- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
It looks like the internet archive is needed assistance, I just heard about this today and figured lemmy could help spread this message around
Modern corporations are a damned plague. Most of these fuckers would destroy our whole cultural heritage in a heartbeat if it meant making a profit.
Yes, corporations exist to make profit, but come on, there are limits.
there are limits
I am glad you have a moral centre.
But that is the capitalist way. A Redditor once wrote: “*Corporations have no morals, no ethics, no code of conduct, no feelings, no empathy, and zero accountability. They have one goal and one goal only: to increase profits at all costs.”
Case in point: the climate crisis. Corporations are literally destroying their own home for a symbol of success that, like their products, is man-made: money. It is the ultimate pursuit of vanity.
Crazy, if you think about it for a moment.
The AI techbros wanna scare you with tales of AI becoming sentient and going rogue to destroy us all, when corporations, mindless machines made out of people to maximize profits at all cost, are already doing all that
Yeah. The monsters gnawing away at nature, public infrastructure, your friends? They are called corporations.
Btw, megacorps have multiple faces and are especially hungry.your friends?
I do not understand. Could you explain what you mean please?
Agreed, now what do we do about it?
I quit a very very well paid IT job in a very big corp because I did not want to participate to their anti-human, anti-planet shit…
What are you doing about it?
I decided not to pursue my interest in geology because I didn’t want to be stuck with the only employment options being oil companies.
It sucks that we need to give up so much even though they keep destroying and pillaging.
Respect! Hope you will find your way following your passion and working for the Good!
What am I doing about it? For the most part, nothing at the moment besides actively refusing to purchase from a small number of companies—Nestlé, Walmart, Amazon, etc—mostly out of principal as I’m not illusioned enough to think one person will make a difference in this sense). Primarily because at the moment I live in a dead-end job making barely enough money to buy food and trying to keep my car from disintegrating long enough for me to get to work and back.
Frankly, I’d love to do more, but there’s really not much I can do. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though. Just because you don’t have an alternative ready doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to dislike the current situation.
Thank you for your reply! You are doing what you can and that is important!
I appreciate you understanding. It really sucks our world has come to just having to deal with it most of the time.
I agree that that is the capitalist way, which is one of the reasons I hate capitalism. I’m no tankie, but I believe there are other ways, even ways that still use personal property as well as currency, beyond capitalism, which is just the use of personal property and currency to obtain more personal property and currency at all costs in an endless cycle.
come and destroy the IPFS, then!
What is the IPFS?
a decentralized file hosting/sharing protocol that powers library genesis, for example
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol, hypermedia, and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. It allows users to host and receive content in a manner similar to BitTorrent.
That’s pretty cool. :)
Europe is voting this weekend. If you care about copyright reform, you should consider voting for the European Pirate Party. IA is probably in the wrong here, legally. But many would argue it’s morally right to have free access to information. Sure, shadow libraries are popping up everywhere and we have access to more information than ever before, but if we really want access for everyone, we need different copyright laws, and for that we need politicians.
Sadly in countries without a pirate party, like Denmark, you can’t (as far as I know) vote for the EP pirate party.
Does voting for a party like that even help anything? I’m asking because my voting experience is US, and everyone knows how many parties matter here. So I’m curious.
It does a bit, since every party will be represented in the European council based on the number of votes they have. It’s not an election where the winner takes all.
I think the pirates had one or two representatives in the council, which is enough to start debates and make proposals. They obviously can’t push anything through by themselves.
Nice. That sounds like more than we have available. Thank you
Yes. In most European countries even small parties can get seats. In my country there are 8 parties in parliament, for example, and 2 of them didn’t use to be there 2 election cycles ago (they were too small/new 8 years ago but eventually grew in popularity and got enough votes for representation).
Of course if they only have 1 or 2 members in parliament they typcily tend to form coalitions with other like-minded parties so they can get more voting power.
I wonder how many people that aren’t from the US running around telling people to vote third party their are, because of what you just described.
