original, saw this somewhere else too. ddos stuff. this one blames ru for archive.today mess. sounds about right. didn' intend it to look like an announcement here. it kind of did. post based on ars story, apparently. who knows
Bypass Paywalls Clean was chased off of the Firefox Add-Ons site, chased off of Gitlab, and chased off of Github via DMCA takedown notices for copyright infringement. It is now hosted on the Russian Gitflic.ru.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said "fuck it" in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
We have spent the better part of two decades dealing with the DMCA being used as an outright weapon to silence information that corporations and government find inconvenient mostly because that information is wildly incriminating for them. It works especially strongly because a large amount of the world's internet has been consolidated to the US and its vast hosting structures like AWS and Cloudflare, putting enormous amounts of the internet under the direct influence of US laws like the DMCA.
Websites like Anna's Archive, Libgen, and Sci-Hub live because they use hosting in countries that allow them to bypass these kind of restrictions. Russia is one of the most common countries for them to host the data out of due to the lack of enforcement of copyright laws, although it is obviously not the only country that these sites use.
Until we are able to alter international copyright protections to be reasonable instead of their current over-zealously and aggressively abusive nature, we will all suffer having to risk hosting of such sites in countries that are otherwise very unsavory to be associating with.
We live in the kind of world early piracy pioneers such as the original creators of The Pirate Bay were trying to fight from becoming a reality. The American copyright cabal fought tooth and nail to change Sweden's interpretations of copyright law so they could send these men to prison.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said "fuck it" in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
I once made a YouTube video which somehow included a clip from some RT Russian TV bullshit show. (The show was in fact a direct ripoff of Gordon Ramsey’s Hell Kitchen, for which I’m sure they did not get license for.)
Some fucking Russian troll bots then DMCA’d my YouTube video, for using their clip, even though it was clearly “fair use” in US jurisdiction, and YouTube happily sucked their russian dicks and flagged and removed my video.
And my video had probably 15 views, like it wasn’t a big thing.
So they aren’t exactly the Robin Hood of free speech.
Of course they aren't, they will happily block information that they dislike because it's embarrassing and incriminating to them. Skepticism should cut both ways, skeptical of those who use Russian connection to delegitimize valuable tools and the people associated with them, and skepticism of why Russia allows those things to persist providing they impact Western countries but not Russia.
Until the Western copyright situation is amended to something reasonable, we have to be skeptical in all aspects of this situation. I'd rather copyright was a reasonable length with reasonable policies so organizations didn't have to resort to connections with Russia. In the meantime we have to work with the situation we have.
Ironically, when Russia was joining the World Trade Organization in early 2010s, one requirement was for them to do something about pirate sites, namely torrent-sharing ones. So iirc the domain torrents.ru was taken away from what is now called RuTracker, and they blocked many other sites, which stay blocked to this day.
Until further notice: archive.today/archive.is/archive.ph/... is banned from this community for apparently being a Russian DDOS tool
And linked to the /c/ukraine community which posted it.
Also, from the Ars story:
Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia.
In December 2019, The Washington Post reported that Elbakyan was under investigation by the US Justice Department for suspected ties to Russia's military intelligence arm, the GRU, to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors. Elbakyan has denied this, saying that Sci-Hub "is not in any way directly affiliated with Russian or some other country's intelligence," but noting that "of course, there could be some indirect help. The same as with donations, anyone can send them; they are completely anonymous, so I do not know who exactly is donating to Sci-Hub. There could be some help that I'm simply unaware of. I can only add that I write all of Sci-Hub code and design myself and I'm doing the server's configuration."
We cannot take for granted that one of the reasons we have access to a large amount of archived information on the internet is often because of unsavory countries who refuse to play by the US governments copyright rules.
We also cannot take for granted how connections with those countries are used to delegitimize people providing valuable services. Bypass Paywalls Clean in particular has had a litany of people assume it's untrustworthy because of its current hosting situation because they don't know the history of it and how it's been kicked off of every other public repository that was stateside.
The archive.today person fucked things up and gave people more ammunition to claim that anything and everything associated with Russian internet is untrustworthy.
I don't see as relevant a possible connection of archive.today to someone based in Russia.
The only facts that should be relevant are that the manager of it is an egomaniac, andcannot be trusted.
