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Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

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Re: Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

#141

Post by GuB-42 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #63

I completely understand marking the software that controls drinking water as critical infrastructure- but at some point a state based cyber attack that just wipes wikipedia off the net is deeply damaging to our modern society’s ability to agree on common facts … Just now thought “if Wikipedia vanished what would it mean … and it’s not on the level of safe drinking water, but it is a level.

> if Wikipedia vanished what would it mean …

That someone would need to restore some backups, and in the meantime, use mirrors.

Seriously, not that big of a deal. I don't know how many copies of Wikipedia are lying around but considering that archives are free to download, I guess a lot. And if you count text-only versions of the English Wikipedia without history and talk pages, it is literally everywhere as it is a common dataset for natural language processing tasks. It is likely to be the most resilient piece of data of that scale in existence today.

The only difficulty in the worst case scenario would be rebuilding a new central location and restarting the machinery with trusted admins, editors, etc... Any of the tech giants could probably make a Wikipedia replacement in days, with all data restored, but it won't be Wikipedia.

Re: Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

#143

Post by _lvbh »

pKropotkin wrote: post #27
256_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone on the Wikipediocracy forums pointed out, basemetrika.ru does not exist. I get an NXDomain response trying to resolve it. The plot thickens.

Yeah, basemetrika.ru is free now. Should we occupy it? ;)

I registered it about 40 minutes ago, but it seems the DNS has been cached by everyone as a result of the wikipedia hack & not even the NS is propagating. Can't get an SSL certificate .

Re: Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

#144

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #123
homebrewer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact of this obvious LLM slop being at the top of this discussion is incredibly insidious . The "facts" it mentions are made up. Has this vapid style finally become so normalized that nobody is seeing it anymore?

Perhaps we're at last watching the internet die.

Yes, but we did that over the last 15 years. We just never realized that's what we were seeing.

It only clicked for me a few weeks ago, in one thread or another here when I realized that no one could ever do what Google did once: Cloudflare and other antibot technologies have closed off traditional search-as-the-result-of-web-crawling permanently. It's not that no one will do it because they think there's no money in it, or that no one will do it because the upfront costs are gigantic... literally it can no longer be done.

The internet died.

Re: Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

#145

Post by Kiboneu »

john_strinlai wrote: post #136
Kiboneu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you can snapshot every 15 minutes. The snapshot interval depends on the frequency of changes and their capacity, but it's up to them how to allocate these capacities... but it's definitely doable and there are real reasons for doing so. You can collapse deltas between snapshots after some time to make them last longer. I'd be surprised if they don't do that. As an aside, snapshotting would have prevented a good…

> Nah, you can snapshot every 15 minutes. obviously you can . but, what is the actual snapshot frequency? like, what is the timestamp of the last known good snapshot? that is what matters. in any case, the comment you are replying to is a hypothetical, which correctly points out that even a day or two of lost edits is fine (not ideal, but fine). your reply doesnt engage with their comment at all.

> the comment you are replying to is a hypothetical, which correctly points out that even a day or two of lost edits is fine (not ideal, but fine). your reply doesnt engage with their comment at all.

I did engage, by pointing out that it wasn't relevant nor a realistic scenario for a competent sysadmin. (Did you read the OP?) That's a /you/ problem if you rely on infrequent backups, especially for a service with so much flux.

> what is the actual snapshot frequency? like, what is the timestamp of the last known good snapshot?

? Why would I know what their internal operations are?

Re: Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

#146

Post by john_strinlai »

Kiboneu wrote: post #145
john_strinlai wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nah, you can snapshot every 15 minutes. obviously you can . but, what is the actual snapshot frequency? like, what is the timestamp of the last known good snapshot? that is what matters. in any case, the comment you are replying to is a hypothetical, which correctly points out that even a day or two of lost edits is fine (not ideal, but fine). your reply doesnt engage with their comment at all.

> the comment you are replying to is a hypothetical, which correctly points out that even a day or two of lost edits is fine (not ideal, but fine). your reply doesnt engage with their comment at all. I did engage, by pointing out that it wasn't relevant nor a realistic scenario for a competent sysadmin. (Did you read the OP?) That's a /you/ problem if you rely on infrequent backups, especially for a service with so m…

>I did engage, by pointing out that it wasn't relevant nor a realistic scenario for a competent sysadmin.

>Why would I know what their internal operations are?

i mean... you must, right? you know that once-a-day snapshots is not relevant to this specific incident. you know that their sysadmins are apparently competent. i just assumed you must have some sort of insider information to be so confident.

Re: Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

#147

Post by yenepho »

cryptoegorophy wrote: post #137
amiga386 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means giving money to the Russian government, so no. If anyone from the Russian government is reading this, get the fuck out of Ukraine. Thank you.

[flagged]

You must be fun at parties

Re: Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

#148

Post by tempaccount5050 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #63

I completely understand marking the software that controls drinking water as critical infrastructure- but at some point a state based cyber attack that just wipes wikipedia off the net is deeply damaging to our modern society’s ability to agree on common facts … Just now thought “if Wikipedia vanished what would it mean … and it’s not on the level of safe drinking water, but it is a level.

What you're suggesting is literally impossible. There are plenty of mirrors and random people that download the thing in its entirety. The entire planet would have to be nuked for that to be possible.

Re: Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

#149

Post by Kiboneu »

john_strinlai wrote: post #146
Kiboneu wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the comment you are replying to is a hypothetical, which correctly points out that even a day or two of lost edits is fine (not ideal, but fine). your reply doesnt engage with their comment at all. I did engage, by pointing out that it wasn't relevant nor a realistic scenario for a competent sysadmin. (Did you read the OP?) That's a /you/ problem if you rely on infrequent backups, especially for a service with so m…

> I did engage, by pointing out that it wasn't relevant nor a realistic scenario for a competent sysadmin. > Why would I know what their internal operations are? i mean... you must, right? you know that once-a-day snapshots is not relevant to this specific incident. you know that their sysadmins are apparently competent. i just assumed you must have some sort of insider information to be so confident.

I think you are misreading my comments and made a bad assumption. The reason I'm confident is because this has been my bread and butter for a decade.

Re: Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

#150

Post by ibejoeb »

sciencejerk wrote: post #139

I wonder if any poisoned data made it into LLM training data pipelines?

Interesting angle. Everyone has already pointed out that there are backups basically everywhere, and from an information standpoint, shaving off a day (or whatever) of edits just to get to a known-good point is effectively zero cost. But I wonder what the cost is of the potentially bad data getting baked into those models, and if anyone really cares enough to scrap it.
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