Internet Archive is continuing to face DDoS attacks after several days, says “this attack has been sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean”

- Could these publishers try to set up these court cases to position it in front of the US Supreme Court?
- 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.
- 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.
  
  I hate the existing copyright system and would love to see it contested.
  My brother in Christ, they're literally contesting it
  
  You are simply wrong from the get go. This is the only way it'll ever get addressed, is 100% in the stated purpose of the Internet Archive, the dumb part isn't on the side of preservation efforts, there isn't a separate issue nor is there a separate copyright the publishers are the same with the exact same unsustainable arguments regardless of web page, code, or ebook.
  You are making the same mistake made upon a lot of patents, assuming "but on a computer" is somehow transformative.
  
  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?
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  Then we fuck the train up
  
  Man... These clowns are getting out of line.
  I guess we gonna need to torrent harder. Stop feeding the parasite. If you want to support the artist pay them directly and torrent everything.
  These clowns owners think they own you and entire human knowledge.
  
  Just not by Internet Archive.
  Why not them in particular?
  
  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
  
  Sure would be nice if these companies could be scared off thus like target and pride month

You gotta be a special kind of sad to DDoS archive.org...
- ..or paid well.
- I bet the attack is coming from Big Hollywood
  
  Why though?
  I mean yes they're assholes but what are they seeking to achieve?
  A few days denial of service won't do anything.
- You can go ahead and say 'Evil'.
- Probably statists or corpos, we must purge them off this planet.
  
  if you ddos the internet archive, doxxing you is moral.
- Wonder if has anything to do with that Google leak

Foreign government, moneyed interests, or domestic dipshits, taking all bets.
- Barnes & Nobel going rouge.
  
  Really? I thought they were more of a chartreuse myself...
  
  But why a reddish kind of powder for your cheeks/lips, specifically?
  
  Rogue*
  
  Loooool
- Someone facing an enormous lawsuit who realized their tweets / claims were accessible and needs to buy time for their legal team.
  -me a day or two ago
- Warner bros for 10k please
- who was trying to sue it out of existence recently? probably them.
  
  Wasn't that Pearson or some other shitty "educational" book publisher?
- Cloudflare
- I'm taking China and/or Russia for $10,000 Alex.
- Corporate espionage is so brutal that state operatives run and hide when they learn who it is. Even law enforcement avoids them.
- just 56 for Burkina faso
- Domestic roscomnadzor paid by China orchestrated by USA. Or paid by USA and orchestrated by China. Either one.
- Maybe a rogue entity trying to anonymously use it to train an AI or LLM. Either for its data or to learn how to more effectively attack.

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

Losing the internet archive would be such a huge loss... I really hope they have a backup plan in case things go bad legally.
- yeah, it's definitely going to be one of the most important things to have ever happened in human history, if it does.
  
  Library of Alexandria burning down for the modern era
- All of the files on the archive have torrent's available. If they just release all of the torrent files or their URL's, people can start seeding and downloading them. It would be a lot of data though.
- Given the volume of data involved, I wonder if one of those fancy new distributed data formats could be used.
  
  A blockchain?

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…
- That’s what IPFS is for. It’s ideal for that kind of stuff
- 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?
  
  No. It affects availability. Not integrity or confidentiality.
  
  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.
  
  Not technically by itself as far as I know
  
  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.
- Torrent?
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  ia already serves all their uploads as torrents

if you have a spare corner in your server, host the archive warrior and help them out.
- To contribute: http://warrior.archiveteam.org/
  Help? https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
  Background on the project: https://netzpolitik.org/2023/archive-team-shutdowns-dont-stop-during-the-weekends/
  
  wth, no docker?..
  
  Thanks, I’ll try to use it from title to time.
- Spooling up 10x VM, I have 50 terabyte of ammo at 10gbit. Give me the one-liner install and run.
  
  https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-dockerfile
- Is that the ArchiveTeam tool or something different? I can spare a VM for them.
  
  Let's fediverse archive.org!
  
  yes! its the archive team warrior.
- Can we federate the internet archive.....?
  
  Sure thing, got room for 100PB?
- It's archive team, not archive.org. Both are good anyway.
- Link please.

What can we do to help?
- For some reason, this comment worked, I donated for the first time ever ~5€ to the internet archive (probaly first time donating anything online). Internet archive is probably one of the most important things on the internet.
  
  I think the long term solution is going to have to involve some distributed/federated piratical tactics and infrastructure.

That last sentence though...
**"The cyberattacks share the timeline with the legal battle Internet Archive is facing from US book publishers, claiming copyright infringement and seeking combined damages of hundreds of millions of dollars from all libraries." ** *
- i wonder why print is dead
  
  How is print books dead ?
  https://www.statista.com/chart/24709/e-book-and-printed-book-penetration/
  And that's only units, in terms of revenue, ebooks is still pocket change in comparison.

Stop it you fucking bastards!

They could do this with the bank of america instead
- Or AP? Nobody gets payed and so they get more attention!
  
  Banks are evil, nonprofits like archive.org are not.

