The Internet Archive is back online

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/the-internet-archive-and-its-916-billion-saved-webpages-are-back-online/

by Wingy • 2 years ago

340 94 2 years ago

seestem4• 2 years ago

It would be better if the Internet Archive was decentralized without a central point of failure, maybe run on something like bittorent.

dusted• 2 years ago

I kind of agree, but the way the internet is going, with everyone being behind carrier-grade nat, it's not much of a decentralized network of computers anymore, not to mention all the kids with their laptops and tablets not even hosting anything :(

Kuinox• 2 years ago

UPnP exists and allow devices to ask the router to open a port to them.

nikisweeting5• 2 years ago

There are ways around this, I've experimented with setting up a cluster of ArchiveBox instances that share snapshots over Tailscale. Tailscale lets users sign up for free accounts, and you can share machines between separate accounts. A (CGNAT-compatible) decentralized invite-only network could concievably spread that way.

uniqueuid• 2 years ago

The problem is that it's hard to do this in a way that ensures good archival of ALL resources.

Bittorrent works well for popular things but fails for marginal content (unless some really dedicated individuals step in.)

What the internet archive provides is a way to have access to many many resources which you didn't know you needed in advance.

TZubiri2• 2 years ago

Lol, in a way the decentralized version is actually the internet.

maire• 2 years ago

I don't know if bittorrent has improved - but 20 years ago I had a personal issue with it.

At that time our son was using it for games. He goes away to college and came home for the first school break. I get a phone call from our internet provider asking if our son was home. I was so shocked and handed the phone to our son.

Apparently at that time bittorrent was optimizing for the most efficient path to a host. Since we had relatively good connection, the mighty weight of the internet was funnelling through our tiny internet provider to our son's computer. The provider (without our knowing it) had made a deal with our son that he would only turn on bittorrent between midnight and 6 AM. I doubt other providers would be so generous.

I have been sceptical of bittorrent since that day.

jetrink• 2 years ago

All clients today (and probably back then) have options to limit bandwidth consumption including throttling, scheduling, and total data transfer caps. For serving mostly HTML and images, dedicating even 10% of a home broadband connection to serving content would allow many, many people per day to access archived pages.

Cheer21712• 2 years ago

You say this as if it is an original idea. Of course the IA is working on this and have been for over 6 years. There already is a DWeb version. They have been advancing DWeb infrastructure. The IA hosts all kinds of DWeb developer events.

But it is over 50 petabytes and the IA gets a huge amount of traffic through the regular web that they need to serve quickly and efficiently to their users.

Guess what has happened over 6 years of decentralization of 50 TB? People only seed what they want or care about and there aren't enough seeders to host. They set all this up and nobody volunteers. You're a DWeb advocate and you haven't been seeding. That's a recipe for disaster if they rely on the goodness of volunteer seeders. The IA's mission is broader. DWeb will ever only compliment the IAs mission.

https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/18/behind-the-scenes-of-the...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/archiveorg-...

seestem4• 2 years ago

It is not my original idea, but it is an obvious idea to anyone who knows how the internet works, I just added it to get the discussion going.

lukas0993• 2 years ago

If I help seed this DWeb and it turns out it has some copyrighted materials in it, will I be potentially held liable?

ksymph• 2 years ago

How does one contribute? In the article you linked:

there is no information on how users can get involved in the decentralized version of Archive.org and who the peers are that are distributing the content.

The other link doesn't mention how people could help host data either. If there is a way, then it seems like more of a marketing issue if those willing are unaware or unable to figure out how. I can't find any actionable steps on how to contribute.

edit - it seems the dweb version was a frontend for archive.org testing serving IA content over alternative protocols. It was never finished or expanded on unfortunately. Links to it are dead but here's the github repo https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-archive

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...

I’ve always been fascinated by this post.

tomrod• 2 years ago

You're describing a network effects problem, specifically a collaborative game failure. Need some mechanism designers and big tech cos to jump in, stat!

tonetegeatinst• 2 years ago

Can confirm that issue about people only seeding what they are interested in.

I found a dataset I wanted to hoard but the authors website was gone. A dataset site had a torrent and I said great I'll just torrent and seed that and help keep the thing alive, turns out I can't find a single seeder for the torrent.

creer2• 2 years ago

It seems to me the various efforts are dead or stalled. Anything in actual current development or production? IPFS was supposed to go in that direction and still exists, sure, but not to provide IA duplication (that is advertised.)

mrtksn• 2 years ago

That would be an awful lot of replication or very shitty archive. Decentralization works when each node can serve all the functions and content alone or when you don't care about completeness.

Unless I'm missing something, an archive is not something small or something that's just as good when part of it is missing.

nikisweeting5• 2 years ago

I'm working on this, ArchiveBox v0.8 adds the beginnings of a content addressable store, with plans for bittorrent-backed instance-to-instance sharing in a later version.