For Germean voters there is the WahloMat to help with the voting choice (a dozen of questions and in the end shows how much overlap there is with all the parties): https://www.wahl-o-mat.de/europawahl2024/app/main_app.html
The major issue is that if you care about CopyRight: Party A. Easier to comply with regulation: Party B. Migration: Party C. Environment: Party D.
And all of the choices (A-D) have some very removed, prominent positions that you strongly oppose and in the end, have no clue what to elect and choose the least worst option and hope for the best.
Everyone that wants context should read this: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-internet-archives-last-ditch
Listen, I love the IA and everything they stand for, but they’re not winning this. They fucked up and gave away copyrighted content, for free, in unlimited amounts during covid. They then proceed to melt down in court because they know it’s impossible to win. Now they’re seeking empathy from everyone and not talking about why they got sued - which is giving away potentially millions of copies of other people’s work…
And everyone that wants unbiased context should read the wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive
The judgment basically completely ignored IA’s arguments towards fair use. EFF filed an amicus brief that explains how baseless the judgment was. Assuming the entire US court system isn’t in the corporate pocket yet they will win this on appeal.
It’s ridiculous to assume that an organization whose main purpose is data archival would knowingly and blatantly ignore copyright law. IA didn’t ignore it, they did they homework and saw that their use qualified as fair use. Then they met a judge who doesn’t give a shit about that. Nobody can prepare for that in advance.
Assuming they don’t win, is there any contingency in place to preserve all their data? I don’t know how exactly because I assume there’s an absolute fuckton of it, but it would be such a shame if all of that was lost forever.
I’d love to see it become like the Pirate Bay, where they squish one and ten more pop up to replace it, but I don’t know if that’s even possible.
That worked for pirate bay because they were storing a miniscule amount of actual data. Torrents are really small. The actual data is stored in the peer to peer network. The torrents are just tracking where in the p2p stuff is.
IA isn’t like that. They probably store exabytes of data.
Would you care the elaborate more?
The nonprofit Internet Archive is appealing a judgment that threatens the future of all libraries. Big publishers are suing to cut off libraries’ ownership and control of digital books, opening new paths for digital book bans and dangerous surveillance.
Join 28,000+ signers on the petition below to show your support for the Internet Archive, libraries’ digital rights, and an open internet with safe, uncensored access to knowledge.
Lol, a petition won’t stop this unless it’s a petition to bribe the judge. The US is owned by corporations.
Sure, but it is still better than doing nothing.
It feels better than doing nothing.
If you can convince yourself you’re not doing nothing.
I’ve never been that good a liar.Large petitions also serve as a way of getting the word out.
Yep. Petition gets large enough for media attention, word is spread, MAYBE people get active.
But Then police beat on them, Trump supporters defend the corporate interests of their supreme lord, it all goes down the shitter anyway.
So don’t ever get active or protest or do anything?
I don’t know.
I still think there’s at least some value, even if the only thing it accomplishes is getting people to talk about it. Many people have never even heard of The Internet Archive.
Either way, there isn’t really a reason not to.
It’s not even a question of being “owned by corporations”. Judges don’t care about petitions. They’re not politicians, their job is to adjudicate the law.
In theory. In the US, at least (I don’t know about other countries), some judge positions are voted in, In that sense, they most certainly are politicians.
On top of that, HAVE YOU SEEN OUR SUPREME COURT. THAT SHIT’S THE HALLMARK CHANNEL OF “OWNED BY OTHER ENTITIES”, be it actual politicians (Trump) or CEOs (also Trump), many of whom ARE both executives and politicans (again, not only Trump, but also a number of other reps & senators).
C’mon it’s at least worth a shot. To me at least.
Except it’s not a threat to the future of all libraries, it’s a threat to the future of “libraries” that decide to completely ignore copyright and give out an unlimited number of copies of ebooks. Basically turning themselves into book-focused piracy sites.
I’m incredibly frustrated with Internet Archive for bringing this on themselves. It is not their mandate to fight copyright, that’s something better left in the hands of activist organizations like the EFF. The Internet Archive’s mandate is to archive the Internet, to store and preserve knowledge. Distributing it is secondary to that goal. And picking unnecessary fights with big publishing houses like this is directly contrary to that goal, since now the Internet Archive is in danger.
