The majority of Reddit discourse on this is wild. The crowd there is going HARD to try and paint IA in the most negative light possible.
I know we don’t like Reddit here, but for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1g7w0rh/internet_archive_issues_continue_this_time_with/
It’s almost as if the “hackers” and/or copyright holders are running that conversation.
Since it’s Reddit, I would guess copyright sockpuppets are steering the narrative to help damage them further.
We need IA full mirrors. This is too critical to leave to this one company.
Knowing the folks at IA I’m sure they would love a backup. They would love a community. I’m sure they don’t want to be the only ones doing this. But dang, they’ve got like 99 Petabytes of data. I don’t know about you, but my NAS doesn’t have that laying around…
I wonder if someone can come up with some kind of distributed storage that isn’t insanely slow. Kinda like a CDN but on personal devices. I’m thinking like SETI@HOME did with distributed compute.
Edit: this is kinda like torrents but where the contents are changing frequently.
You should look up IPFS! It’s trying to be kinda like that.
It’ll always be slower than a CDN, though, partly because CDNs pay big money to be that fast, but also anything p2p is always going to have some overhead while the swarm tries to find something. It’s just a more complicated problem that necessarily has more layers.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible for it to be “fast enough”
And there’s a promising new IPFS-like system called Iroh, which should have a lot less overhead and in general just be faster than IPFS. It’s not quite ready to just switch to right now, but an enterprising individual could probably make something useful with it without too much work (i.e. months, not years).
I’m using it for a distributed application project right now, but the intent is a bit different than the IA use-case.
Something like torrents. Split the whole thing in small 5gb torrents.
That is an insane amount of storage. How much does it grow every year and is it stable growth or accelerating?
I guess this is an attempt to discredit them.
After working at many, many companies, security is usually very bad. This is typical. Not changing access tokens is also very common.
Discrediting someone usually has a goal of pushing customers to another source though. There is no other source of this information, so what would be the point?
Destroy a source of historical documents so that the past can be contested. Sow doubt, confusion, deniability. Hide evidence of past crimes, or inconvenient documents. Plant documents, etc.
He who controls the past controls the future, he who controls the present controls the past.
Now we are talking.
I really hate that reddit slang but username checks out
Why are people fucking with the Internet Archive? Who benefits?
Copyright holders compete with old content clogging up the works. They wish the library would burn.
People use Archive links to avoid giving sites traffic.
This is a problem for advertisers and media corps.
Not saying they’re the ones doing this, but they’d definitely benefit.
I’ve enjoyed using Wayback Machine on journalistic articles where they try to retcon information, but the original copy had already been captured. The Ministry of Truth hates archive.org.
Someone else looked to the group claiming responsibility for this. It’s a pro-Palestinian Russian group
Why is this a problem, how would it affect real availability of ads? Except maybe tracking users.
Without tracking they don’t have metrics for their ads, which effects reports and pricing. They really want to know if someone looks at an ad.
It’s funny how these people feel like cockroaches.
Well right wingers want to ban books and services like IA make that harder since they provide easy access to download or digitally borrow those books. It makes it harder for them to deny people access to those books since they can find them online. Of course, there are other ways people can still obtain those books, IA isn’t the only one, but it’s the easiest and the most convent.
I’ll give you my opinion though you haven’t asked for it:
Some right wingers (libertarian mostly) don’t want to ban books, they want books in fact to be reliably available, and having one centralized Internet Archive to store all of them is not reliable.
(Or in the same logic for humanity to be knowledgeable and resistant to propaganda, and treating sources’ availability as a given being harmful towards that goal - naive people can believe wrong things.)
See Babylon V example with kicking the ant hive again and again to some well-meaning goal, of the evolution kind.
Mind that I don’t think these people have such an intent.
It’s just in my childhood someone has gaslighted me into trying to be optimistic in such cases. Like “if someone is digging a grave for you, just wait till they’re done, you’ll get a nice pond”. Same as a precedent that is created with one intent and interpretation, but works for all possible intents and interpretations, because it’s a real world event.
So, other than gaslighting, real effects are real. Including positive ones, like all of us right now realizing that a centralized IA is unacceptable, we need something like “IA@home”, with a degree of forkability without duplicating the data, so that someone who’d somehow hijack the private key or whatever identifying said new IA’s authority wouldn’t be able to harm existing versions and they wouldn’t require much more storage.
Shit, I can’t stop thinking about that “common network and identities and metadata exchange, but data storage shared per communities one joins, Freenet-like” idea, but I don’t even remotely know where to start developing it and doubt I’ll ever.
4 years ago (best number I can find, considering IAs blog pages are down) IA used about 50 petabytes on servers that have 250 terabytes of storage and 2gbps network.
From this, we can conclude that 1 TB of storage requires 8mbps of network speed.
Let’s just say that average/all residential broadband has spare bandwidth for 8mbps symmetrical.
We would need 50,000 volunteers to cover the absolute minimum.
Probably 100k to 200k to have any sort of reliability, considering it’s all residential networking and commodity hardware.In the last 4 years, I imagine IA has increased their storage requirements significantly.
And all of that would need to be coordinated, so some shards don’t get over-replicated
Okay, enough is enough. The Internet Archive is both essential infrastructure and irreplaceable historical record; it cannot be allowed to fall. Rather than just hoping the Archive can defend itself, I say It’s time to hunt down and counterattack the scum perpetrating this!
Where are the anonymous group and 4chan autists? They should attack these assholes. Attacking internet archive is like kicking a kitten. Everyone will hate you for it.
Lol you’re gonna pull that thread and at the end of the sweater is gonna be the CIA or Russia.
Edit: in = is
Did I stutter?
Quick question for those more in the know: Have these events disrupted IA’s ability to archive pages? I ask because I was recently talking with a security guy about a novel malware that used a hacked webpage for command injection. One possible motive that came to mind, if the archiving was disrupted would be to cover tracks for a similar malware. Inject code, perform malicious activity, revert, then, there’s more time before the control code is discovered.
This again??
This time once archive.org is back online again… is it possible to get torrents of some of their popular data storage? For example I wouldn’t imagine their catalog of books with expired copyright to be very big. Would love a community way to keep the data alive if something even worse happens in the future (and their track record isn’t looking good now)
I’m pretty sure all their content is available by torrent, so you could mirror the data and provide the torrent files for direct download. It’ll probably be here when it’s back up: https://archive.org/details/public-domain-archive
Yep, that seems like the ideal decentralized solution. If all the info can be distributed via torrent, anyone with spare disk space can help back up the data and anyone with spare bandwidth can help serve it.
Most of us can’t afford the sort of disk capacity they use, but it would be really cool if there were a project to give volunteers pieces of the archive so that information was spread out. Then volunteers could specify if they want to contribute a few gigabytes to multiple terabytes of drive space towards the project and the software could send out packets any time the content changes. Hmm this description sounds familiar but I can’t think of what else might be doing something similar – anyone know of anything like that that could be applied to the archive?
Apparently, BlackMeta is behind the DDoS attack to the Internet Archive. Apparently they are pro-Palestine hacktivists - their X account also has some russian written in it.
(Edit) Also, Internet Archive is banned on China since 2012 and Russia since 2015.
Yes they are a “pro-Palestine” Russian based hacker group… Nothing funny going on here no sir
Buddy. I don’t care what they say. It’s plainly obvious they are lying. They are just brown hat hackers
Reading that whole page, holy shit, it’s like a twelve year old wrote it trying to sound very smart while also attempting to divert blame and falsify agenda. If this ain’t a Russian psyop, nothing is.
