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And I wondered why I couldn’t access the page 6 hours ago…
Why the fuck…
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.
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.
Would webcrawling look like a DDoS?
Heavy traffic is different from a DDoS, assuming the attacker is using standard DDoS techniques (refusing connection after confirmation from server)
Just now? Would thought theyd been hit at least once before now
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looks like itch.io is down too. might be a coincidence or someone trying to show off…
I was wondering why I couldn’t get to it yesterday.
Yeah it still seemed slow today.
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.
Used to be, “the tragedy of the commons” didn’t quite so literally mean an attack on the common resources.
“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?
If each request simply came from the same IP address then yeah, all the recipient has to do is block that one and the whole attack is over.
But what if piracy websites were trying to stream content directly from the internet archive rather than make a copy of it first, and messed up to cause this attack. So intentional to cause the traffic but unintentional to cause this amount of it. Or even if those websites first opened the door, and then someone tried to DDoS them, which propagated onwards to the internet archive, whether knowingly or otherwise.
Anyway, I was just postulating that it was theoretically possible… and odder things have and continue to happen all the time so who knows?:-P
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I think this is public information on some services. Not Lemmy, but other federated services.
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?
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.
This is definitely something that has to be thought about in terms of UI/UX design. I recently developed a Outlook calendar-esque interface, and we’ve had on-and-off discussions for a couple of hours about how we best implement a way to “click” an empty spot in the calendar to create an event there.
I’m championing “we don’t on mobile, but use double-click on desktop.” I think I’m winning.
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.
You can’t anymore.
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.
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!
Why out of all sites why internet archive
Someone wanted to erase history.
Well they made a bad job of it because you can’t do that with a DDOS attack. Basically it’s the same as picketing the entrance to a building. All you need is a lot of people anyone can do it at any time.
Actually entering the building and manipulating contents it holds is much more difficult, as then you actually have to engage with the building security.
A DDOS attack can never delete data.
A DDOS alone cannot delete data, but like your picketing analogy, if you can get in first, the picketing will keep out anyone looking to stop your interference.
Luckily non of the data was deleted
It might be that someone wanted to change something that was on a website before the archive could get to it too.
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.
If you own the domain you can disable the crawler on it. And remove previous scrapes.
Then it still makes no sense, as you being unable to take down the content means you also very likely can’t edit the content. I can’t think of a situation where you:
- Need content to not be scraped
- Need time to remove/edit that content
- Have access to do the above
- Don’t have access to pull the content immediately
- Have control of a large enough botnet to take down Internet Archive
- Don’t have a big enough botnet to take down the aforementioned content
On an individual level, having a massive archive of everything you’ve ever posted isn’t always a good thing, especially when mentally ill people will quote mine a single post and then try to misuse it.
Well that’s my point… It doesn’t make sense because you can just go after the fact and make the request to take it all down.
You have to be stupidly paranoid and obscenely stupid to believe that a DDOS is the correct answer if this is the case.
Modification of history is one of the most common tools of dictators
But they have back up to the entire thing am pretty sure any change would be detectable if a dictator is behind this then he’s extremely stupid
If the internet archive goes offline we can just view a cached version of it at the internet archi OH NO!
I thought there back online was there any update on the issue?
They’re storing proof of my fuck up which I fixed but if anyone looks it up I’m cooked
Let’s hear it.
There
100% US Military doing it.
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
I sometime wonder
I sometimes wonder what needs to happen to people in order for them to confidently write nonsense like this.
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Maybe he works with them.
I sometimes wonder what needs to happen to people in order for them to confidently write nonsense like this.
Stupidity mostly.
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
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.
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.”
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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.
Proof?
The Internet Archive is so important. The closest thing to a digital library.
It has time on its side.
Someone is really trying to recreate the Burning of Alexandria. Can we be certain that Internet Archive and Wikipedia (as awful of a shit place that can be) are going to stand the test of time at this rate?
when was wikipedia crap? /genq
The culture of editors can get toxic, but usually the content is still good.
Odd. I’m able to listen to music there still
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.
