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The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
211–220 of 227 posts
Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we know for sure that they trained on data from libgen etc? It's such a powerful source of information you'd assume they must have, although they would never admit it. There must be a way to test if they have, via enquiring about some niche information only found in certain books.
It is apparently widely suspected that a certain "Books2" dataset mentioned by OpenAI is basically just LibGen: https://blusharkmedia.medium.com/the-ongoing-battle-against-... https://techhq.com/2023/09/can-libgen-shadow-library-survive... https://www.twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282152689336320 https://qz.com/openai-books-piracy-microsoft-meta-google-cha... https://qz.com/shadow-libraries-are-at-the-heart-of-the…
Thanks a lot for all the links. Fascinating stuff.
Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, thanks. Cloudflare acts ethically only until it suits them. It is the pre-exploitation phase to lure a customer. We are not fools here. The report at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808 says it all. Secondly, considering Cloudflare would MITM all traffic, it would make a data good source for the NSA, thereby violating all user privacy.
That argument doesn't really fly. The "poor little customer" was an online casino who was using Cloudflare to avoid getting taken down in countries where online gambling isn't allowed. This had a high risk of getting Cloudflare's limited ipv4 addresses to a blacklist - affecting ALL of their customers. All CF did was ask them to switch to an Enterprise plan and bring their own IP-addresses. They refused to do either…
Spoken like a true Cloudflare employee! But no, we see through your false reframing of the facts.
If a customer's action is truly illegal, the customer's account should be terminated, either immediately or after a reasonable warning to fix things. Under no circumstances should money be sought to support the illegal activity.
CF is engaged in a pig-butchering scam whereby they lure customers, then when the customer is all fat and happy, they get asked to pay up or lose their business.
In this case, CF destroyed the customer's business as soon as CF got word that the customer was going to move to Fastly, considering that the protection money was not paid. It's an open and shut case of racketeering.
Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
#214What are the ways to manage a DDoS attack, preferably using open source? Don't say Cloudflare because they're an extortionist firm.
HAProxy + DDOS protection? https://www.haproxy.com/blog/application-layer-ddos-attack-p... Or any proof of work proxy that delays the ingress traffic. If you only have one server there is very little you can do except maybe redirect to a static page or kill the DNS entries.
HAProxy looks good, but I would also consider a unique unguessable subdomain per established customer. This won't thwart the IP-level attacks, but it will thwart most subdomain attacks for those customers.
Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
#215Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
The user you're responding to is Jason Scott of TIA.
Which without context that is not given I certainly didn't know, so it isn't safe to expect others to know to. Are we supposed to dig into people's profiles to derive relevant context?
One could also argue that this is merely being conversant on the topic one is conversing on.
And not taking on the job of police when you don't know as much as you think you do, such as the speakers whose speech you presume to police.
You might not know the significance of "textfiles says no", but you do know that in general it's a thing that on HN, sometimes the rando is no rando, and you do know that you're not dang.
That's all it takes to avoid looking like a douche. And soon enough some comment or other would fill in the significance, from someone else looking like a douche and having it explained to them.
Jason could have added "Internet Archive here, it's not that." But he would have to say that in front of every comment he ever writes, which I think would get old for him and probably no small number of other people would criticize that too "yesss we know you work for IA FFS get over yourself..."
I think it's fine for him to just speak and let everyone else take care of themselves.
Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
would a decentralized internet archive make sense? impossible to ddos.
I'd love to work on something like this. But the internet archive themselves don't seem too interested in it I guess.
they literally organize an annual conference called "Dweb Camp" to support a community of distributed web nerds and have a partnership with Filecoin to mirror content to IPFS. They opened up a Vancouver headquarters to start acting as a mirror - they are very interested in removing themselves as a single point of failure
Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
#218What are the ways to manage a DDoS attack, preferably using open source? Don't say Cloudflare because they're an extortionist firm.
Proof of work gateways and really annoying captchas.
That won't fix the issue of your inbound pipe being saturated, preventing legitimates from accessing your site.
Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 materia…
This "AI" nonsense seems like a legitimate threat to literacy. Why would young people read a nonfiction book when they can just send questions to a so-called "tech" company that has used the book in training a LLM. These companies, needless intermediaries with zero experise on the subject matter of the book, exist only to collect data and use it for commercial purposes. Unlike the books' authors and publishers they h…
s/experise/expertise/
Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proof of work gateways and really annoying captchas.
That won't fix the issue of your inbound pipe being saturated, preventing legitimates from accessing your site.
I believe it would though? Isn't that the whole point?
If you need PoW for every connection, it's going to end up being very expensive for an attacker to saturate the connection. And the captcha is probably a different server to the main site.