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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
That would be very difficult though for a site as large as the Internet Archive. They will most definitely have intricate defense strategies and lots of bandwidth. Cannot really imagine a teenager to be capable of that unless their parents are billionaires.
Lol, even the "own the lib" types I'm hard pressed to believe would do this. Alot of them probably benefit from IA in that they often pull stuff from there for their smear or attack campaigns.
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
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!