It’s like they’re carrying around a precious baby and they decided it was a good idea to start whacking a bear with a stick. Now the bear is eating their leg and they’re screaming “oh my god help me, the bear is threatening this baby!” Well yeah, but you shouldn’t have brought a baby with you when you went on a bear-whacking expedition. You should have known exactly what that bear was going to do.
Exactly. I hate fucking everything about this. I love the internet archive and nearly all they do.
In principal I love their “covid-19 emergency library” or whatever they called it. In practice? They absolutely know better than to pull stunts and I’m terrified that this will spell the end for one of the greatest knowledge and media resources of the modern age. For shit that was effectively already available to the public through ebook piracy sites.
They already operated on shaky ground, hosting downloads for a metric ton of shit that is unquestionably still under copyright (despite their claims to only be archival of things that are not), skating by on technicalities and by not drawing too much attention to themselves.
Plus, there were so fucking many better ways to do the “free digital library” thing without jeapordizing themselves.
- Have some volunteers “misuse resources”: load an SSD up with the book files, “borrow” some compute power to decrypt/remove drm, pass batches off to existing ebook “dumping” groups to stagger releases and obsfucate the true source. This would ensure that any material they had which was not already available on the high seas would get there.
- Make a big red banner on the site to a blog post with the generic “While we would never condone piracy or copyright infringement, we understand that times are extremely hard right now [blah blah] here are some links to community guides on how to access learning literature (pirate ebooks) during these trying times [blah blah] Please abide by your local laws.”
You summed it up exactly. As one politician put it, the Internet Archive does not decide copyright. They have became to big for there own shoes.
The thing that drives me nuts is that I really do value that baby they’re carrying around. It is precious. But I don’t want to give the Internet Archive money just to funnel into the pockets of their lawyers and settlement payments to big publishers due to these unrelated quixotic battles.
I was hoping that the IA would have learned a lesson from losing this court case, they should have settled as soon as they could. I’m sure the publishers don’t want the bad publicity of “destroying” the Internet Archive, they just want them to stop blatantly violating their copyrights. But this appeal suggests that they haven’t learned that lesson yet.
In an ideal world there’d either be some kind of leadership shakeup at the IA to get rid of whoever was behind this stunt, or some kind of alternative IA-like organization appears to pick up the archive before the IA goes broke and its collection ends up being sold off to the highest bidder. Or simply destroyed.
It is not a great situation. I wish they would break into smaller organizations
They did not ignore copyright. The judge brazenly and incorrectly dismissed all their arguments for fair use. They had no way to foresee they would meet a judge that would go that far.
it’s a threat to the future of “libraries” that decide to completely ignore copyright and give out an unlimited number of copies of ebooks
So do I, so this is very bad.
Fuck.
I really hope someone gets hold of the data and shares it on p2p or otherwise. If all this data is deleted it would be equivalent to nuking pyramids or burning Picasso paintings.
Honestly, I’d say it would be much much worse than your examples. It would be erasing parts of history itself.
Fuck yes, we need to get our hands on this stuff for fucks sake. I have shit there I don’t even know I need yet
Can someone fucking near get their ass there and do a legendary copy paste operation on a massive scale
Exactly. Losing Internet and digital history would create another dark ages for future historians. Everything we’ve done would just be gone.
If I had more money than humanly usable I would create a project that transcribes wikipedia or whatever onto stone/metal plates so it’s not forgotten.
Good luck, every day more than 1PB is uploaded to IA.
That’s one of the reasons why uploads to the Archive have torrents.
Now if they’d just fix the damn tracker…
Made me look for internet archive merch and found they actually do have a store for it
ill mention this in every thread about them:
run the archive team warrior if you can. it helps them archive black boxes like telegram, discord, reddit…
Didn’t know about this, but sounds like a good cause.
Is there any legal risk involved with this? Is it recommended to run behind a VPN?
No, VPNs are not allowed. See here for more info.
The DDOS attack or the lawsuits?
This one pertains to the lawsuits.
There’s no link. Down voted.
Update: OP updated the post to include a link. Up voted.
