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The Internet Archive is under attack, with a popup claiming a ‘catastrophic’ breach (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 210 points 2 years ago (48 children)

I can’t think of any reason to attack that website, what have they done wrong?

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  • [–] 177 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Archived something someone doesn't want to be seen by the world... like any and all since-removed misinformation for one...

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  • [–] 168 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    I have zero proof of this so take it for the musing it is, but the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine can be used to view articles that have been taken offline (sometimes for political reasons). The IA is a very accessible way to prove that once something is on the Internet, it's out there forever. I used it in a recent post to show an Israeli newspaper article that argued Israel had a right to not just Palestine, but Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and other territories. It was taken off the newspaper's website a few days later, but IA had it.

    This may explain why no one is taking credit, and there are no demands. Or it could very well be another reason, including people just being assholes.

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  • [–] 88 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah, this is a bit like vandalizing a library. They are providing a valuable public service, leave them alone.

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  • [–] 36 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, and what kind of psychos would want to restrict public access to books in libraries?!?! I'm not on the conspiracy train until there's proof and I agree with your post. Just saw a bit of irony there since a lot of North Americans are currently in the process of dismantling libraries.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago

    There's currently a fuck ton of hacking going on everywhere maybe just prior to the US elections maybe something unrelated but there's definitely a concerted effort to turn the internet on its head.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    In this case it’s looking like people trying to showcase their skill and possibly get bragging rights or at least a reputation for doing these attacks which they can use to earn money from others for these types of services.

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  • [+] -71 points 2 years ago (33 children)

    I just sent a DMCA takedown last week to remove my site. They've claimed to follow meta tags and robots.txt since 1998, but no, they had over 1,000,000 of my pages going back that far. They even had the robots.txt configured for them archived from 1998.

    I'm tired of people linking to archived versions of things that I worked hard to create. Sites like Wikipedia were archiving urls and then linking to the archive, effectively removing branding and blocking user engagement.

    Not to mention that I'm losing advertising revenue if someone views the site in an archive. I have fewer problems with archiving if the original site is gone, but to mirror and republish active content with no supported way to prevent it short of legal action is ridiculous. Not to mention that I lose control over what's done with that content -- are they going to let Google train AI on it with their new partnership?

    I'm not a fan. They could easily allow people to block archiving, but they choose not to. They offer a way to circumvent artist or owner control, and I'm surprised that they still exist.

    So... That's what I think is wrong with them.

    From a security perspective it's terrible that they were breached. But it is kind of ironic -- maybe they can think of it as an archive of their passwords or something.

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  • [–] 48 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Not to mention that I’m losing advertising revenue if someone views the site in an archive.

    No one is using Internet Archive to bypass ads. Anyone who would think of doing that already has ad blockers on.

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  • [+] -12 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    You misunderstood. If they view the site at Internet Archive, our site loses on the opportunity for ad revenue.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    I completely understood. No one is going to IA as their first stop. They're only going there if they want to see a history change or if the original site is gone.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Yes, some wikipedia editors are submitting the pages to archive.org and then linking to that instead of to the actual source.

    So when you go to the Wikipedia page it takes you straight to archive.org -- that is their first stop.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Because if you're referencing something specific, why would you take the chance that someone changes that page? Are you going to monitor that from then on and make sure it's still correct/relevant? No, you take what is effectively a screenshot and link to that.

    You aren't really thinking about this from any standpoint except your advertising revenue.

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  • [+] -6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I'm thinking about it from the perspective of an artist or creator under existing copyright law. You can't just take someone's work and republish it.

    It's not allowed with books, it's not allowed with music, and it's not even allowed with public sculpture. If a sculpture shows up in a movie scene, they need the artist's permission and may have to pay a licensing fee.

    Why should the creation of text on the internet have lesser protections?

    But copyright law is deeply rooted in damages, and if advertising revenue is lost that's a very real example.

    And I have recourse; I used it. I used current law (DMCA) to remove over 1,000,000 pages because it was my legal right to remove infringing content. If it had been legal, they wouldn't have had to remove it.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's not allowed with books

    Have you ever heard of the mysterious places called "libraries"? IA does not "republish" anything, it is an archive.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    Technically, each time that it is viewed it is a republication from copyright perspective. It's a digital copy that is redistributed; the original copy that was made doesn't go away when someone views it. There's not just one copy that people pass around like a library book.

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  • [+] 31 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

    What do you mean by “engagement”, exactly? Clicking on ads?

    In SEO terms user engagement refers to how people interact with the website. Do they click on another link? Does a new blog posting interest them?

    Lmao you think Google needs to go through Archive to scrape your site? Delusional.

    Any activiity from Google is easier to track and I have a record if who downloaded content if it's coming from my servers.

    The mechanisms used to serve ads over the internet nowadays are nasty in a privacy sense, and a psychological manipulation sense. And you want people to be affected by them just to line your pockets? Are you also opposed to ad blockers by any chance?

    I agree that many sites use advertising in a different way. I use it in the older internet sense -- someone contacts me to sponsor a page or portion of the site, and that page gets a single banner, created in-house, with no tracking. I've been using the internet for 36 years. I'm well aware of many uses that I view as unethical, and I take great pains not to replicate them on my own site.

