Internet Archive (@archive.org)
bsky.app
Sorry to say, archive.org is under a ddos attack. The data is not affected, but most services are unavailable. We are working on it & will post updates in comments.

Brought to you by the Department of Erasing History.

    • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.mlEnglish
      140·
      5 months ago

      Not surprising. They archive information that powerful people would rather we forget monetise.

      FTFY

    • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        5 months ago

        …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.

        • ripcord@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          5 months ago

          And THEY are attacking the IA to prevent it…? Otherwise what does it have to do with anything here?

  • elliot_crane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    284·
    5 months ago

    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 donations@archive.org

    I say we go full Streisand effect on whatever dickhead is trying to censor them.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      60·
      5 months ago

      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!!!

    • Xanis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      29·
      5 months ago

      @dogsnest Thanks for the heads up.

      OP thanks for posting this.

      Donated what little I could. Free access to information is absolutely one of the most important things we as a collective can support.

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        5 months ago

        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!

        • realbadat@programming.devEnglish
          20·
          5 months ago

          Nobody (worth caring about) would look down on you for not being in a situation to donate.

          Besides, there are lots of ways to help that don’t cost money, like telling people who do have money that they can donate to the internet archive. Equally valid effort.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          9·
          5 months ago

          the best thing you can do is to spread word and knowledge.

          There are likely other people out there that don’t already know of the utility of IA.

        • girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          26·
          5 months ago

          It might be that someone wanted to change something that was on a website before the archive could get to it too.

          • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            32·
            5 months ago

            That’s a ridiculous amount of effort to go through to slow down a scraper for one site, especially when that site could just be… turned off.

              • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                14·
                5 months ago

                Then it still makes no sense, as you being unable to take down the content means you also very likely can’t edit the content. I can’t think of a situation where you:

                1. Need content to not be scraped
                2. Need time to remove/edit that content
                3. Have access to do the above
                4. Don’t have access to pull the content immediately
                5. Have control of a large enough botnet to take down Internet Archive
                6. Don’t have a big enough botnet to take down the aforementioned content
                • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
                  7·
                  5 months ago

                  Well that’s my point… It doesn’t make sense because you can just go after the fact and make the request to take it all down.

                  You have to be stupidly paranoid and obscenely stupid to believe that a DDOS is the correct answer if this is the case.

                • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️@7.62x54r.ruEnglish
                  1·
                  5 months ago

                  On an individual level, having a massive archive of everything you’ve ever posted isn’t always a good thing, especially when mentally ill people will quote mine a single post and then try to misuse it.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        Well they made a bad job of it because you can’t do that with a DDOS attack. Basically it’s the same as picketing the entrance to a building. All you need is a lot of people anyone can do it at any time.

        Actually entering the building and manipulating contents it holds is much more difficult, as then you actually have to engage with the building security.

        A DDOS attack can never delete data.

        • PyroNeurosisEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          A DDOS alone cannot delete data, but like your picketing analogy, if you can get in first, the picketing will keep out anyone looking to stop your interference.

      • Nziom@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        But they have back up to the entire thing am pretty sure any change would be detectable if a dictator is behind this then he’s extremely stupid

        • Agent641@lemmy.worldEnglish
          29·
          5 months ago

          If the internet archive goes offline we can just view a cached version of it at the internet archi OH NO!

    • kandoh@reddthat.comEnglish
      26·
      5 months ago

      They’re storing proof of my fuck up which I fixed but if anyone looks it up I’m cooked

  • anticurrent@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    140·
    5 months ago

    I very rarely go to the internet archive, but the moment I needed to get a safe copy of very old software, shitty people decided to DDOS it. shitty humans. find better hobbies losers

    • uis@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      I read “find better hobbies” as find better horsies

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    112·
    5 months ago

    I was wondering what was going on. The Internet Archive is an incredibly important asset beyond archiving websites because it has things like the Prelinger Collection, which is the largest archive of industrial, educational and other ephemeral films, which would be only accessible via commercial sites like YouTube otherwise.

    And that’s really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the audio, video and texts available.

    I hope this gets resolved soon.

  • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
    92·
    5 months ago

    Who would downvote something like this, without leaving a comment to explain why!?

    Sometimes I wish I could see that info, in rare circumstances like this.

        • stepan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
          4·
          5 months ago

          I set the downvote gesture to reply instead, which I’ll definitely notice if I do it by mistake.

      • 🐍🩶🐢@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        I know right? It sucks having a curved screen with a case as it pushes my thumb in the exact worst spot on the side of the screen. I accidentally do things all the time. I rest my thumb on the case edge to try and avoid it, but if I barely tilt, it touches the oversensitive touchscreen. First world problems.

    • redcalcium@lemmy.instituteEnglish
      17·
      5 months ago

      Due to how federation works, downvotes are actually somewhat public because instance owners can query them in lemmy database, though instance owners probably won’t tell you if you ask due to privacy reason. If you’re interested in something like this, you can run your own instance.

      • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
        13·
        5 months ago

        Yeah, it’s actually … a bit creepy.

        Federated voting in general seems like it could use some rethinking to enable private voting but also to protect against vote manipulation. Right now the fediverse is arguably incredibly vulnerable to vote manipulation campaigns.

        • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          12·
          5 months ago

          Open (and distributed) and private are two very difficult things to intermingle. You can mitigate some issues, but at the end of the day the two ideas have to butt against each other.

          • laurelravenEnglish
            2·
            5 months ago

            I hate to suggest it but I wonder if a blockchain would work here

            • capital@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              5 months ago

              What aspect of the points mentioned in the thread do you feel are addressed by blockchain?

              • laurelravenEnglish
                1·
                5 months ago

                Openly distributed while being private(-ish; I know blockchains aren’t truly private but it could at least obfuscate it adequately against casual or semi serious attempts to identify someone)

                I’ll admit I’m no expert or even particularly well versed in blockchain technologies, but my (limited) understanding of them suggests this might actually be the kind of thing it’s good at (as opposed to how it could seemingly do anything a few years ago and everyone was trying to shoehorn a blockchain into their products)

                And to underline part of my comment, I did say “I wonder if…” rather than asserting that it would work or even that I bet it would work

                • capital@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  5 months ago

                  Fedi technologies are already distributed. That’s literally what federation is about.

                  Blockchain isn’t private by default although some have gone that direction. Bitcoin, for example, is pseudonymous - all transactions are public to the world though no tx is tied to an identity on chain.

                  Any privacy features you’re imagining can be built for a blockchain solution to this problem could be built into a “normal”, web 2.0, federated solution that would be far less expensive to run, resource-wise.

                  It’s almost always the case that when someone comes up with blockchain as the solution to some problem, they mean distributed or maybe self-hosted. Neither of which requires a blockchain.

                  Check out videos involving crypto on the Cartoon Avatar’s youtube channel such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xq721IAqBo&t.

              • laurelravenEnglish
                2·
                5 months ago

                Yeah, I’d imagine not, though I’m fairly confident any solution to this would be nontrivial

                • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
                  1·
                  5 months ago

                  Fair point. Blockchain might be the quickest to implement just because the infrastructure is already established, even if it’s not trivial. Not sure, though.

        • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️@7.62x54r.ruEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          I was wondering about this. If they didn’t keep track of who is voting, manipulation would be easier then it already is. The problem is that rogue instance admins could make votes public.

          • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
            2·
            5 months ago

            One possible answer is to allow anyone to see votes categorized by instance, so you know where they’re originating from.

            Small/single user instances could be aggregated together/anonymized or maybe that’s just the price you pay for having a single user instance.

  • Snapz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    5 months ago

    The attack on the few remaining services that the “every person” openly benefits from is so disheartening.

    Not the save structure for org, but this feeling made be remember The Consumerist in it’s heyday and when it was bought and silenced effectively… you know kids, the internet used to be a thing that actually helped and supported us without the ready acceptance of 51% “hallucinations” in information. It was actual people, in small, quiet corners, that didn’t demand subscriptions and micro transactions at every turn. It wasn’t that long ago.

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.worldEnglish
    50·
    5 months ago

    “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.

    • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
      21·
      5 months ago

      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.

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          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

  • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    39·
    5 months ago

    So the recording industry thugs hired out a job. Not the first time.

  • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️@7.62x54r.ruEnglish
    17·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      5 months ago

      Reddit also has vote fuzzing where you can get the number of votes, but it’s always manipulated for some reason.

      The stated reason is to prevent abuses like “piling on”.

    • 1ostA5tro6yneEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      “everyone i don’t like is pedophiles for vague reasons i won’t elaborate” continues to be the lamest and most unproductive take on the entire internet.

      • dumbass@leminal.spaceEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Anyone whose goal is to erase history has a high chance of having something horrible to hide, you know, like a pedophile.

        • 1ostA5tro6yneEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          let’s apply that logic to a different topic. cats are mammals which eat meat. therefore any mammal which consumes meat is probably a cat.

          your insistence on injecting pedophilia into the discussion feels more like deflection than any kind of coherent point. please seek help, or at the very least leave the phone at home and go for a walk.

            • 1ostA5tro6yneEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              it would appear so. and just like the original all it accomplishes is helping those people hide.

          • dumbass@leminal.spaceEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            You’re weirdly defensive over a one line comment mocking a group of sad fucks whose goal is to erase history, go play devils advocate somewhere else.

            I’m starting to wonder if you’re one of them and took the shit talking personally.

            • 1ostA5tro6yneEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              i guess it’s on me for trying to talk rationally to someone who willingly takes the moniker “dumbass”. well-chosen.