I don’t think the issue is paywalls. I think the issue is the personal actions of the owner. I also really don’t think Russia plays into this. Again, the personal actions of the owner of achive[.]today were the reason it was removed. The site was used by the owner to personally attack someone.
This is understandable, but at the same time, none of the anti-paywall lists are as good as archive.today. They actually have paid accounts at a bunch of paywalled sites, and use them when scraping.
Unfortunately, they’ve allegedly modified the contents of some archived articles, so even though they may do better to archive, nothing archived is of any value because it cannot be trusted.
For anyone curious, I looked into the DDOSing, and what was done is a simple string of JavaScript was added to archive[.]today that made a background request to the blog with a randomly generated search parameter. Every time someone looked at an archive, they unknowingly sent a request to the blog under attack.
There's websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can't bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.
That doesn't mean an alternative shouldn't be found, but we also shouldn't pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.
I'm still deciding how much I agree or disagree with this. It's true that they do cite books which you often can't read online, but adding information backed up by a paywalled proof feels a bit "trust me bro". E.g. I could find/create a site with an impossibly large paywall and no-one would realistically able to check my sources.
I do hope this move results in more support for the IA/Wayback Machine and helps them to update some of their crawler tech — thanks to the rise of AI, some sites are effectively (thru captchas etc.) or actively (through straight-up greed [coughRedditcough]) blocked from being archived almost entirely, which is frustrating for legit archivists/contributors.
If this is not an announcement, Lemmy lets you edit your post titles so you can correct that mistake instead of luring in people who think lemmy.world is also banning links using archive.today.
I’m not speculating on your intent, only pointing out that you can correct this situation instead of apologizing after the fact.
guardian is surviving by slowly becoming a tabloid. not sure if i would have paid for it anyway, and im not sure if this was preventable by paying for it in the first place.
I appreciate the guardian a lot more than I did before now that someone gave me a nytimes subscription, seeing how bad they are now. For the guardian's faults, they do break some stories still, and somewhat comprehensively cover the news, perhaps better than the times, that is too busy trying to cover for Israel to even report honestly on epstein and apparently surrendered to the administration besides.
Paying for journalism is ideal, but unfortunately makes it difficult to cite/link to a source the way Wikipedia needs as a way to ensure the information remains open and accessible.
Admittedly, I'm not familiar with these outlets enough to know if those paywalls are significant, but the problem with direct article links is that those links can change. Archival services (I suppose not archive[.]is) are important for ensuring those articles remain accessible in the format they were presented in.
I've come across a number of older Wikipedia articles about more minor or obscure events where links lead to local new outlet websites that no longer exist or were consumed by larger media outlets and as a result no longer provide an appropriate citation.
So what you're saying is if we refuse to pay for journalism long enough, the journalists will eventually give up and just work for free? Not have to travel for their investigations, eat nothing and need no private home?
Democracy isn’t possible without an independent press.
Epstein was persecuted because the frigging Miami Herold reported about his abuses in 2018. He would have continued raping and trafficking kids for who knows how long without that. In a world where the media is owned by Epstein, that won’t happen.
They're already mostly owned and working for the ultra-rich interests. There have been plenty of outlets over the years that had paying users, they're mostly owned at this point. Those that aren't are getting quite click-baity.
It's not our fault the media decided to switch to a subscription model while not providing a product worthy of paying a subscription, even before they downgrade it every year.
I haven't said that journalists have to work for free. Just that we don't have to be the ones who are trickled out to feed them. I doesn't have to be "poors vs workers" unlike what the media is telling you, ya know? A better system is possible.
Huh, I don’t get that argument. To me, it seems that citizens paying journalists is desirable. I’m genuinely curious, who else should pay them in your view?
It could be the citizens but done indirectly, for example via taxes. Even better, not all citizens: just tax the rich and put the money into a journalism pool, so the rich can't choose to benefit any particular newspaper or editorial line.
Also remember the journalists that need support the most are local papers and news stations. The big ones have plenty of donors, and while it's worth the support, they are less likely to completely collapse than the news that is run in your city.
Go look for that independent source. They will report more news that actually affects you as well.
copy the headline and find the same thing free somewhere else. usually it's a news site full of unreadable slop. pay walls used to be almost worth bypassing. no more. just another money grab, pretending to protect valuable information. not
Bro any archiving/scraping tool can be used for ddos u just tell it to archive the same site over and over and now u have a different IP spamming the endpoint
In this case, their CAPTCHA page intentionally included code to DoS a particular blog, sending a request to search for a random string every 300ms (search is very CPU-intensive). This was regardless of the archived site you were trying to view.