The Internet Archive needs to be distributed somehow. We can't have a single point of failure like this or we've learned nothing since Alexandria.
I've got several terabytes just laying around that I'd happily devote to ancient copies of web pages.
- As of January 2024, archive.org claims to have over 99 Petabytes of data stored.
- This is why we need more websites to adopt secure client side scripting.
  JavaScript may or may not be it, but the web needs to be reachable/archivable. It should also have attribution, but that’s a tangent.
- dweb.archive.org loads for me

Describing a high intensity DDOS attack on one of the world's most important resources as simply "mean" is unironically one of the funniest things I've read this year.
Hope they get some support soon.

Do they have any idea who’s perpetrating the attack?
- If i go into conspiracy mode i would say record labels (they tent to have small peepees when it comes to, well everything) or some DICKtator country that doesnt like archived text of some sort.

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.
- 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.

i honestly really hope this shit gets taken care of so internet archive can still keep going

people are shitty
- when you enshittify
  facebook looks ugly
  when you’re a drone
  women seem wicked
  when you’re a want ad
  default instructions … so unclear
  when you’re down
  when you’re AI
  prompts just appear in your brain
  as AI
  humans are nothing but pain
  as AI
  as AI
  when you’re A-A-A-I

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.

Well Google search method was just leaked... Wonder if this picked that up before they pulled it.
- Can you tell me more about this? Or just a link would be amazing.
  I'm worried about what this could mean about further SEO enshittification.
  
  Here you go
  https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/

Is it possible that someone is conducting some operation and doesn’t want it to be randomly documented?
Some state maybe? Eh I just have a hard time thinking of motives for this attack
- I really doubt ddos is affecting whatever crawling internet archive does, just blocking the public from viewing the website.
  
  That would depend on the ability of the sysadmins yes?
- If this party is benefiting from a temporary outage of the IA, then that means their exposure window is temporary. That makes me think they’re doing something where the evidence will appear on some website temporarily, but not permanently. Don’t know what that might be, but that would be the profile of a thing which would benefit from DDoSing the IA.
  The alternative is they’re trying to kill IA permanently. Enough time of its having zero utility to the world will eventually kill it. Could take years though.
  Could be a rogue AI. It is a strange thing to see.
  But generally speaking, I don’t feel confused when I see beautiful things attacked. I’ve seen a lot of things get attacked because they’re beautiful and useful, and it doesn’t surprise me any more.
  
  There is no way a DDoS on the website in affecting the crawler. Also, running a DDoS attack of this size costs a lot of money (if you rent the network, if you own it it costs money as lost sales). No one is giving AI control over a DDoS network to just fuck around.
  
  Sure but usually those who attack pretty things for no reason are morons barely able to articulate themselves let alone coordinate a massive DDoS.
- Capitalists don't like libraries because it means open access to resources which reduces the market size.
- I had the save thought and the same wish-wash conclusion.

:(

Can someone explain why they're not able to protect against this? Couldn't they put request limits or monitor for spikes and banning these attempts?
- Without knowing how, not really. If it's a massive multi-device botnet, like Mirai, for example, that's millions of indvidual devices across millions of addresses, so it isn't so simple as just blocking a domain. Trying to block all of them might well just block legitimate users.
  Request limits also wouldn't work if it's millions of devices making a few requests at once, and an overall limit would have a similar locking-out effect as blocking everything. Especially if the DDoS is taking up most/all of that limit.
  
  Just so crazy to me the scale.
  Is there any range for how many "a few requests" would be needed to ddos a site like this?

Alright let's put in our bets.
I've got $50 on JIDF behind the DDoS attack.

FBI? CIA? Or just some shit company pissed? Taking all bets.

Terrible.

Donated

Go offline a couple of days until they are losing interest in DDOS'ing? Would that work?
- That just means the DDOSer is taking Internet Archive down without any further work required.
  
  True. That's not something you want. Could use that downtime for extensive maintenance to roll out a more robust system (they are probably even working on that already in the background). For the end user it doesn't really make a difference if down because of DDOS or because of maintenance I thought.

Couldn't they just use cloudflare or something?

Maybe temporarily switch to a different address? And leave fake addresses to catch the ddos. Then just keep changing addresses using an IPFS system to front-end the new address?
- IPFS is a real solution though

Can someone eli5 to me why it’s hard to track down these dipshits ? Even if it’s a distributed attack, picking a single IP and doing a lookup for the domain name and checking with the registrar might actually reveal their identity right ? Of course I’m guessing law enforcement needs to be involved to force registrars to give up that info if it’s not publicly available? Are there laws that say a ddos is illegal ?
- There is no domain name associated with the IPs.
  Most importantly, usually, DDoS attacks use infected devices (PCs, mobile phones, smart fridges, shady browser addons etc...) to get many ip addresses and devices/locations and attack from everywhere at once.
- most ddos use privat pcs controlled through a botnet
- DDoS attacks are performed by botnets. What is a botnet? Well, you know about viruses etc, right? Your PC gets infected and it becomes a part of the botnet. Now police do the investigation, they look up IPs and they see YOUR IP and come to YOUR house. See what the problem is?
  And, frankly, your PC doesn't even have to be infected to become a part of an attack. There are plenty of hacked web sites, which still look like nothing has changed, but they will contain a hidden JavaScript code which will force your browser to flood the victim. Again, the police will only find YOU.

It might be Trump's squad trying to make it so that his trial outcome can't get into the archive
- Court documents are already open record and stored indefinitely. Internet archive wouldn't be needed for that.