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
      1362·
      6 months ago

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

      FTFY

    • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
      412·
      6 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.

    • ripcord@lemmy.worldEnglish
      216·
      6 months ago

      Yeah man, THEY want to take down the information so they can control it, man…

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        111·
        6 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
          37·
          6 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
    2741·
    6 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
      619·
      6 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
      27·
      6 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
        19·
        6 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
          18·
          6 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.

        • girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          252·
          6 months ago

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

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        3·
        6 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.

        • PyroNeurosis@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          6 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.

    • xavier666@lemm.eeEnglish
      741·
      6 months ago

      Modification of history is one of the most common tools of dictators

      • Nziom@lemmy.worldEnglish
        45·
        6 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
          252·
          6 months ago

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

          • Nziom@lemmy.worldEnglish
            63·
            6 months ago

            I thought there back online was there any update on the issue?

    • kandoh@reddthat.comEnglish
      26·
      6 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
    129·
    6 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
      52·
      6 months ago

      I read “find better hobbies” as find better horsies

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1062·
    6 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.

  • EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    982·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
    905·
    6 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
      1021·
      6 months ago

      Me before I disabled the super-sensitive side gestures on mobile.

      • 🐍🩶🐢@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 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.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@lemmy.todayEnglish
      281·
      6 months ago

      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?

      • GreatAlbatross@feddit.ukEnglish
        16·
        6 months ago

        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 :|

        • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          72·
          6 months ago

          Which doesn’t make sense on Lemmy because it’s not algorithm based. But is probably a muscle memory reaction from using Reddit or similar.

          • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
            19·
            6 months ago

            Lemmy has algorithms, it’s just that they aren’t designed to maximise profit.

            If you have the sort type set to Hot, posts are ranked based on score (upvotes minus down votes) with a decay based on post time. Active is the same but based on the last comment time.

            If you are on the website, there is a ? next to the sort option that will take you to a page explaining how the different options work.

            But long story short, most sorting options are affected by down votes.

      • Dojan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        6 months ago

        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.

      • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        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.

    • redcalcium@lemmy.instituteEnglish
      15·
      6 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 ArcAEnglish
        11·
        6 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.

        • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️@7.62x54r.ruEnglish
          1·
          6 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 ArcAEnglish
            21·
            6 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
    54·
    6 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
    451·
    6 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
      201·
      6 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·
          6 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
    372·
    6 months ago

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

  • Tachikoma741@lemmy.todayEnglish
    16·
    6 months ago

    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