Any good archiver will check for an archived copy before making a request, and batch requests. This was very different than the attack you’re imagining — if you opened any archive.today page, it would poll a developer’s personal blog, regardless of whether you were interacting with content from that blog.
He only modified archived pages in response to a dox attempt?
And the thing is, the discovery of the modified pages revealed that it wasn’t even the first time he’d modified pages. And he used a real person’s identity to try and shift blame.
Irrespective of the doxxing allegations, if he’s done all this multiple times already, it means the page archives can’t be trusted AND there’s no guarantee that anything archived with the service will be available tomorrow.
Seems like we need to switch to URLs that contain the SHA256 of the page they’re linking to, so we can tell if anything has changed since the link was created.
Only works for archived pages though, because for any regular page, a large portion of the page will be dynamically generated; hashing the HTML will only say the framework hasn’t changed.
You would need a way of verifying that the SHA256 is a true copy of the site at the time though and not a faked page. You could do something like have a distributed network of archives that coordinate archival at the same time and then using the SHA256 then be able to see which archives fetched exactly the same page at the same time through some search functionality. I mean if addons are already being used for doing the crawling then we may be mostly there already since said addons would just need to certify their archive and after that they can discard the actual copy of the page. You need need a way to validate those workers though since a bad actor could just run a whole bunch at the same time to legitimise a fake archival.
The idea is to verify the archival copy’s URL, not to verify the original content. So yes, a server could push different content to the archiver than to people, or vary by region, or an AitM could modify the content as it goes out to the archiver. But adding the sha256 in the URL query parameter means that if someone publishes a link to an archive copy online, anyone else using the link can know they’re looking at the same content the other person was referencing.
If the archive content changes, that URL will be invalid; if someone uses a fake hash, the URL will be invalid (which is why MD5 wouldn’t be appropriate).
The beauty of this technique is that query parameters are generally ignored if unsupported by the web server, so any archival service could start using this technique today, and all it would require is a browser extension to validate the parameter.
Link it to something like Web of Trust, and you’ve solved the separate issue you described.
In fact, this is a feature WoT could add to their extension today, and it would “Just Work”. For that matter, Archive.org could add it to their extension today, too.
Seems like we need to switch to URLs that contain the SHA256 of the page they’re linking to, so we can tell if anything has changed since the link was created.
Unfortunately, they shot themselves in the foot by responding the way they did. They basically did the job of anyone who wants them taken down and not trusted. It was probably the worst way they could have reacted. Such a tragedy to lose such a valuable website.
Yeah, someone being shitty to you doesn't mean go you full-fledged shitty in return, it kind of proves your lack of trustworthiness to begin with. It's like Nazis being like "leftists were mean to me by explaining how my politics made me a Nazi, so I'm gonna show them by Nazi-ing even harder! They forced me to be like this!" It kind of betrays the argument that the reason you got that way was because leftists were mean to you.
Yeah, ESH.
His response of editing an archive showed the site to be unreliable as an archive. DDOSing from the site as a counter to the dox attempt caused the site serious reputational harm as well.
It sucks because his site was actually more reliable than The Internet Archive.
85 Comments
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 156 pts · 188d
As someone who uses Bypass Paywalls Clean, this is so frustrating.
Bypass Paywalls Clean was chased off of the Firefox Add-Ons site, chased off of Gitlab, and chased off of Github via DMCA takedown notices for copyright infringement. It is now hosted on the Russian Gitflic.ru.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said "fuck it" in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
We have spent the better part of two decades dealing with the DMCA being used as an outright weapon to silence information that corporations and government find inconvenient mostly because that information is wildly incriminating for them. It works especially strongly because a large amount of the world's internet has been consolidated to the US and its vast hosting structures like AWS and Cloudflare, putting enormous amounts of the internet under the direct influence of US laws like the DMCA.
Websites like Anna's Archive, Libgen, and Sci-Hub live because they use hosting in countries that allow them to bypass these kind of restrictions. Russia is one of the most common countries for them to host the data out of due to the lack of enforcement of copyright laws, although it is obviously not the only country that these sites use.
