this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Brought to you by the Department of Erasing History.

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[–] TheFeatureCreature 289 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 140 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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

FTFY

[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 month ago (16 children)

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.

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[–] General_Effort 40 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Iheartcheese 22 points 1 month ago (17 children)

Lots of grand conspiracy theories in this thread when, in the end, it's probably some bored script kiddy

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[–] elliot_crane 287 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Lost_My_Mind 53 points 1 month ago (10 children)

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!!!!!

[–] UnderpantsWeevil 41 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Xanis 30 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@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 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month 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.

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[–] assembly 204 points 1 month ago (3 children)

What kind of dick smack attacks the internet archive!!!!

[–] Sam_Bass 91 points 1 month ago (6 children)

People that dont want their history revealed

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The same people that harass librarians and burn books en masse, is my first guess.

[–] dogsnest 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Gimme an M !!!

"M" !!!

Gimme an A !!!

A !!!

Gimme a G !!

G

..............

[–] essteeyou 20 points 1 month ago (3 children)
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[–] Nziom 181 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Why out of all sites why internet archive

[–] Phegan 113 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Someone wanted to erase history.

[–] Nziom 35 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Luckily non of the data was deleted

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago (2 children)

They're storing proof of my fuck up which I fixed but if anyone looks it up I'm cooked

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[–] [email protected] 140 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

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[–] FlyingSquid 113 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 90 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 111 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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

[–] 0110010001100010 29 points 1 month ago

Oh wait you can do that? Damn I feel like an idiot now... I have 100% accidentally downvoted without realizing it.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (6 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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 :|

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (15 children)

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.

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[–] Snapz 55 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Suavevillain 54 points 1 month ago

The Internet Archive is so important. The closest thing to a digital library.

[–] peopleproblems 50 points 1 month ago (2 children)

"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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

And I wondered why I couldn't access the page 6 hours ago...

Why the fuck...

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] db2 39 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] dojan 20 points 1 month ago

Or Boeing. 😩

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Department of Erasing History.

Sounds like a group of pedophiles.

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