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.
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
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.
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.
Reddit has stopped being a good guy a long time ago.
RIP Aaron Swartz
@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!
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.
What kind of dick smack attacks the internet archive!!!!
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
..............
Why out of all sites why internet archive
Someone wanted to erase history.
Luckily non of the data was deleted
It might be that someone wanted to change something that was on a website before the archive could get to it too.
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.
They're storing proof of my fuck up which I fixed but if anyone looks it up I'm cooked
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I wondered why I couldn't access the page 6 hours ago...
Why the fuck...
So the recording industry thugs hired out a job. Not the first time.
Or Boeing. 😩
Donated!
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.
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!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