Until we are able to alter international copyright protections to be reasonable instead of their current over-zealously and aggressively abusive nature, we will all suffer having to risk hosting of such sites in countries that are otherwise very unsavory to be associating with.
We live in the kind of world early piracy pioneers such as the original creators of The Pirate Bay were trying to fight from becoming a reality. The American copyright cabal fought tooth and nail to change Sweden's interpretations of copyright law so they could send these men to prison.
jaybone@lemmy.zip · 37 pts · 188d
I’m with you on this, but let’s be careful here.
I once made a YouTube video which somehow included a clip from some RT Russian TV bullshit show. (The show was in fact a direct ripoff of Gordon Ramsey’s Hell Kitchen, for which I’m sure they did not get license for.)
Some fucking Russian troll bots then DMCA’d my YouTube video, for using their clip, even though it was clearly “fair use” in US jurisdiction, and YouTube happily sucked their russian dicks and flagged and removed my video.
And my video had probably 15 views, like it wasn’t a big thing.
So they aren’t exactly the Robin Hood of free speech.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 27 pts · 188d
Of course they aren't, they will happily block information that they dislike because it's embarrassing and incriminating to them. Skepticism should cut both ways, skeptical of those who use Russian connection to delegitimize valuable tools and the people associated with them, and skepticism of why Russia allows those things to persist providing they impact Western countries but not Russia.
Until the Western copyright situation is amended to something reasonable, we have to be skeptical in all aspects of this situation. I'd rather copyright was a reasonable length with reasonable policies so organizations didn't have to resort to connections with Russia. In the meantime we have to work with the situation we have.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 188d
Not sure how this says anything about Russian copyright laws or Russian government.
yucandu@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 188d
hey thanks, i had never heard of that bypass paywalls firefox addon
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 188d
There's also a version for Chrome if you swing that way.
yucandu@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 188d
I do not because I don't like ads on Youtube, but thx.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 188d
Ironically, when Russia was joining the World Trade Organization in early 2010s, one requirement was for them to do something about pirate sites, namely torrent-sharing ones. So iirc the domain torrents.ru was taken away from what is now called RuTracker, and they blocked many other sites, which stay blocked to this day.
kilgore_trout@feddit.it · 5 pts · 188d
Is your comment in the thread about Wikipedia banning archive.today?
edit: I realised by reading other comments that many used archive.today to bypass paywalls, aside from the archival purpose Wikipedia relied on.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 pts · 188d
Original post title was:
And linked to the /c/ukraine community which posted it.
Also, from the Ars story:
The reason it matters:
It makes people suspect of anything hosted in Russia, which is frustrating because there's a lot of valuable shit hosted there by people who are not necessarily from there, such as Alexandra Elbakyan founder of Sci-Hub, who has had many accusations tossed her way due to her websites association with Russia:
We cannot take for granted that one of the reasons we have access to a large amount of archived information on the internet is often because of unsavory countries who refuse to play by the US governments copyright rules.
We also cannot take for granted how connections with those countries are used to delegitimize people providing valuable services. Bypass Paywalls Clean in particular has had a litany of people assume it's untrustworthy because of its current hosting situation because they don't know the history of it and how it's been kicked off of every other public repository that was stateside.
The archive.today person fucked things up and gave people more ammunition to claim that anything and everything associated with Russian internet is untrustworthy.
kilgore_trout@feddit.it · 3 pts · 188d
I don't see as relevant a possible connection of archive.today to someone based in Russia.
The only facts that should be relevant are that the manager of it is an egomaniac, andcannot be trusted.
thesmokingman@programming.dev · 3 pts · 187d
I don’t think the issue is paywalls. I think the issue is the personal actions of the owner. I also really don’t think Russia plays into this. Again, the personal actions of the owner of achive[.]today were the reason it was removed. The site was used by the owner to personally attack someone.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 186d
And now Firefox completely bans it from even being sideloaded.
dan@upvote.au · 61 pts · 188d
This is understandable, but at the same time, none of the anti-paywall lists are as good as archive.today. They actually have paid accounts at a bunch of paywalled sites, and use them when scraping.
CombatWombat@feddit.online · 90 pts · 188d
Unfortunately, they’ve allegedly modified the contents of some archived articles, so even though they may do better to archive, nothing archived is of any value because it cannot be trusted.
