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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

#151

Post by john_strinlai »

Kiboneu wrote: post #149
john_strinlai wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>The reason I'm confident is because this has been my bread and butter for a decade.

my decade of dealing with incompetent sysadmins and broken backups (if they even exist) has given me the opposite of confidence.

but im glad you have had a different experience

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

#152

Post by worksonmine »

mafriese wrote: post #121

I’m not saying that this is related to Wikipedia ditching archive.is but timing in combination with Russian messages is at least…weird.

And they probably used mind-control to make the admin run random userscripts on his privileged account as well, the capabilities of russian hackers is scary.

/s

It is just another human acting human again.

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

#153

Post by kbolino »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #132
kbolino wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of ways to approach this information. One is to compare to the past. For example, comparing with 2008-2009 [1], they now spend 3.75 times as much on hosting, but 48 times as much on salaries, illustrating a more-than-tenfold relative growth in salaries compared to hosting. While hosting is not now nor ever was their only relevant expense, it is a good anchor point. Another key difference over the l…

Look, I'm not defending wikipedia, I'd just like to point out that comparing hosting to salaries is a quite strange metric. Hosting is cheap and relatively constant, adding features to the site or paying admins to maintain the quality of edits is scalable. How does throwing more money at hosting make a better product? It's not like the servers can't handle the requests. Using hosting costs as an index is nonsensical.…

I picked hosting because it's a line item that exists across all of their budgets, it's a rough proxy for a web business's non-salary expenses, it's a big part of what you think you're donating to based upon Wikipedia's own language in their fundraising drives, and if nothing else, it's way more forgiving to the growth of their expenses than consumer price inflation is.

Ultimately every person has to decide for themselves whether they think WMF is a worthy recipient for their donations, but it is in no way operating on a shoestring budget nor staffed by volunteers anymore.

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

#155

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #144
JKCalhoun wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are still a few options. I recently had the idea of doing search engine queries on 9 search engines.

Mojeek is a good independent search browser, it isn't the best but at that Hackernews comment/analysis I was doing I found it to be the only one which worked for that case.

Brave exists too.

I know the situation is very critical/dire tho but there is still some chance. All be it quite small.

Mojeek IIRC, is operated by one single guy for 15 years.

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

#157

Post by __turbobrew__ »

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.

You can download the entirety of wikipedia and store it in your own offline immutable backup.

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

#158

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

_lvbh wrote: post #143
pKropotkin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I had looked into its availability too just out of curiosity itself before reading your comment on a provider, Then I read your comment. Atleast its taken in from the hackernews community and not a malicious actor.

Do keep us updated on the whole situation if any relevant situation can happen from your POV perhaps.

I'd suggest to give the domain to wikipedia team as they might know what could be the best use case of it if possible.

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

#159

Post by sefrost »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #156
epicprogrammer wrote: post #20

[flagged]

> [...] is incredibly insidious. It really exposes the foundational danger of [...] My LLM sense is tingling.

Yeah, it's like the really high-energy way it's written or something? Can't quite put my finger on it.
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