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The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

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Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#151

Post by mike_d »

jltsiren wrote: post #118
mike_d wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly the problem. These services are constantly at war with each other and are attacked by competitors. Cloudflare provides DDoS protection to the DDoS providers so they can keep their services online, which directly benefits Cloudflare by DDoS being a bigger problem than if they were all busy attacking each other. This is a sampling of currently available services and who they use for DDoS protection: str…

I find the idea of DDoS providers confusing. If someone tried to operate a service that can be abused easily to cause similar disruption in the physical world, the operation would be taken down quickly and the people behind it would probably end up in prison. But somehow the internet is still a lawless zone where crime is tolerated and everyone is out for themselves.

It used to be very rare for DDoS providers to publicly advertise their services, you kinda had to know a guy who knew a guy. If you put up a website offering this service the Good Guys of the Internet would track you down and get your provider to take you down, or that provider would in turn get disconnected from the internet.

Now they hide behind Cloudflare who will refuse to turn over any information so that security folks can get them taken down. Unfortunately Cloudflare has grown too large that we can't just block all of it or depeer them like we would any other network that provided services to bad actors.

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#152

Post by youcantcook »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #37
ai_what wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh sorry, I guess that makes it a very detailed and well though-out response.

It does, yes. The single word, from that source, on this topic, communicates all relevant information.

[dead]

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#153

Post by Lammy »

nox101 wrote: post #149
Lammy wrote: post #105

This is why I’ve gotten into the habit of maintaining my own WWW archive of sites I find interesting. Probably have around 1 TiB now, and One Of These Days I’d like to set my network up so it can serve arbitrary sites directly from local archive to revive any site I want. I have a `wget-mirror` shell function invoking wget with all the trimmings that takes care of 99% of sites. I’ll edit the full command into this co…

how is this a solution? The Archive performs a valuable service. They're collecting wahy more of the internet than you are (I assume) so when that thing you didn't back up today is not available in 10yrs it's more likely to be on the archive. I donate to The Archive. More people should too.

I don't know why you're treating them as mutually exclusive. Single points of failure are as bad when it comes to organizations as they are with anything else. Internet Archive (the org) could stop existing with the flick of a pen. I don't think “Let Somebody Else Do It” is a healthy attitude to take, and I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing.

Plus for as great of a service as Wayback Machine is, it can be very unpleasant to actually browse. I dislike how it injects its own toolbar into every page (yes I know how to massage the URLs to get the raw page data, but it isn't browsable that way). Have you never encountered sites in Wayback Machine where certain pages were just randomly not archived? Or when you click a link and get a page from years earlier or later than the one you came from? Never encountered a page or an entire domain that was blocked from Wayback Machine? Why do you think I would get started doing something like this in the first place if I didn't find it more fun to browse my own archives than Somebody Else's?

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#154

Post by emporas »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #117
emporas wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only universal way IMHO, is to associate a small cost to every internet request. The cost has to be as small as possible, but it has to be there for million/billion/trillion requests to add up the cost and make it uneconomical to continue the attack past some point. It is the same problem with email spam. What's stopping someone from sending billions of spam mails? If we suppose that: a blockchain exists which is…

Similar systems were proposed in the late '90s/early 2000s (hashcash/micropayments) to combat spam. The big problem isn't a technological one, it's that it presupposes some "sweet spot" price (negligible for legitimate users, yet prohibitive for abusers) that has never been shown to exist in reality. (also, you're arguably just moving the problem to DDoSing the payment processing / firewall mechanism)

> Similar systems were proposed in the late '90s/early 2000s (hashcash/micropayments) to combat spam.

These ideas indeed exist for decades.

> The big problem isn't a technological one, it's that it presupposes some "sweet spot" price (negligible for legitimate users, yet prohibitive for abusers) that has never been shown to exist in reality.

Advances in technology, software and hardware, make it easier and easier for that sweet spot to exist. That sweet spot, didn't exist in the past, certainly, but we are close right now.

One example that i think is useful here, is aluminum cans for fizzy drinks. Aluminum, a strong metal compared to cardboard or plastic or glass, is better at withstanding pressurized gases without exploding. The downside, is that it's more expensive. When manufacturing prices dropped down a lot, then it was feasible to drink half a liter of liquid and just throw away the metal. Aluminum still not free though, but the small price did worth it. Huge waste of energy as well to smelt all that metal and throw it away after 10 minutes of drinking, but it is economically viable.

One could manufacture Titanium cans, and drink even more fizzy drinks. But that's not economically viable as of today.

> you're arguably just moving the problem to DDoSing the payment processing / firewall mechanism.

Yes, the problem is moved elsewhere, that's the weak link in the scheme i described. The thing is that a flood of transactions still costs money. Blockchains cannot be flooded just with requests, they have to be flooded by transactions. Take a look at the article [1] which outlines some ideas. I don't agree with a lot of things in there, but it states the problem and gives some numbers.

The theory when it comes to blockchain deterring DDoS attacks (and other kind of attacks), is that there are not bad guys in general, just rational economic actors who use dirty tricks. When a dirty trick starts to cost money, and profit disappears from an attack, then the rational economic actor will stop the attack. The bad guy will resume the attack regardless of profit, but that's one of the axioms of the theory, that there are no bad guys.

[1] https://www.dlnews.com/articles/defi/ddos-attacks-are-an-inc...

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#156

Post by IntoEmptySpace »

Lammy wrote: post #140
Lammy wrote: post #105

This is why I’ve gotten into the habit of maintaining my own WWW archive of sites I find interesting. Probably have around 1 TiB now, and One Of These Days I’d like to set my network up so it can serve arbitrary sites directly from local archive to revive any site I want. I have a `wget-mirror` shell function invoking wget with all the trimmings that takes care of 99% of sites. I’ll edit the full command into this co…

Missed the edit window, but here's the command I use. Newlines added here for clarity. wget-mirror() { wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites \ --no-parent --content-disposition --content-on-error \ --header="Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" \ --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0" \ --restrict…

This is great, thanks for sharing with that additional context.

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#157

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Lammy wrote: post #105

This is why I’ve gotten into the habit of maintaining my own WWW archive of sites I find interesting. Probably have around 1 TiB now, and One Of These Days I’d like to set my network up so it can serve arbitrary sites directly from local archive to revive any site I want. I have a `wget-mirror` shell function invoking wget with all the trimmings that takes care of 99% of sites. I’ll edit the full command into this co…

Assume everyone is familiar with this project, dating back to 1996:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWWOFFLE

https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/distfiles/wwwoffle-2.9j.tg...

The way the www is going, it seems like downloading a copy of libgen, i.e., nonfiction books, and scimag, i.e., academic journals, via torrent, would be more valuable than archiving websites, in general. These primary sources are part of the material used to train so-called "AI" anyway. The problem is that this so-called "AI" also includes all the garbage from the www.

Worst case is eventually these books and journals will again become publicly inaccessible but "AI" will be offered as a bogus substitute; a future where few people will do research using primary materials anymore, they will just submit questions to a remote "AI" server. Truth will be decimated.

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#160

Post by humanfromearth9 »

sirtaj wrote: post #31
ai_what wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The user you're responding to is Jason Scott of TIA.

Shallow dismissal anyway, even if he was the Supreme Majestic King of New Americania. He might further explain his answer. And I'm truly sorry for the DDos happening to this guy's organisation!
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