Scrollone@feddit.it · 3 pts · 188d
What if somebody used archive.today to bypass a paywall and then archived that using Web Archive? (So we're sure the content stays the same)
tyler@programming.dev · 5 pts · 188d
They’re injecting data into the sites during archive so that wouldn’t work.
0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -2 pts · 188d
So are they removing all other websites that post lies or modify their articles to suit their narrative at times?
Fox news? MSN? CNN? BBC? Reuters? AP?
Why the sudden urge to validate the archives? How many articles have been proven to be modified?
Seems like they've been wanting to remove an entity the empire doesn't control and they're using this as a cover to do it.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 186d
that's exactly one of the main reason they use archive sites for citations. but when an archival site does that it becomes useless.
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 188d
Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 57 pts · 188d
For anyone curious, I looked into the DDOSing, and what was done is a simple string of JavaScript was added to archive[.]today that made a background request to the blog with a randomly generated search parameter. Every time someone looked at an archive, they unknowingly sent a request to the blog under attack.
brianpeiris@lemmy.ca · 57 pts · 188d
Good reminder to donate to web.archive.org
Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz · 20 pts · 188d
While archive.org is good and more trustworthy than archive.is, it isn't as useful for bypassing paywalls.
Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 188d
But Wikipedia doesn't need to bypass paywalls, and you can bypass them yourself with a bit of work.
Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 188d
There's websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can't bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.
That doesn't mean an alternative shouldn't be found, but we also shouldn't pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.
Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 187d
That's good for you, and it is okay for you to use archive.today personally, as long as you block their DDoSing.
But Wikipedia does not need to bypass paywalls, and they don't require the source to be freely (or easily) viewable to verify the info.
Deebster@infosec.pub · 2 pts · 187d
I'm still deciding how much I agree or disagree with this. It's true that they do cite books which you often can't read online, but adding information backed up by a paywalled proof feels a bit "trust me bro". E.g. I could find/create a site with an impossibly large paywall and no-one would realistically able to check my sources.
mayabuttreeks@lemmy.ca · 7 pts · 188d
I do hope this move results in more support for the IA/Wayback Machine and helps them to update some of their crawler tech — thanks to the rise of AI, some sites are effectively (thru captchas etc.) or actively (through straight-up greed [coughRedditcough]) blocked from being archived almost entirely, which is frustrating for legit archivists/contributors.
4am@lemmy.zip · 16 pts · 188d
If this is not an announcement, Lemmy lets you edit your post titles so you can correct that mistake instead of luring in people who think lemmy.world is also banning links using archive.today.
I’m not speculating on your intent, only pointing out that you can correct this situation instead of apologizing after the fact.
Dayroom7485@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 188d
Good reminder to pay for journalism.
The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Tageszeitung and many others need subscribers to stay independent of the oligarchs.
kepix@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 187d
guardian is surviving by slowly becoming a tabloid. not sure if i would have paid for it anyway, and im not sure if this was preventable by paying for it in the first place.
vantablack@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 186d
yeah and they're also transphobic af as a policy. don't give them a damn cent
https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/guardian-staff-trans-rights-letter
can also find more stuff by just looking up "the guardian transphobia"
hector@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 186d
I appreciate the guardian a lot more than I did before now that someone gave me a nytimes subscription, seeing how bad they are now. For the guardian's faults, they do break some stories still, and somewhat comprehensively cover the news, perhaps better than the times, that is too busy trying to cover for Israel to even report honestly on epstein and apparently surrendered to the administration besides.
Flatfire@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 188d
Paying for journalism is ideal, but unfortunately makes it difficult to cite/link to a source the way Wikipedia needs as a way to ensure the information remains open and accessible.
Admittedly, I'm not familiar with these outlets enough to know if those paywalls are significant, but the problem with direct article links is that those links can change. Archival services (I suppose not archive[.]is) are important for ensuring those articles remain accessible in the format they were presented in.
I've come across a number of older Wikipedia articles about more minor or obscure events where links lead to local new outlet websites that no longer exist or were consumed by larger media outlets and as a result no longer provide an appropriate citation.
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 187d
Paying for journalism simply promotes that those who don't pay it don't get it ie.: more paywalls, not less.
Schmuppes@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 186d
So what you're saying is if we refuse to pay for journalism long enough, the journalists will eventually give up and just work for free? Not have to travel for their investigations, eat nothing and need no private home?
Dayroom7485@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 186d
Democracy isn’t possible without an independent press.
