You gotta be a real piece of shit to target the Internet Archive.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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I wouldn't be surprised if it were paid by the companies currently battling them over copyright. Bunch of greedy bastards.
What I wanna know is how companies get away with stuff like this.
Getting to the bottom of a cyber attack isn't... Impossible? It just takes resources.
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I read yesterday that a study found out that 25% of webpages generated in 2013-2023 are gone forever. Attacking the internet archive maybe has darker motives such as censorship or plainly wanting to erase inconvenient history
1984 that what your saying. They erase the past so they can tell you it never happen.
Who controls the past now, controls the future...
Who controls the present now, controls the past...
Who controls the past now, controls the future...
Who controls the present now?
Now Testify! It's right outside your door
Now Testify!
Testify!
It's right outside your door...
Censorship is probably the most reasonable explanation
Or monetizing content. Can't monetize what is freely available.
Which I guess that falls under censorship, just for a different reason
This should be pursued the same way as if you broke into the Louvre and shat on the Venus Di Milo
Like targeting PSN and Xbox servers on Christmas Day.
Who benefits? This is paid for by corps using paywalls., under the table.
Which pathetic limp dick asshat is attacking the internet archive?
Fucking spend the time to attack a company that deserves it.
The companies that deserves it....
Nestle and Meta would be a wonderful start.
I think they're responding to your question. The companies that deserve it are probably the ones behind the attack.
Right? Even from a purely selfish perspective, this is unwarranted and wanton whereas if you go after a company you can make money.
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I'm checking the Xitter page of the alleged source of the attacks, SN_Blackmeta. But what caught my attention the most was another message. And overall the account.
- Their group was formed in April 2024. It's an extremely new group.
- Their targets overall seem too "random".
- They're using Xitter dammit. Do they not care about their own security?
- Whoever wrote the English version of the text speaks Dutch or German. Probably Dutch, as their spelling corrector is "fixing" words like "beginning" into "beginnen", "witne[ssed]" to "witten[seed]", etc.
- Don't trust me on what I'm going to say as I don't speak Russian, but there's also something off with their Russian version of the text. Typically Russian doesn't use a comma after time expressions like "в этот день" (on this day); you could argue that it's there due to that parenthetical expression (7 апреля 2024 года), but even its presence feels off. Also the fact that they spelled out "года" instead of just "г.".
If I had to take some bets: the group is from Western Europe, not Russia or any country where Arabic is the dominant language. They're likely skript kiddos trying to take the "glory" of attacks conducted by someone else; if they aren't, my second guess would be that they're doing it just to call attention to themselves ("look ma! I'm a haxor!!! I'm so cool!! X-D" style).
Someone pointed out in another thread that it would make a lot of sense that this attack was for clout/reputation on the darkweb as a high profile advertisement for their DDOS business.
"DDOS business"
...
"So what do you do for a living?"
"Oh I'm just a massive piece of shit, I own a business that ruins things for people."
"Oh you work at Microsoft!"
Actually worse than crypto miners
There is such a thing?
There are people who spend a tonne of energy and materials needed and wanted across the planet to fund crime and trash all that material, just to fill their wallet
and then there's people who waste tons of other people's material and energy to selectively hurt others by participating in crime, just to fill their wallet
GOP?
So instead of "look ma, I'm cool", it's "look potential hirer, I'm profitable!".
Then it makes sense why they'd translate their stuff in EN/RU/AR even being potentially not speakers of any of them - because their hirers might.
Who do I crowdfund to DDoS the DDoS'ers?
The Internet Archive, and by extension the Wayback Machine, are integral to Internet democracy and accountability. We can't lose that.
Man, the internet archive is one of the good sites that's not a puke gobbling corporate, can we direct attacks to someone worthy of the heat instead?
This is not the timeline where we get to have nice things. This is the timeline where meta and xitter exist, billionaires rule, and teeth are just viewed as luxury bones.
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Would be nice if we could reroute traffic to somewhere else.
Technically you probably could. But it might be frowned upon to be complicit in a DDoS attack.
Eugh I'm overdue donating to them. I've done Wikipedia as I use it way more but this site is important and I think it's time.
Also Wikipedia is very well funded, there are a lot of smaller projects running on shoestring budgets
Honestly, I don't care. At this point, looking at the smoking hellscape the internet has become, looking at what happened to wikia, I don't care if they're getting funded or not, I'm donating. Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are some of that last bastions of the internet the way it was meant to be. We simply can't lose them the way we've lost so many others.
It's really to curb my own anxiety more than anything else. It's the only thing I can do to reinforce the bulwark, and I'm gonna do it, because I can rest a little bit easier knowing that bulwark is a little bit stronger.
Eugh
What is does that mean? Is that an expression of frustration like "ugh" or "argh"?
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Let's use this as a catalyst to support them and similar projects. I'll be donating a chunk of money to them and also to the Wikimedia foundation and other related FOSS projects.
If you are able to donate, please do! If we all do our small part, we can make a big difference.
And now two of the websites I have an overwhelming reliance on are basically facing the threat of potentially disappearing for good. Now I have another thing to donate to.
What's the second?
The rest of the Internet Archive, you know, the thing that hosts files and public domain things and some software and whatnot.
The first is the Wayback Machine.
Ah. I usually conflate the two under "internet archive".
They're technically both owned of the Internet Archive, however one is for browsing old versions of websites, and the other is for general archiving of media.
And both are facing the threat of potentially becoming no more.
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Soulseek has been getting hammered too
Well whatever this is about needs to be Streisanded. Find out who is responsible and why, and then make it a household name.
An anonymous gang calling itself SN_Blackmeta, which seems to be against US and Israeli interests and writes in English, Russian, and Arabic, has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks for reasons unknown. We'll take it with a grain of salt, and have put it to the Internet Archive for comment.
Many people have brought attention to the fact that SN_Blackmeta twitter group is very new and they don't speak most languages particularly well, leading to the conclusion that maybe they're just kids trying to take credit for it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While the San Francisco institution has assured users that its collections and web archives are safe — that's the good news — it warns service remains spotty for the online library and its Wayback Machine.
Since the flood of phony network traffic began, attackers have launched "tens of thousands of fake information requests per second," according to Chris Freeland, director of library services at Archive.
And while the traffic tsunami has been "sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean," it's not the biggest threat to the site, according to Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Archive.
Kahle founded the nonprofit service – which provides free access to tons of digitized materials, from software and music to scans of print books — in 1996.
The Internet Archive is right now fighting legal battles against major US book publishing companies and record labels, which have charged the site with copyright infringement and are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
An anonymous gang calling itself SN_Blackmeta, which seems to be against US and Israeli interests and writes in English, Russian, and Arabic, has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks for reasons unknown.
The original article contains 495 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Monolithic Archive systems like Internet Archive are cool, but we really should be pushing for better localized infrastructure usage for this kind of archiving, IMO.
That's another potential defederated API to build out. I doubt it will end up developed, since most opensource devs are already busy on other projects.
IT'S OFFICIALY OKAY TO DOXX SN_BLACKMETA.
They don't have much aside from a recently created twitter group AFAIK.
if you want to help but cant spare any money, consider hosting the archive warrior to help them out.
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