- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
Brought to you by the Department of Erasing History.
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Not surprising. They archive information that powerful people would rather we forget.
Not surprising. They archive information that powerful people would rather
we forgetmonetise.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.
That literally has nothing to do with archive.org
Archive.com is not archive.org.
Fixt
I keep seeing people reference diddy did something bad, without mentioning what he did…
Half a dozen people have accused him of sexual assault.
He assaulted a singer named Cassie.
Addition to what others have stated. He is in trouble for more than just one woman. There are many claiming, but Cassie was the first (I think) that accused him and got paid to not say anything. That made his civil suit with her go away, but the feds built up a case and busted on human trafficking amongst other things. His old employee has a bunch of recordings of illegal stuff.
i actually doubt that. i bet of they could make money off of it woth no repercussions they would not give a single fuck.
So we’re accusing P.Diddy and R. Kelley of DDOSing the Internet Archive, then?
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Nobody is denying it I noticed.
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I wasn’t being literal but go right ahead.
Then wtf does it have to do with anything related to the IA
You’re either a troll or a dipshit. They introduced an example where both interests of removing information from the public forum and having the monopoly of reporting on that information work to undermine archiving. It is important for the truth and for public trust that we support Internet Archive and other archivists/historians.
They introduced an example of whay P.Diddy has to do with anything?
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
I doubt it. I’d sooner think it’s a corporation or state actor.
How does taking the website down for a few hours help those people? Especially a state actor? If it was the US government or someone like them wouldn’t they do something more permanent? Actually wipe the website?
Some news source released something that got redacted based on government pressure. Archive made a snapshot of the news source. Now the state actor goes after the Archive to prevent time sensitive information from spreading. They benefit from the information not being widely available immediately.
Oh…so what got released today?
How would I know? The news source retracted their statement and archive.org is down…
Israel attacking Palestine again possibly
What does knocking the website offline for a few hours do for their war?
OwN tEh LiBs !!!
Who knows, how in The world would I know
Aliens or illuminati, for sure.
Is it still something you can do to big sites the way people did back in the 2000’s?
Yep but usually the worst case scenario is a few hours of downtime.
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.
That’s one of the problems with archiving everything. I lean in favor of the IA, but there are still issues.
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.
Does this answer the question?
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.
And THEY are attacking the IA to prevent it…? Otherwise what does it have to do with anything here?
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
I want to live in a world where he lived and guys like Spez “killed themselves”
Boost doesn’t do this sadly
Unless it’s a setting I missed, same with Voyager.
Edit: I am as dumb as a bag of rocks. Couple comments down the chain and someone pointed out it’s a feature on Voyager.
I’m not seeing it in Sync for Lemmy either
Which client? Voyager doesn’t show this AFAIK
Settings > Appearance > Other (at the bottom) > Display Votes
Omg thank you!
It’s in the settings.
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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!
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.
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.
What kind of dick smack attacks the internet archive!!!
People that dont want their history revealed
Don’t they honour deletion requests
Yes but I believe the requests themselves are actually publicly available knowledge.
I think it depends on the circumstances. I work for a publisher and submitted a request for one of my clients copyrighted books to be removed from the archive, and they took it down the same day.
I think they’d legally have to as well if something violated GDPR
I don’t think so, reading their terms.
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
…
Magneto!
Magneto could just erase all the magnetic hard drives.
And “Bingo” was his name!
I read this fully in Ace Ventura 2 intonation.
Copyright holders.
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.
If you own the domain you can disable the crawler on it. And remove previous scrapes.
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:
- Need content to not be scraped
- Need time to remove/edit that content
- Have access to do the above
- Don’t have access to pull the content immediately
- Have control of a large enough botnet to take down Internet Archive
- Don’t have a big enough botnet to take down the aforementioned content
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If the internet archive goes offline we can just view a cached version of it at the internet archi OH NO!
I thought there back online was there any update on the issue?
They’re storing proof of my fuck up which I fixed but if anyone looks it up I’m cooked
Let’s hear it.
There
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.
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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 set the downvote gesture to reply instead, which I’ll definitely notice if I do it by mistake.
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 :|
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.
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.
I would say the distinction is that lemmy doesn’t have a personalized algorithm.
That’s fair. I didn’t know all that.
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.
If you click “more” and then “activity”, its listed in the “reduces” tab. Kbin only includes kbin downvotes though, which is why downvotes look so rare on kbin.
You can’t anymore.
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.
I hate to suggest it but I wonder if a blockchain would work here
Blockchains are the antithesis of anonymity. Pseudo anonymity isn’t anonymity, it just doesn’t scream your name out there from the get go.
What aspect of the points mentioned in the thread do you feel are addressed by blockchain?
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
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.
It likely could, but it’s not trivial to implement.
Yeah, I’d imagine not, though I’m fairly confident any solution to this would be nontrivial
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.
I want the ability to see who down votes what but don’t want to have other people see that about me. Ha
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Would webcrawling look like a DDoS?
Heavy traffic is different from a DDoS, assuming the attacker is using standard DDoS techniques (refusing connection after confirmation from server)
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
