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The Internet Archive is so important. The closest thing to a digital library.
Not surprising. They archive information that powerful people would rather we forget.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
So we’re accusing P.Diddy and R. Kelley of DDOSing the Internet Archive, then?
deleted by creator
Nobody is denying it I noticed.
deleted by creator
So the recording industry thugs hired out a job. Not the first time.
Or Boeing. 😩
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.
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.
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.
Me before I disabled the super-sensitive side gestures on mobile.
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.
Oh wait you can do that? Damn I feel like an idiot now… I have 100% accidentally downvoted without realizing it.
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.
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 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.
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.
100% US Military doing it.
I sometime wknder
I sometimes wonder what needs to happen to people in order for them to confidently write nonsense like this.
Maybe he works with them.
I sometimes wonder what needs to happen to people in order for them to confidently write nonsense like this.
Blindly dismissing it is pretty naive ;)
Have you ever heard the phrase, “that which is asserted without evidence maybe dismissed without evidence”?
yeah but we also live in the age where difference between a conspiracy theory and an outright conspiracy can sometimes be as short as 6 months lol
Sounds like it doesn’t take long to wait for evidence then hu?
about the same time when they start busting corpo leakers
Ok. In the meantime, I don’t have to believe anything that’s untrue.
Burden of proof baby… U accuse someone of something, it’s ur job to prove it (or at least come up with a hypothesis). Just commenting ur conclusion n running away giggling is not the nicest thing to do.
The irony of claiming burden of proof on a post about proof being suppressed.
My hunch is the billions of dollars we have recently siphoned into a cyber warfare branch of the military, Project 2025, which is advancing almost identically to how The Plan for the New American Century progressed 20 years ago, and a President who is in bed with a war criminal fugitive. Oh, and they also recently started one of the largest censorship campaigns in decades Ala “STOP FREELY SHARING INFORMATION ON TIK TOK! WE ARE SUPPOSED TO FILTER RAW INFORMATION OUT AND PROPAGANDA IN VIA MAJOR NEWS NETWORKS AND ISP THROTTLES THAT WE CONTROL!!@!@”
The 100% part was hyperbole, but America is the one doing everything in it’s power to spark WWIII, and the one that benefits most from scrubbing recent history.
Ok, we at least have a hypothesis now. So u’r saying, the US military is secretly executing a Republican plan when a Democrat is in office, when there was a Republican President in office just 3 years ago who tried to coup the government? Don’t u think the military would’ve pulled shit waaaay more noticeable than DDOSing a goddamn archive for five minutes?
Also, why would America want to spark WW3? Businesses function best during peacetime. WW3 would definitely mean usage of nuclear weapons. By your logic, we should’ve already had a nuclear war back when the Soviet Union existed.
This is just like the anti vax conspiracies- the US military is putting chips through vaccinations to control u.
I’m sure there’s proof just laying around, what is the article about ? Oh nevermind if someone didn’t write about it online it’s not true. The US has no history of this type of nonsense.
Again, burden of proof. Ur comment is similar to anti vaxxers saying- “Bill Gates is putting microchips through vaccinations to control society. What, why’re you asking me for proof? Look it up! It’s right there on the internet! Plus billionaires are known to pull shit like this.”
One is plausible. One is not. What did you do with all the time you saved typing ur instead of your you fuckin dunce
One is plausible. One is not.
Again, mentioning the conclusion without the goddamn hypothesis and evidence to support the hypothesis.
What did you do with all the time you saved typing ur instead of your you fuckin dunce
I boinked ur mom (sorry, u kinda invited me for that lol)
Maybe he works for them, can’t elaborate because NDA, who knows. What’s the article about again.
Yeah, no. This comment alone would go against any government NDA - and this user is just some random person who, going by their comment history, most certainly has no inside knowledge of anything.
As far as you know
Stupidity mostly.
Proof?
why?
Because US bad China good USSR was actually the good guy Uyghur genocide never happened Tiananmen square incident was a lie REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE /s
Found the Blue MAGA.
I’m not even from the US lmao. But still, good effort.
[ 中华人民共和国寄语] Great work, Citizen! Your social credit score has increased by [100] Integers. You can now have priority transport and can now get into prestigious colleges! Keep up the good work! [ 中华人民共和国寄语]
So you are confirming that, you sir, are the outsider trying to influence American politics… by accusing other people of being outsiders influencing American politics.
Sounds very Blue MAGA.
Didn’t know CCP bots weren’t capable of comprehending shitposts.
mao did nothing wrong sir!
No sir he didn’t! Chairman Mao was the greatest communist revolutionary to ever exist, sir! The Great Leap forward was such a successful project! /s
Vuvuzela iPhone
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!
Link to source on the fediverse/mastodon: https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/112513905401989149
What kind of dick smack attacks the internet archive!!!
Copyright holders.
People that dont want their history revealed
No idea. Hope not
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.
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.
I was wondering why I couldn’t get to it yesterday.
What kind of sick fuck would do this?
“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.
Oh shit… it’s the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth!
Just now? Would thought theyd been hit at least once before now
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?
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).
You mean like IPFS?
Thanks! Inter Planetary File System, no less! I do love the cool/very cheezy name :-)
I actually do know IPFS and how it works, (DHT).
It was IMO one of the first great tries to make data distributed in a decentralised manner. I stumbled onto it in 2016 IIRC.
What I think it is lacking is that it’s not possible to change your data without ruining your link/“uri” and that it is based on benevolent links to publish your data. Stepping stones and all that.
I know they are trying to fix the link problem and for me it seems they traded convenience for centralisation.
Would love to hang out somewhere chatting about stuff like that.
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 🥲
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!!!
Which client? Voyager doesn’t show this AFAIK
It’s in the settings.
Settings > Appearance > Other (at the bottom) > Display Votes
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.
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”
@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.
