Internet Archive is continuing to face DDoS attacks after several days
www.neowin.net
Internet Archive and Wayback Machine have been facing DDoS cyberattacks for the last few days. The non-profit assured that collections are safe despite the service being inconsistent since Sunday.
    • Gork@lemm.eeEnglish
      26·
      2 个月前

      Could these publishers try to set up these court cases to position it in front of the US Supreme Court?

    • dgmib@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 个月前

      What the Internet Archive is doing seems to be to be a pretty textbook case of fair use to me.

      The claim that the publishing and recording industries are somehow harmed by a site that can only make copies of content that was made freely available and isn’t being resold is ludicrous stupid.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
      1992·
      2 个月前

      The problem is that the litigation was entirely “just”, as far as the legal system goes. It’s an open-and-shut case and everyone saw it coming. The Internet Archive basically stood in front of a train and dared it to turn, and now they’re crying the victim. Doesn’t exactly entice me to send them donations to cover their lawyers and executives right now.

      They really need to admit “okay, so that was a dumb idea, and ultimately not related to archiving the Internet anyway. We’re not going to do that again.”

      Note that I’m not saying the publishers are “good guys” here, I hate the existing copyright system and would love to see it contested. Just not by Internet Archive. Let someone else who’s purpose is fighting those fights take it on and stick to preserving those precious archives out of harm’s way.

      • benignintervention@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1073·
        2 个月前

        I hate the existing copyright system and would love to see it contested.

        My brother in Christ, they’re literally contesting it

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
          2619·
          2 个月前

          Did you read literally the next sentences I wrote after that one? Here they are:

          Just not by Internet Archive. Let someone else who’s purpose is fighting those fights take it on and stick to preserving those precious archives out of harm’s way.

          The Internet Archive is like someone carrying around a precious baby. The baby is an irreplaceable archive of historical data being preserved for posterity. I do not want them to go and fight with a bear, even if the bear is awful and needs to be fought. I want them to run away from the bear to protect the baby, while someone else fights the bear. Someone better equipped for bear-fighting, and who won’t get that precious cargo destroyed in the process of fighting it.

      • snooggums@midwest.socialEnglish
        153·
        2 个月前

        They really need to admit “okay, so that was a dumb idea, and ultimately not related to archiving the Internet anyway. We’re not going to do that again.”

        It literally archives internet pages and files. What do you think the internet archive does if it doesn’t do that?

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
          814·
          2 个月前

          The lawsuit was about them distributing unauthorized copies of books. Not archiving, and not internet pages or files.

          And that was exactly the problem.

      • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        2 个月前

        It’s an open-and-shut case and everyone saw it coming.

        And yet whoever’s doing this evidently doesn’t expect to succeed via legal means.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
          36·
          2 个月前

          This subthread switched specifically to the topic of their pending lawsuits, it’s not about the DDoS. I doubt the publishers are behind this DDoS because they’re already easily winning in the courts, there’s absolutely no need for them to risk blowing their case and getting countersued this way.

          • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
            8·
            2 个月前

            This subthread switched specifically to the topic of their pending lawsuits

            Because Internet Archive implied a potential connection to the DDoS attack. And given the large-institution scale of the attack and the lack of motivation for any other actors on that scale, it seems like the most plausible explanation.

            Edit: And I’m not sure where you’re trying to go with this whole subthread—you tried to narrow the topic exclusively to the legal case by arguing that the case is unrelated to the DDoS attack, while at the same time pointing to the lawsuit to imply that IA had it coming.

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
              36·
              2 个月前

              Then the Internet Archive is being an idiot and risking a lawsuit. Again. They’ve already been raked over the coals for copyright violation, I guess they want to add libel to the list as well?

              The Internet Archive has plenty of enemies, many of whom don’t have an easy legal arsenal to throw at them like those big publishers did. The publishers have been playing smart so far and have won already through legal means, it makes no sense for them to suddenly turn stupid and launch this DDoS.

      • emb@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        2 个月前

        Well said. Within the existing framework of copyright law, the emergency open library thing that got them sued seems obviously illegal, despite it being a good thing. What’s good and what’s legal don’t always line up.

        The Internet Archive’s work is too important. The library portion (that does controlled digital lending of published books) is nice, but I wouldn’t be too hurt if it goes down. Regular public libraries can fill a lot of that role. But the archive itself is incredible, and losing that would be a huge shame.

