The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

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

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

FTFY
- 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.
- Exactly. We're allowed to know based on what we can afford to know.
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.
- Lots of grand conspiracy theories in this thread when, in the end, it's probably some bored script kiddy
- 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.
- Can you elaborate on the last part?
  
  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.
Yeah man, THEY want to take down the information so they can control it, man....
- ................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 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.

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 used to show downvotes, sort by controversial, and hide by variable net downvote totals.
  
  Then someone in admin decided it wasn't good for business, so all the features got phased out.
- Boost doesn't do this sadly
- Which client? Voyager doesn't show this AFAIK
- 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.
@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.
- 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 kind of dick smack attacks the internet archive!!!!

People that dont want their history revealed
- Don't they honour deletion requests
- No idea. Hope not
The same people that harass librarians and burn books en masse, is my first guess.
- Gimme an M !!!
  
  "M" !!!
  
  Gimme an A !!!
  
  A !!!
  
  Gimme a G !!
  
  G
  
  ..............
Copyright holders.

Why out of all sites why internet archive

Someone wanted to erase history.
- Luckily non of the data was deleted
- 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.
Modification of history is one of the most common tools of dictators
- 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
They're storing proof of my fuck up which I fixed but if anyone looks it up I'm cooked
- Let's hear it.

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

I read "find better hobbies" as find better horsies

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.

the internet archive is a very useful tool for countering the "official story" whenever the powers that be are lying.

If you're able, I hope you donate to the internet archive. There's a lot of horrible people from all over youtube that like to erase their old videos to help control their own narrative.

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.

Me before I disabled the super-sensitive side gestures on mobile.
- Oh wait you can do that? Damn I feel like an idiot now... I have 100% accidentally downvoted without realizing it.
- I just made both gestures an upvote lol
- 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.
Sometimes people miss-tap while scrolling. Also, on kbin at least, you can who downvote things if they're on kbin. I think if you run your own instance, as an admin you can see who as well?
- Admins that access the post through their instance can currently see the votes.
  
  Someone explained it to me that a lot of the downvoting is people browsing all, then getting annoyed and downvoting when they see things they're not interested in :|
- This is definitely something that has to be thought about in terms of UI/UX design. I recently developed a Outlook calendar-esque interface, and we've had on-and-off discussions for a couple of hours about how we best implement a way to "click" an empty spot in the calendar to create an event there.
  
  I'm championing "we don't on mobile, but use double-click on desktop." I think I'm winning.
- Kbin: Not anymore, at least last I checked. I have an old account there that I left behind due to the enormous amount of technical glitches it kept having, and checking in on it recently (maybe last week?), not one of my comments has even a single downvote there - even older ones. iirc the "reduces" tab was still present, just entirely empty. (I was looking for a particular comment, but then while there noticed the effect was much wider.) Edit: I took another look, and I the only downvotes I see are from kbin itself (example post), so it seems to not be federating downvotes from outside of itself.
  
  In the past when it did used to work, it also would not show downvotes from instances that it had server-wise defederated with, although someone can still get downvotes from personally blocking an instance, on a Lemmy server running v0.19.3 or greater, that the server itself had not server-wise defederated with. So there was always a very large gap there.
  
  The reason I thought of this all was due to the OP title: e.g. someone could mass-downvote things on the Fediverse to attempt to control the conversation by de-emphasizing things that they did not personally agree with, but outside of moderator or admin reporting that offers a degree of trust behind it. Obviously that is its intended purpose, but I mean maliciously subverting that like have 10 accounts and log into all of them to influence a post.
  
  About once a week lately I keep blocking some spammer accounts that randomly shill products or videos throughout the Fediverse, rather than wait for an admin to do it, but if an account(s) was more subtle and merely downvoted, then I doubt such a thing would even be noticed?
  
  I should add that I respect some people's decisions if they want to be on a server that doesn't even record or reveal downvotes - that's fine bc it's their choice. But otherwise it is basically public knowledge, except as you say you need to fire up an instance of your own to view them, and then protect that instance from intrusion efforts even if you use it for nothing else (or possibly there is some API call, but I doubt that knowledge would be so easy to find, and for one thing it would have to access a database that has sent out past updates, not merely listen for new ones unless it had been running prior to the downvote event).
  
  Anyway, I hoped people would see this post, and it seems that is happening, so this time the downvotes did not detail any conversation about the topic (with many tens-fold greater up- than down-votes), but if there had been sufficient number of downvotes delivered quickly enough... then how many of us would have even seen this, sorting Subscribed or All by Hot? So it points to a liability in the Fediverse, which at some point, someone somewhere is going to exploit.
- I didn't know know you could see who voted on kbin.
  
  I just knew lemmy, mbin, and some others don't get counted, so the troll down boats don't matter.
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.
- 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.
- I think this is public information on some services. Not Lemmy, but other federated services.

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.

Used to be, "the tragedy of the commons" didn't quite so literally mean an attack on the common resources.

The Internet Archive is so important. The closest thing to a digital library.

"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.
- Would that even be possible? How would someone just scripting kidding around cause a major outage?
IDK, blender.org got DDoS-ed for a while too. It seems like it would take a lot of resources for no possible benefit to anyone involved.

And I wondered why I couldn't access the page 6 hours ago...

Why the fuck...

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.
- That gave me a thought, could be a group trying to scrape some older content for use in feeding an llm since reddit was obviously a bad choice.

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

Or Boeing. 😩

Donated!

Damn. I guess this is why we can't have nice things.

I guess I'll take this opportunity mention if one cannot make a monetary donation to IA. You can always help them out by help seed some of their torrents. I'd appreciate it at least :P

I tried to seed the torrents but I never found anything that needed seeds, most users download via browser

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.

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".

Department of Erasing History.

Sounds like a group of pedophiles.

Link to source on the fediverse/mastodon: https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/112513905401989149

How am I supposed to know what jcctv.net looked like back in 2011 now?

Thanks a lot, Department of Erasing History. I hate you now.

(And yes, that is indeed a real website... well, it WAS a real website)

Oh shit... it's the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth!

Is it a tutorial of how to be a jerk?

looks like itch.io is down too. might be a coincidence or someone trying to show off...

What kind of sick fuck would do this?

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.

Any idea?

You mean like IPFS?
- https://ipfs.tech/
- Yes, stuff like IPFS, filecoin, others... my little contribution... The future censorings, what to do about it, ...
Build a minimum viable product and publish it.
- You can check it out here tenfingers.org
  
  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.
  
  I'm so bad at publishing things 🥲
So Bittorrent?
- 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).

Damn, I was about to watch, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.. 😣

Such a great show, hail to the king baby!
- Hell yes, a fantastic actor who shines in everything he does. Hail to the king, baby!

This seems like it could be the work of someone who doesn't want their webpage data being scraped and stolen by AI LLMs, that are using archive.org as some kind of method for bypassing paywalls.

If I find out who's doing it I'm chopping off your hands and stealing your botnet. Long live The Internet Archive!

Someone is really trying to recreate the Burning of Alexandria. Can we be certain that Internet Archive and Wikipedia (as awful of a shit place that can be) are going to stand the test of time at this rate?