Epstein was persecuted because the frigging Miami Herold reported about his abuses in 2018. He would have continued raping and trafficking kids for who knows how long without that. In a world where the media is owned by Epstein, that won’t happen.
sibachian@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 186d
what democracy? every person in the leadership of america and most of the world were either friends with epstein or on his payroll.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 186d
They're already mostly owned and working for the ultra-rich interests. There have been plenty of outlets over the years that had paying users, they're mostly owned at this point. Those that aren't are getting quite click-baity.
Capitalism is hard on News. Facism is worse.
hector@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 186d
It's not our fault the media decided to switch to a subscription model while not providing a product worthy of paying a subscription, even before they downgrade it every year.
It's a problem, but one of their own making.
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 186d
I haven't said that journalists have to work for free. Just that we don't have to be the ones who are trickled out to feed them. I doesn't have to be "poors vs workers" unlike what the media is telling you, ya know? A better system is possible.
Dayroom7485@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 186d
Huh, I don’t get that argument. To me, it seems that citizens paying journalists is desirable. I’m genuinely curious, who else should pay them in your view?
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 186d
It could be the citizens but done indirectly, for example via taxes. Even better, not all citizens: just tax the rich and put the money into a journalism pool, so the rich can't choose to benefit any particular newspaper or editorial line.
meep_launcher@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 186d
Also remember the journalists that need support the most are local papers and news stations. The big ones have plenty of donors, and while it's worth the support, they are less likely to completely collapse than the news that is run in your city.
Go look for that independent source. They will report more news that actually affects you as well.
m3t00@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 188d
https://lemmy.world/c/ukraine was where i saw this. i didn't write it. thought lemmy would have linked to the original, was wrong. FYI
null@lemmy.org · 6 pts · 186d
The root of the problem is Wikipedia not having local snapshots leaves their articles vulnerable to eroding sources.
T156@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 186d
Is it reasonable for them to keep their own local snapshots?
That's not a trivial amount of work and data, particularly it it's multimedia.
null@lemmy.org · 1 pts · 186d
I think it's a concerning issue affecting long-term viability of the platform. It'll only get worse as time goes on and sources go offline.
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 187d
Okay so, what is the currently going-for alternative that bypasses paywalls?
dude@lemmings.world · 3 pts · 187d
I’m afraid there aren’t any. You can use the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension though
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 186d
Oh well, archive.today it is in the meantime I guess.
m3t00@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 186d
copy the headline and find the same thing free somewhere else. usually it's a news site full of unreadable slop. pay walls used to be almost worth bypassing. no more. just another money grab, pretending to protect valuable information. not
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 186d
Fair point. Very few if any news sites provide unique articles.
vantablack@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 186d
i've had consistently good luck with the archive.org wayback machine
tonytins@pawb.social · 5 pts · 188d
I've switched to .md when the community mentioned something was up with the .today domain. Hopefully that one isn't compromised.
The_Decryptor@aussie.zone · 24 pts · 188d
It's the same person running all of them, so yeah it is.
tonytins@pawb.social · 5 pts · 188d
Damn.
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 188d
Source
Maeve@kbin.earth · 5 pts · 188d
Democracy died in daylight, the darkness hides the rotten body.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 186d
It's relatively possible it never got out of the planning stages intact.
Maeve@kbin.earth · 2 pts · 186d
Or ever made it into planning?
Formfiller@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 186d
That’s very 1984 of them
anghenfil@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 188d
How does the paywall circumvention of archive.today works?
anthropozaen@feddit.org · 7 pts · 188d
It identifies itself as a google (or other) crawler, which sites often allow and give the full content to, for better SEO.
ChaosMonkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 188d
I guess that they genuinely owned subscriptions for popular paywalled sites.
muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com · -8 pts · 188d
Bro any archiving/scraping tool can be used for ddos u just tell it to archive the same site over and over and now u have a different IP spamming the endpoint
dan@upvote.au · 25 pts · 188d
In this case, their CAPTCHA page intentionally included code to DoS a particular blog, sending a request to search for a random string every 300ms (search is very CPU-intensive). This was regardless of the archived site you were trying to view.
