Originally published at: Internet Archive beleaguered by DDoS attacks, also hacked - Boing Boing
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I can’t think of anyone who would want to do a hatchet job on the Internet Archive.
Music, book or movie companies?
I know the publishers won their lawsuit, but are there any lingering beefs?
I can not fathom what the Internet Archive has done to earn such wrath.
That’s because you’re not a raging, inflamed arsehole of the sort who did this.
Destruction of History
Shades of Curious Yellow
That’s utter bullshit or utter stupidity. A non-profit organized in the U.S. doesn’t “belong to the USA.” They may as well try taking down the Evil Empire by crippling the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
I have the words Putinist psyop flashing inside my head now.
Yeah. Destroying history is not a way of demonstrating solidarity with Palestinian people.
Not at all.
Why did bin Laden fly two planes into a commercial office building with a fancy name?
The simplest answer is that he didn’t. Ignoring that, he planned it because he was a terrorist. What’s your point?
The Internet Archive is a great way to unearth scams and lies (“oh, that website that looks like it’s been around a while didn’t exist before last week?” “That politician had what as a policy statement four years ago, before deleting it all off their website?!”), so there’s a lot of people who’d want to see it knocked offline, both permanently or for even just a limited time.
I think it is bullshit - I think it’s a disingenuous justification intended to hide sinister motives.
Supposedly because the WTC was a prominent symbol of American global capitalism and the imperialism it enabled. The Internet Archive is not that. It’s essentially a public library. I agree with @anon58741709 that the pretext is BS.
I suspect it’s a matter of “people who are bad at hacking still want to ‘hactivist’.”
The Internet Archive is pretty implausible as part of Uncle Sam’s Zionist/military-industrial-complex conspiracy; but it’s disproportionately visible for its limited resources; so almost certainly easier to knock over than an actually plausible target would be. If only for fear of industrial espionage and because of NIST requirements your choice of defense contractors have at least enough checkbox IT security minions to make casual attacks more difficult; and actual Israeli nation-state targets are likely on the hard side.
I get that it’s a a somewhat easy target, but just being an easy target doesn’t make it a sensible target. The person didn’t answer “b/c I want to do hacking and this is what I’m capable of.” That would have been refreshingly honest, at least.
Yes, laziness is another plausible reason behind the choice of target. DDoS attacks don’t require 1337 H4x0r skillz to pull off, and as you say IA is a soft target (probably softer than it should have been). The edgelord who did this might not have even thought of a motive before he was asked on Xitter, and then came up with this obviously bogus reason when he saw that this pissed off other techies.
Either that or, as @anon73430903 noted, this is a Russian op trying to do damage to both IA and pro-Palestinian activists in one shot. Whatever’s going on, this is not the work of either a talented hacker or a serious activist.
What the actual fuck. If these people are genuine (and as noted it’s plausible it’s bs), this ranks up there at “let’s deface megalithic structures as a protest to big oil” dumb.
Internet archive is one of the few remaining places on the internet that is still “good old Internet”, despite steady attacks from IP trollies
Edit:
I guess there’s a mapping from the markdown. That’s not a typo
hey. They added Mastadon and Bluesky to their update message
Temporarily Offline
Internet Archive services are temporarily offline.
Please check our official accounts, including Twitter/X, Bluesky or Mastodon for the latest information.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Not great to only use Twitter for this type of thing when Elon Musk displays “most liked” instead of “most recent”,
at least I can say I was ahead of that;
Update: @internetarchive’s data has not been corrupted
one silverstreak at last and lets fucking hope so.