Technology

Not surprising. They archive information that powerful people would rather ~~we forget~~ monetise.

FTFY

I doubt this has to do with "powerful people". A DDOS attack does not remove anything from the net, but only makes it temporarily hard to reach.

There are firms that specialize in suppressing information on the net. They use SEO tricks to get sites down-ranked, as well as (potentially fraudulent) copyright and GDPR request.

There must be any number of "little guys" who hate the Internet Archive. They scrape copyrighted stuff and personal data "without consent" and even disregard robots.txt. Lemmy is full of people who think that people should go to jail for that sort of thing.

What I like about Lemmy is, I can see not only score, but also up AND downvotes. On reddit, I can see the score. On Lemmy, If I see you have a score 7, I can also see you have 10 upvotes and 3 downvotes. 10-3=7, and I can get a better idea if a comment is controversial, or popular.

Your post, that I'm replying to has 69 (nice) upvotes, and zero downvotes. THIS IS HOW IT MUST STAY!!!!!

@dogsnest Thanks for the heads up.

OP thanks for posting this.

Donated what little I could. Free access to information is absolutely one of the most important things we as a collective can support.

People that dont want their history revealed

The same people that harass librarians and burn books en masse, is my first guess.

Someone wanted to erase history.

Modification of history is one of the most common tools of dictators

They're storing proof of my fuck up which I fixed but if anyone looks it up I'm cooked

Me before I disabled the super-sensitive side gestures on mobile.

Sometimes people miss-tap while scrolling. Also, on kbin at least, you can who downvote things if they're on kbin. I think if you run your own instance, as an admin you can see who as well?

Due to how federation works, downvotes are actually somewhat public because instance owners can query them in lemmy database, though instance owners probably won't tell you if you ask due to privacy reason. If you're interested in something like this, you can run your own instance.

Not "clearly" at all. It could be as simple as someone new to coding doing it accidentally, probably using masking of their request origins (granted, this does not seem very likely at all...:-D).

Also, it forces the archive to expend resources that they could have allocated elsewhere - which would have longer-term consequences far beyond the short-term duration of the attack. Enough attacks like these could cause the archive to deprioritize something else that they had wanted to do, or drop something they used to support but won't be able to continue to do so in that case.

Or, why does a bully hit someone? That too offers purely short-term pain, until the next attack. Yet they do it anyway, and often it works to cow the victim into submission so that future attacks aren't even necessary, and instead the mere threat of one may be sufficient for the bully to get their way.

Also, does the entire rest of the world submit funding to the internet archive? I don't know anything about their finances, but compared to those of e.g. Russian disinformation sources or corporate profit-seeking, surely they are tiny in comparison?

The only thing "clear" here is that the attacker seems to be using the Might Is Right principle, as they are stepping outside the bounds of society to take on this vigilante effort by themselves.

I'll admit they have some powerful enemies, but I can't imagine who specifically would be behind this. Maybe it's not a conventional attack but some wealthy idiots trying to clone the archives to feed their dumb hobby.

Or Boeing. 😩