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!
Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens
Submitted 4 weeks ago by Dju@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
grue@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Lol you’re gonna pull that thread and at the end of the sweater in gonna be the CIA or Russia.
grue@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Did I stutter?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Israel more likely. Making an attack completely useless for Palestine and calling yourself a pro-Palestine group - would be exactly their kind of braindead, but capable.
dovahking@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Why are people fucking with the Internet Archive? Who benefits?
queermunist@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
People use Archive links to avoid giving sites traffic.
This is a problem for advertisers and media corps.
DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Wouldn’t put it past them…
WldFyre@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Someone else looked to the group claiming responsibility for this. It’s a pro-Palestinian Russian group
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Why is this a problem, how would it affect real availability of ads? Except maybe tracking users.
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Copyright holders compete with old content clogging up the works. They wish the library would burn.
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Maybe they’re just trolls doing it for the lulz.
notfromhere@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
We need IA full mirrors. This is too critical to leave to this one company.
psycotica0@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
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…
el_abuelo@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
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.
notfromhere@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
That is an insane amount of storage. How much does it grow every year and is it stable growth or accelerating?
RxBrad@infosec.pub 4 weeks ago
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: reddit.com/…/internet_archive_issues_continue_thi…
It’s almost as if the “hackers” and/or copyright holders are running that conversation.
ikidd@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Since it’s Reddit, I would guess copyright sockpuppets are steering the narrative to help damage them further.
zlatiah@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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)
Exeous@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Like this idea
njordomir@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 4 weeks ago
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?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
There’s an issue with torrents, only the most popular ones get replicated and the process is manual\social.
Something like Freenet is needed, which automatically “spreads” data over machines contributing storage, but Freenet is an unreliable storage, basically like a cache where older and unwanted stuff gets erased.
So it should be something like Freenet, but possibly with some “clusters” or “communities” with a central (cryptography-enabled) authority of each being able to determine the state of some collection of data as a whole, and pick priorities. My layman’s understanding is that this would be similar to something between Freenet and Ceph, LOL. More like a cluster filesystem spread over many nodes, not like cache.
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
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: archive.org/details/public-domain-archive
SilentStorms@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Anna’s Archive does this. I think its a really good way to make it difficult to take them down.
Hopefully this hack starts some conversations on how they can ensure longevity for their project. Seems they’re being attacked on multiple fronts now.
dch82@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Not this crap again
obbeel@lemmy.eco.br 4 weeks ago
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.
Traister101@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
Yes they are a “pro-Palestine” Russian based hacker group… Nothing funny going on here no sir
GhostFaceSkrilla@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I was 99.9% sure it was the Isrealis before seeing this. Now I’m 100% certain it’s those genocidal fuck wads.
_sideffect@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Wtf
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
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.
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Hope they had a backup
1984@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
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.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 4 weeks ago
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?
qfe0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Destroy a source of historical documents so that the past can be contested. Sew doubt, confusion, deniability. Hide evidence of past crimes, or inconvenient documents. Plant documents, etc.
OpenStars@discuss.online 4 weeks ago
Generating turmoil just prior to the USA election maybe?
grubbyweasel@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
War of attrition is my guess