Seriously no one cares if you downvote or upvote stuff. Get lost with your inept attempt at manipulation
Yeah and I was supposed to stay calm and cute this whole week see what you have done with your shitty comment?
I was asking others to downvote low effort content to improve the quality of the content on the platform for others.
Yeah where? You just said down voted like your personal opinion on the post mattered. Then edited to say upvoted like anyone cared or you were deluded into thinking it was thanks to your little tiny point down
Maybe I am angry but the frikin internet archive is going down, I hate this shit
They made a really dumb move and now have to pay for it. I understand their importance but it doesn’t seem like they do - or they are naive enough to believe corpos have good will.
They broke law in such a dumb way, and it’s a pity they put their entire project in jeopardy. My only thought while deciding to donate is “what will prevent them from doing something this dumb again?”
Is this suppost to be a link
I was trying to link to Battleforlibraries but I failed, it’s my first lemmy post
Please update the post to include the link. Use the edit button.
Okay I edited the post and changed the link, tell me If I was successful!
It was successful. Thank you.
Just sent them a couple of bucks. Wish I could give more but the conversion rate on my currency is atrocious lol 🫠
Lots of people hate blockchain technology, but you can neither take down nor ddos websites hosted on web3.0. You also cannot threaten with legal actions againts the many nodes that run the blockchain because you don’t know who those are.
This is the worst kind of misrepresentation of tech. Nothing you said is explicitly false, it sounds true in passing, but it sure is effectively false.
The amount of data you can actually store in any single node/transaction on a given blockchain is traditionally very small. Even most NFTs are not truly “on the chain” as in the image data fully stored in a node/element, it’s instead a “smart contract” which just says X identity owns Y (with Y itself being stored elsewhere). There have been many many attempts at actually storing data on various chains and there hasn’t been any successes significant enough to come even close to being able to store the classic 90’s Space Jam website, let alone the fucking Internet Archive.
Beyond that, you absolutely can take down nodes in a chain, so to speak. Numerous major “heists” have been “rolled back” or had their nodes/transactions flagged to be ignored by marketplace admins.
You’re right about NFTs. There’s no reason to store the data on chain. Chain stores the metadata and pointers to the files (IPFS, torrent/magnet link whatever). Chain administers how many copies etc should exist and enforces those rules. Filecoin etc have already successfully done this.
You use IPFS for the website itself, and the blockchain to guarantee donations cannot get frozen or stolen like on patreon, and also to keep track of the files on IPFS. The latter is why you need the blockchain and no alternative work.
Think magnet links, but you can’t take down hosts who share the links like piratebay.
You don’t need blockchain to accomplish what the internet archive is, just a network of computers that share a part of their disk space to the other computers. This is just a torrent network at the end of the day
Except you can take down piratebay and send the founders to jail. You can’t take down Ethereum, or anything hosted on it.
???
Taking down PirateBay didn’t kill the torrents it hostedNo, but it landed the founders in jail. Are you suggesting we just accept jail as an outcome if we want to save the internet archive?
Piratebay itself was taken down. You need piratebay to distribute the magnet links.
Well then, just use an anonymus service to distribute magnet links (i2p, tor, blockchain)
Fully agree. In fact, that’s what I’m suggesting in my original comment.
Web3 is essentially just indexing links. But since indexing links to pirated data is illegal, that’s why the blockchain is needed. Sure, tor is also viable, but riskier for the people hosting the websites.
I agree but I find blockchain technology too costly hardwarewise, a simple anonimizing network may be enough
Blockchain is great for when you need global consensus on the ordering of events (e.g. Alice gave all her 5 ETH to Bob first, so a later transaction to give 5 ETH to Charlie is invalid). It is an unnecessarily expensive solution just for archival, since it necessitates storing the data on every node forever.
Ethereum charges ‘gas’ fees per transaction which helps ensure it doesn’t collapse under the weight of excess usage. Blocks have transaction limits, and transactions have size limits. It is currently working out at about US$7,500 per MB of block data (which is stored forever, and replicated to every node in the network). The Internet Archive have apparently ~50 PB of data, which would cost US$371 trillion to put onto Ethereum (in practice, attempting this would push up the price of ETH further, and if they succeeded, most nodes would not be able to keep up with the network). Really, this is just telling us that blockchain is not appropriate for that use case, and the designers of real world blockchains have created mechanisms to make it financially unviable to attempt at that scale, because it would effectively destroy the ability to operate nodes.