CombatWombat@feddit.online · 11 pts · 188d
Any good archiver will check for an archived copy before making a request, and batch requests. This was very different than the attack you’re imagining — if you opened any archive.today page, it would poll a developer’s personal blog, regardless of whether you were interacting with content from that blog.
m3t00@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 188d
don't know all the details. fyi basically. i forget where i saw the same site mentioned for the same thing. don't call me bro Bro
RobotToaster@mander.xyz · -11 pts · 188d
Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that he only did this in response to a malicious dox attempt.
adespoton@lemmy.ca · 30 pts · 188d
He only modified archived pages in response to a dox attempt?
And the thing is, the discovery of the modified pages revealed that it wasn’t even the first time he’d modified pages. And he used a real person’s identity to try and shift blame.
Irrespective of the doxxing allegations, if he’s done all this multiple times already, it means the page archives can’t be trusted AND there’s no guarantee that anything archived with the service will be available tomorrow.
Seems like we need to switch to URLs that contain the SHA256 of the page they’re linking to, so we can tell if anything has changed since the link was created.
deathbird@mander.xyz · 6 pts · 188d
Actually a pretty good idea.
adespoton@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 188d
Only works for archived pages though, because for any regular page, a large portion of the page will be dynamically generated; hashing the HTML will only say the framework hasn’t changed.
conorab@lemmy.conorab.com · 3 pts · 188d
You would need a way of verifying that the SHA256 is a true copy of the site at the time though and not a faked page. You could do something like have a distributed network of archives that coordinate archival at the same time and then using the SHA256 then be able to see which archives fetched exactly the same page at the same time through some search functionality. I mean if addons are already being used for doing the crawling then we may be mostly there already since said addons would just need to certify their archive and after that they can discard the actual copy of the page. You need need a way to validate those workers though since a bad actor could just run a whole bunch at the same time to legitimise a fake archival.
adespoton@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 188d
The idea is to verify the archival copy’s URL, not to verify the original content. So yes, a server could push different content to the archiver than to people, or vary by region, or an AitM could modify the content as it goes out to the archiver. But adding the sha256 in the URL query parameter means that if someone publishes a link to an archive copy online, anyone else using the link can know they’re looking at the same content the other person was referencing.
If the archive content changes, that URL will be invalid; if someone uses a fake hash, the URL will be invalid (which is why MD5 wouldn’t be appropriate).
The beauty of this technique is that query parameters are generally ignored if unsupported by the web server, so any archival service could start using this technique today, and all it would require is a browser extension to validate the parameter.
Link it to something like Web of Trust, and you’ve solved the separate issue you described.
In fact, this is a feature WoT could add to their extension today, and it would “Just Work”. For that matter, Archive.org could add it to their extension today, too.
Remind me to ping Jason about that.
The_Decryptor@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 188d
IPFS says hi
adespoton@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 188d
Yes; the problem IPFS has is the same problem IPv6 has.
The hash-in-a-URL solution can function cleanly in the background on top of what people already use.
The_Decryptor@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 188d
IPFS has gateways though, so you can link to the latest version of a page which can be updated by the owner, or alternatively link to a specific revision of the page that is immutable and can't be forged.
dan@upvote.au · 17 pts · 188d
It wasn't a dox attempt though. The blog just collected information that was already publicly available on other sites.
Anon518@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 188d
Unfortunately, they shot themselves in the foot by responding the way they did. They basically did the job of anyone who wants them taken down and not trusted. It was probably the worst way they could have reacted. Such a tragedy to lose such a valuable website.
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 188d
As they should since it doesn't matter.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 188d
Yeah, someone being shitty to you doesn't mean go you full-fledged shitty in return, it kind of proves your lack of trustworthiness to begin with. It's like Nazis being like "leftists were mean to me by explaining how my politics made me a Nazi, so I'm gonna show them by Nazi-ing even harder! They forced me to be like this!" It kind of betrays the argument that the reason you got that way was because leftists were mean to you.
trk@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 188d
Who cares why they did it?
It proves they can and do alter the "archived" website, so it's usefulness as a source is completely gone.
RobotToaster@mander.xyz · 5 pts · 188d
Archiving a site inherently requires altering it, to change embed URLs, scripts, etc. The fact they had that capability was never in question.
deathbird@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 188d
Yeah, ESH. His response of editing an archive showed the site to be unreliable as an archive. DDOSing from the site as a counter to the dox attempt caused the site serious reputational harm as well.
It sucks because his site was actually more reliable than The Internet Archive.