Yeah. I’m not buying for a minute that anything was “discovered”, other than that they didn’t pay their protection bill. Meta/Facebook seems to have tolerated worse and more obvious abuses for decades.
While I fully support the spirit of this idea, the problem here has little to do with a lack of storage redundancy and everything to do with the bandwidth limitations of a nonprofit company vs a malicious nation state that would seek to deny access to this sort of resource. Basically, given enough bandwidth, you either become resilient to most of these attacks or you become capable of performing them yourself on anyone with a slower connection than you.
I think the Internet Archive would be better served by direct donations, although I’d also love to see a complete torrent posted that gets updated regularly for anyone with the storage and bandwidth necessary to grab and then re-seed it. The web content alone is nearly a trillion pages, though, so that’s not going to be a long list of volunteers.
I’ve been supporting Wikipedia with a monthly $5 donation. By now, ~$150 in total! I want to support all kinds of great projects, but I don’t have an infinite amount of money to share between everything that exists 😔
I might switch to a monthly donation to The Internet Archive just because of how crucial its existence is.
If only they hadn’t shot themselves so hard in the foot during covid with their book lending, and dug the hole so much deeper with their piss poor handling of the lawsuit.
While I do very much support what they do, I’d be reluctant to give them money, if only because it might go to paying their dumbass lawyer.
Same here. I'm waiting to see that lawsuit reach its final conclusion, I don't want to throw good money after bad.
Even afterward, I'm concerned that they might go do some stupid stunt like that again. I'll want to see if there's any fallout among their leadership over getting into this situation.
The lawsuit wasn’t coming because they were in a strong grey area with one physical copy per digital. By offering unlimited copies they directly invited a lawsuit.
And then their legal defense had absolutely no competency behind it. They didn’t come with any legal principles, they basically just said “we shouldn’t be punished because we’re nice”, and then they tried the same style of argument during appeal, basically throwing money away on legal expenses. All the while they were campaigning for donations - the people that supported them were paying the lawyers, not for the IA’s regular activities.
Or, it’s because whoever is doing this hates freedom of information and historical evidence. There’s a long list of powerful people and governments who have the resources and will to carry out these attacks.
Cyber warfare is real, and the Internet archive is a museum and library of culture and truth. It provides evidence and context to our past.
As in conventional war, it is valuable to the amoral to destroy culture and truth in order to control it. Many would like to kill that to supplant it with their version of events that can’t be refuted with evidence.
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