I think IA is already overloaded as-is. I know it's hard to keep that insane amount of storage available but it's still always slow. They probably only have one server location, as opposed to a global CDN like YouTube.
I think the slowness is partly by design.
Their goal is to make everything available, not necessarily available quickly; people going to an archive are generally looking for something in particular so a bit of latency doesn't really affect the majority of valid use cases. They're not hosting a CDN and they want to discourage people from treating it as such. It also puts off scrapers as I imagine the rate at which you could scrape is slower than the rate at which content is added to the archive
I know. I'm not saying I need it any faster and most people in fact don't, but as they have no incentive to widen their bandwidth, we can expect outages if they ever make some lawless group angry.
They have several but the main one on the Western hemisphere is an old church in SF.
I think library of Alexandria in Egypt is another location?
Wait... Alexandria... Now Internet Archive is literal Internet Library of Alexandria.
I would bet good money the attack is backed by people who want their old content offline, but dont want to been viewed in public as the bad guys.
I'm more cynical, I think it's just for clout and marketing. IA is widely known and used, so an attack is guaranteed to be noticed and generate news articles. They're also known for having large robust infrastructure, but they aren't large enough that an attack is impossible, so a successful attack is impressive yet still feasible. If someone can pull it off, it would make great marketing for their black market DDOS service and also grant huge bragging rights in certain communities.
I'm not sure why you are getting down voted. This is the conclusion I came to as well.
IA is one of those rare organizations that have an incredible online reach and notoriety but aren't backed by a trillion dollar corporation. Taking them down is easier compared to other sites with the same amounts of traffic, while still providing a lot of publicity. Another example would be Wikipedia, however most of their content is plain HTML and easily cacheable too. The IA has a lot of heavy media; videos, old software, photo's, etc not even mentioning the ability search over all those millions of pieces of content. It seems like a prime target for this kind of pubilicty stunt.
"Let's vandalize our local library"
some fuckheads are actually doing this to the SPL.
The IQ of a mob is it's dumbest member divided by the number of people in the mob. I think that Terry Pratchett stole that line.
It's worse when the people in the mob don't have to leave the basement
Real not very fun answer: China or Russia.
Control of information is the real power.
Look at every dictatorship. Look at extremism. Look at wife beaters ffs. If someone is trying to DDOS the Internet Archive then someone is trying to mess with the free flow of information.
Why is it a subway sandwich?
Why wouldn't it be a sandwich? Sounds like you have been reading to much pro burrito propaganda.
That's not a sandwich, it's a sub. A sandwich is made from sliced bread, not from a bun. That's why a sausage sanga is a sandwich but a hot dog isn't. Hot dog has a bun, disqualifying it.
Someone please correct Ben's BBQ. I don't even want to think about pulled pork sandwiches.
Did you know a bun is sliced bread?
There's bad actors all of kinds.
install the archive warrior if you have spare server space and help them out
Ive half been waiting for a headline from Internet Archive
"Its not a DDoS its actually a bunch of webscrapers collecting non-paywalled articles for AI"