        Legally, I don’t know that admitting fault and saying sorry does much good, but it certainly isn’t surprising that they got into hot water here.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
          22·
          2 个月前

          It probably wouldn’t help their current lawsuit, at this point. Maybe right at the beginning, before it went to court and they could negotiate a bit in search of a reasonable settlement, but at this point they’ve already lost it hard.

          What it would do is reassure me that they’re not going to do something dumb like this in the future, which would make me more willing to donate money to them knowing it’ll go to actual internet archiving activities instead of being thrown into big publishers’ pockets as part of more lawsuit settlements.

      • Zirconium@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 个月前

        Okay well they’re being sued for millions of damages? If they just agree to those damages they put themselves at higher risks of losing other court cases and the money to run the site

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
          34·
          2 个月前

          They’re only at risk when they take risky behaviours. Simply archiving the Internet, like they’ve been doing for years, is not what they got sued over.

          If they’re going to keep doing the same thing they got sued over then they’re going to keep losing court cases, because obviously they are. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. They should stop doing that.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
          85·
          2 个月前

          I explained why not in the sentence directly following the one that you quoted. Here it is again:

          Let someone else who’s purpose is fighting those fights take it on and stick to preserving those precious archives out of harm’s way.

          To explain in more detail: The Internet Archive is custodian to an irreplaceable archive of Internet history and raw data. If they go and get themselves destroyed at the hands of book publishers fighting lawsuits over ebook piracy, that archive is at risk of being destroyed along with them. Or being sold off at whatever going-out-of-business sale they have, perhaps even to those very giant publishers that destroyed them.

          That is why not them in particular. Let someone who isn’t carrying around that precious archive go and get into fights like this.

  • modifier@lemmy.caEnglish
    148·
    2 个月前

    Across social, economic, and political spectra, you can always tell the good guys from the bad guys by their stance on access to knowledge.

    • Spacehooks@reddthat.comEnglish
      30·
      2 个月前

      Had an argument with FIL where he argued his last child Is out of school so he votes against school taxes. I’m like you know that pays for the people you and your family will interact with. His response was “I want them as ignorant as me”. Even as joke it’s lacks wisdom. He just complained about doctors being uneducated an hour before.

      • grrgyle@slrpnk.netEnglish
        19·
        2 个月前

        Ffffuck that’s depressing.

        I don’t even have kids. I’m actually pretty against having them in general. But education is an existential requirement to a functioning democracy, and even a basic education is so broadening.

        The only reason to want people ignorant is if you’re trying to swindle them, which honestly benefits no one in the long run.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
          5·
          2 个月前

          Not even democracy per se; it’s a basic requirement for a society that functions at more than a medieval level.

      • Zink@programming.devEnglish
        8·
        2 个月前

        Complains without solutions and distrusts legitimate experts, with a dash of “fuck other people.” So you’re just saying your FIL is a typical Republican.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    942·
    2 个月前

    A quick search indicates that they’ve archived ~100PB of data.

    Now I’m trying to come up with a way to archive the internet archive in a peer-to-peer/federated fashion while maintaining fidelity as much as possible…

    • Nine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      321·
      2 个月前

      That’s what IPFS is for. It’s ideal for that kind of stuff

    • thrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      2 个月前

      Can DDOS attacks actually erase/corrupt stored data though? There’s no way they’re running all of this on a single server, with hundreds of PB’s worth of storage, right?

      • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
        35·
        2 个月前

        DDOS attacks block connection to the servers, they don’t actually harm the data itself. You could probably overload a server to the point of it shutting down, which might affect data in transit, but data at rest usually wouldn’t be harmed in any way; unless through some freak accident a server crash would render a drive unusable. But even then, servers are usually fully redundant, and have RAID systems in place that mirror the data, so kind of a dual redundancy. Plus actual backups on top of that; though with that amount of data they might have a priority system in place and not everything is fully backed up.

      • SendMePhotos@lemmy.worldEnglish
        53·
        2 个月前

        From what I’ve learned, it is possible to create a vulnerability within the system of a ddos attack would overload and cause a reset or fault. At that point, it’s possible to inject code and initiate a breach or takeover.

        I can’t find the documentation on it so… Take it with a grain of salt. I thought I learned about it in college. Unsure.

      • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
        261·
        2 个月前

        That wouldn’t distribute the load of storing it though. Anyone on the torrent would need to set aside 100PBs of storage for it, which is clearly never going to happen.

        You’d want a federated (or otherwise distributed) storage scheme where thousands of people could each contribute a smaller portion of storage, while also being accessible to any federated client. 100,000 clients each contributing 1TB of storage would be enough to get you one copy of the full data set with no redundancy. Ideally you’d have more than that so that a single node going down doesn’t mean permanent data loss.

        • hellofriend@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          2 个月前

          Not sure you’d be able to find 100k people to host a 1TB server though. Plus, redundancy would be better anyway since it would provide more download avenues in case some node is slow or has gone down.

          • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
            5·
            2 个月前

            Yes, it’s a big ask, because it’s a lot of data. Any distributed solution will require either a large number of people or a huge commitment of storage capacity. Both 100,000 people and 1TB per node is a lot to ask for, but that’s basically the minimum viable level for that much data. Ten million people each committing 50GB would be great, and offer sufficient redundancy that you could lose 80% of the nodes before losing data, but that’s not a realistic number to expect to participate.

        • uis@lemm.eeEnglish
          4·
          2 个月前

          That wouldn’t distribute the load of storing it though. Anyone on the torrent would need to set aside 100PBs of storage for it, which is clearly never going to happen.

          Torrents are designed for incomplete storage of data. You can store and verify few chunks without any problem.

          You’d want a federated (or otherwise distributed) storage scheme where thousands of people could each contribute a smaller portion of storage, while also being accessible to any federated client.

          Torrents. You may not have entirety of data, but you can request what you need from swarm. The only limitation is you need to know in which chunk data you need.

          Ideally you’d have more than that so that a single node going down doesn’t mean permanent data loss.

          True.

          • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
            3·
            2 个月前

            True. Until you responded I actually completely forgot that you can selectively download torrents. Would be nice to not have to manually manage that at the user level though.

            Some kind of bespoke torrent client that managed it under the hood could probably work without having to invent your own peer-to-peer protocol for it. I wonder how long it would take to compute the torrent hash values for 100PB of data? :D

            • uis@lemm.eeEnglish
              1·
              2 个月前

              ~300MB/s on one core of 13-years old i5 SHA-256(used in BitTorrent v2). Newer cores can about half a gig per one. Less than 3 days on one core then. Less than day on 3 cores.*

              * assuming no additional performance penalty for increased power consumption and memory bandwith usage

              My guess storage bandwidth would be biggest bottleneck.

              Found relatively old article(in Russian, just search for openssl and look at graph that mentions SHA-512 which is SHA-2 too) that says i7-2500 all-cores throughput is slightly over 1GB/s.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        62·
        2 个月前

        It’d be a lot more complicated than that, I think, if one wanted to effectively be able to address it like a file system, as well as holistically verify the integrity of the data and preventing unintentional and unwanted tampering

  • space@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    741·
    2 个月前

    Losing the internet archive would be such a huge loss… I really hope they have a backup plan in case things go bad legally.

  • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
    61·
    2 个月前

    if you have a spare corner in your server, host the archive warrior and help them out.

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.eeEnglish
    315·
    2 个月前

    If it’s an entity, my money would be on China just discovering it exists since it diametrically opposes its propaganda machine. But it could very well just be dark web shitheads whose seasonal drug binge just spiked up again, plenty of them to go around to make accusations and propaganda they know are false whom can’t simply backtrack it because of archive.org and it doesn’t require much to disrupt a still too largely implicit trust driven Internet.

    • intensely_human@lemm.eeEnglish
      17·
      2 个月前

      Wasn’t there some controversy involving Internet Archive just recently?

      Whoever’s behind this is trying to get rid of the fact that Internet Archive creates memory of the internet’s contents. Somebody wants to be able to control what people see on the internet.

      Heck it could be Google doing it, since that would be in line with their recent push to change the way search works. Both of those act as components of a larger drive to control what people see and hear.

  • Dark_Dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    25·
    2 个月前

    I’m not good with computers and stuff. If somebody finds these scumbags who are ddos’ing internet archive I’d be very grateful. Also fucking them up in the process is also good.

    • intensely_human@lemm.eeEnglish
      13·
      2 个月前

      when you enshittify
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      default instructions … so unclear
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