it temporarily hard to reach.
There are firms that specialize in suppressing information on the net. They use SEO tricks to get sites down-ranked, as well as (potentially fraudulent) copyright and GDPR request.
There must be any number of "little guys" who hate the Internet Archive. They scrape copyrighted stuff and personal data "without consent" and even disregard robots.txt. Lemmy is full of people who think that people should go to jail for that sort of thing.
How does taking the website down for a few hours help those people? Especially a state actor? If it was the US government or someone like them wouldn't they do something more permanent? Actually wipe the website?
Some news source released something that got redacted based on government pressure. Archive made a snapshot of the news source. Now the state actor goes after the Archive to prevent time sensitive information from spreading. They benefit from the information not being widely available immediately.
Oh that's true. I've seen a lot of cancel/call-out documents archived on IA, some of which were directed at children or had false accusations on them. It would be funny but not that surprising if all of this was over obscure Twitter drama.
TBH I can understand that it's a problem for people who aren't expecting it. If they disregard instructions not to index things then that's also a problem. The only real way to prevent scrapers from replicating content is to place it behind a registration wall.