    I disapprove of ad blockers. I approve of things that block tracking.

    As far as "lining my own pockets" goes, I want to recoup my hosting costs. I spend hours researching for each article/showcase, make the content free to view, and then I'm expected to pay to share it with anyone who's interested? I have a day job. This is my hobby, but it's also my blood, sweat, and tears.

    And how do you suggest a site which has been wiped off the face of the internet gets archived? Maybe we need to invest in a time machine for the Internet Archive?

    archive.org could archive the content and only publish it if the page has been dark for a certain amount of time.

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  • [+] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    It’s user-driven. Nothing would get archived in this case. And what if the content changes but the page remains up? What then? Fairly sure this is why Wikipedia uses archives.

    That's a good point.

    Pretty sure mainstream ad blockers won’t block a custom in-house banner. And if it has no tracking, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s on Archive or not, you’re getting paid the same, no?

    Some of them do block those kinds of ads -- I've tried it out with a few. If it's at archive.org I lose the ability to report back to the sponsor that their ad was viewed 'n' times (unless, ironically, if I put a tracker in). It also means that if sponsorship changes, the main drivers of traffic like Wikipedia may not see that. It makes getting new sponsors more difficult because they want something timely for seasonal ads. Imagine sponsoring a page, but Wikipedia only links to the archived one. Your ad for gardening tools isn't reflected by one of the larger drivers of traffic until December, and nobody wants to buy gardening tools in December.

    Yes, I could submit pages to archive.org as sponsorship changes if this model continues.

    It was a much bigger deal when we used Google ads a decade ago, but we stopped in early 2018 because tracking was getting out of hand.

    If I was submitting pages myself I'd be all for it because I could control when it happened. But there have times when I've edited a page and totally screwed it up, and archive.org just happened to grab it at that moment when the formatting was all weird or the wrong picture was loaded. I usually fix the page and forget about it until I see it on archive.org later.

    I asked for pages like that to be removed, but archive.org was unresponsive until I used a DMCA takedown notice.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    SEO killed the internet. You're literally part of the reason why people go look for alternatives to viewing your website, no one wants ads.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (8 children)

    Wait, people prefer the archived version? Too much ads?

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  • [+] -27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 38 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Did you just draw comparison between redistribution of publicly available content and...rape? Dang.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    how do you expect an archive to happen if they are not allowed to archive while it is still up. How are you suposed to track changed or see how the world has shifted. This is a very narrow and in my opinion selfish way to view the world

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    how do you expect an archive to happen if they are not allowed to archive while it is still up.

    I don't want them publishing their archive while it's up. If they archive but don't republish while the site exists then there's less damage.

    I support the concept of archiving and screenshotting. I have my own linkwarden server set up and I use it all the time.

    But I don't republish anything that I archive because that dilutes the value of the original creator.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    What if I'm looking for something but the page has changed?

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Shouldn't that be the content creator's prerogative? What if the content had a significant error? What if they removed the page because of a request from someone living in the EU requested it under their laws? What if the page was edited because someone accidentally made their address and phone number public in a forum post?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Nah. It just lets slimy gits claim they never said XYZ, or that such and such a thing never happened. With as volatile a storage media as internet media, hard backups are absolutely necessary. Put it this way; would you have the same complaimt about a newspaper? A TV show? Post your opinion piece to a newspaper and it's fixed in ink forever. Yet somehow you complain when that same opinion piece is on a website? Get outta here.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    Like I said, I have no problems with individuals archiving it and not republishing it.

    If I take a newspaper article and republish it on my site I guarantee you I will get a takedown notice. That will be especially true if I start linking to my copy as the canonical source from places like Wikipedia.

    It's a fine line. Is archive.org a library (wasn't there a court case about this recently...) or are they republishing?

    Either way, it doesn't matter for me any more. The pages are gone from the archive, and they won't archive any more.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    A couple of good examples are lifehacker.com and lifehack.org. Both sites used to have excellent content. The sites are still up and running, but the first one has turned into a collection of listicles and the second is an ad for an "AI-powered life coach". All of that old content is gone and is only accessible through the Internet Archive.

    In fact, many domains never shut down, they just change owners or change direction.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Again, isn't that the site's prerogative?

    I think there should at least be a recognized way to opt-out that archive.org actually follows. For years they told people to put

    User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow:

    in robots.txt, but they still archived content from those sites. They refuse to publish what IP addresses they pull content down from, but that would be a trivial thing to do. They refuse to use a UserAgent that you can filter on.

    If you want to be a library, be open and honest about it. There's no need to sneak around.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    About the only thing I can agree with you on here is I don’t like when people on Wikipedia archive a link and then list that as the primary source in the reference instead of the original link. Wikipedia (at least in English) has a proper method to follow for citations with links and the archived version should only become the primary if the original source is dead or has changed and no longer covers the reference.

    They should also honor a DMCA takedown and robots.txt, but at least with the DMCA I’m sure there’s a backlog. Personally I’ve always appreciated the archive’s existence, though, and would think their impact is small enough that it’s better to have them than block them.

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