The only real reason to use an existing blockchain anyway would be on the theory that you could argue it is too big to fail due to legitimate business use cases, and too hard to remove censorship resistant data. However, if it became used in the majority for censorship resistant data sharing, and transactions were the minority, I doubt that this would stop authorities going after node operators and so on.
The real problems that an archival project faces are:
- The cost of storing and retrieving large amounts of data. That could be decentralised using a solution where not all data is stored on a chain - for example, IPFS.
- The problem of curating data and deciding what is worth archiving, and what is a true-to-source archive vs fake copy. This probably requires either a centralised trusted party, or maybe a voting system.
- The problem of censorship. Anonymity and opaqueness about what is on a particular node can help - but they might in some cases undermine the other goals of archival.
You suggest IPFS, but isn’t that what web3 is?
Web3 is blockchain + IPFS and/or torrents or whatever p2p protocol.
I am not suggesting storing the data itself on the blockchain, but the index, the equivalent of simple HTML pages on the blockchain so we never lose track of the data we share with torrents or whatever peer to peer protocol.
However, if it became used in the majority for censorship resistant data sharing, and transactions were the minority, I doubt that this would stop authorities going after node operators and so on.
I doubt it would exceed transactions, but if it did, authorities would need a global agreement with every single nation to take down all nodes, and that is never happening.
The problem of curating data and deciding what is worth archiving, and what is a true-to-source archive vs fake copy. This probably requires either a centralised trusted party, or maybe a voting system
I agree with you on this, but a voting system doesn’t sound too difficult to implement. And alternatively the internet archive could be that centralized trusted party. Arresting them for reporting on what data is correct would surely be unconstitutional.
And guess what? You don’t need blockchain for that.
Torrents exists, IPFS dropped dependency on block chain. What blockchain do is that if your literal neighbor has the file you want, you must first connect to the global super inefficient network to sync your chain. And if you have censored Internet? Well…
Layer torrent on top of Yggdrasil on top of I2P and you’ll get faster, more decentralized and more resilient network than any blockchain ever done. Such network would continue to work from friend to friend even if your whole town get cut from global net.
Yes, torrents exist, and people get fined or go to jail for seeding them, especially ebooks, movies and music, which is what the internet archive hosts.
Same would apply to yggdrasil.
But no one is going to jail for running an Ethereum node even if illegal file sharing occurs as a result of it because it is impossible to prevent it by design.
Downvote this guy all you want, but this is an incredibly true point. For 15 years, Bitcoin has maintained a distributed, uncensorable ledger, the question is, can we use similar ledger tech to store archive.org? Wikipedia is a single point of failure, so is Archive.org. So is the library of congress. We could easily store all the text content of wikipedia on chain that’s under 100GB, along with IPFS pointers to media content. Long-term, humanity needs a resilient censorship-resistant system to store our collective knowledge and history. These systems, when sufficiently large, are uncensorable and incredibly difficult to exercise undue influence against or shut down. Ask anybody whose tried to get a judge to enforce a judgement against the bitcoin blockchain lol. And they can survive quite well major disruptive events like wars, natural disasters, and even widespread network disruptions. Blockchain can also solve the spam problem that plagued early P2P systems like Gnutella/Ed2k/etc. Everybody moved to BitTorrent because we could trust custodians (trackers and indexers) to curate lists of valid torrents. But that can be decentralized now.
There’s over a dozen different blockchain projects working on the “file storage problem”, some of them have very interesting proposals, at least one of those is going to emerge from the smoke with something that will replicate archive.org’s current role, but it might be a few years before that happens. Already, we have blockchains which offer “decentralized file storage marketplace” that competes pretty well with current file storage providers (AWS etc), and some of them have been running for years.
not enough AI features! /s
Is there any way to use my own computer to take up summer off the dose traffic?