I think Archive.org should still exist too (and ArchiveBox donates + submits URLs to Archive.org too), but having a self-hosted option where you can archive personal stuff that requires a login, and do P2P sharing with with fine grained permissions is a gap that should be filled.

Aiming to archive the entire internet is Archive.org's goal, aiming to archive the part of the internet YOU care about is our goal.

sourcepluck• 2 years ago

I'm hoping that Autonomi (formerly The Safe Network) is up for the job when (if) it makes it out into the real world one day https://forum.autonomi.community/t/the-internet-archive-a-pe...

[I know that some percentage between 95 and 100 of crypto projects are a scam. I personally believe this one isn't, after much diligent reading. Whether it gets released or does what it claims it will do is another question, but please do spare me the kneejerk anti-crypto reactions, if you can. Just because they're almost all money-making scams, doesn't mean they're all money-making scams.]

thrownaway561• 2 years ago

that will never happen. no one is going to be able to seed the amount of data that IA has. The only thing they can hope for is that a company like Google or CF provides another data center for them.

throwaway484765• 2 years ago

When the internet archive censors a website is it deleted permanently or just not publicly available?

chirau• 2 years ago

I don't think they censor anything, strictly archiving. Do you know of any instance in which they censored a site?

throwaway484765• 2 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/twitter.com/taylo...

For one. I'm just curious what their policy is.

edgineer• 2 years ago

Kiwi farms

tossit444• 2 years ago

https://archive.fo/p8DmQ

teddyh• 2 years ago

I take it you’ve never encountered the dreaded message, “The item is not available due to issues with the item's content”?

There was a news item here on HN about something available on the Internet Archive: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16725526> This is now gone from IA. Old page with links to IA which are no longer working: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180331224513/http://profileeng...>

dark-star• 2 years ago

They black out all items that get a DMCA complaint or similar request (so it's still there just not accessible). However they permanently delete illegal stuff.

throwaway484765• 2 years ago

I would assume they delete illegal stuff as they are compelled to. What I'd like to know is their policy for legal stuff that they exclude that is not as a result of DMCA.

yard2010• 2 years ago

Honestly we are so lucky to have something like this. Solving this problem in a decentralized manner is so hard, and when a centralized solution has its drawbacks, when done properly (i.e. not for making money but serving greater values) is invaluable. A gift.

onetokeoverthe• 2 years ago

Still down in my town.

mananaysiempre• 2 years ago

The Internet Archive is not, in fact, completely online (as the article explains but the title doesn’t). The Wayback Machine, which is part of it, is kind of online but (in my experience) you are going to experience HTTP 504 timeouts from time to time on the first query for a given (URL, date) pair as it seemingly goes out to slower storage. (Long delays happened in the past occasionally as well but not to the point of a 504.)

tiffanyh• 2 years ago

I thought Cloudflare was going to provide "Always Online" access to Internet Archive

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-always-online-and-th...

adambb• 2 years ago

Other way around! Cloudflare can optionally load your site from IA if it's down.

imglorp• 2 years ago

If that's the case, I hope CF is making a big, periodic, donation to IA for the business value provided.

TZubiri2• 2 years ago

Do you happen to remember how you learned this? I'm quite skeptical of it.

jgrahamc• 2 years ago

That is about us using the Internet Archive to show a snapshot of a page from the Internet Archive when the origin server is down.

yabones• 2 years ago

Will CF be funding IA for using the service so extensively?

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41856008

LetsGetTechnicl• 2 years ago

There have been so many instances since it's been down that I tried to access IA resources and realized they were unavailable. I'm still bitter that of all the targets a hacker could've chose, it was the IA. Couldn't have happened to a better website. I plan on upping my monthly donation as soon as I can.

Alifatisk• 2 years ago

Hope these hackers receive lots of negative reactions from their peers and people around them.

7402• 2 years ago

Some source information about the group that has claimed responsibility:

"A group known as SN_Blackmeta claimed responsibility for the attack, with a confusing antisemitic message that the archive “belongs to the USA” as if it were a government project."

https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/15/internet-archive-data-breach-...

"Internet Archive Cyber Attacked by Pro-Palestinian Hackers"

https://www.cybersecurityintelligence.com/blog/internet-arch...

"Anti-Israel hacker group hacks 'Internet Archive', exposing 31 million users"

https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/bkird2rjke

compootr• 2 years ago

Right, but it's somewhat IAs fault, since they didn't secure their shot properly

Maybe they needed this wakeup call before someone could, say, remove all of their data

krunck• 2 years ago

What makes you think the "hacker" was just a person looking for an easy target? More likely that this was a targeted attack by those that don't like IA.

karlzt• 2 years ago

> by those that don't like IA.

Or perhaps it was to make IA better.

binary132• 2 years ago

just build your own 960 billion website archive

idlewords• 2 years ago

Working on it.

hersko• 2 years ago

I wonder if it would be possible to identify and prosecute those responsible.

serendipty01• 2 years ago

Does someone know where i can download MIT OCW videos ?

As the videos are present on archive.org but it is down and i was unable to find them anywhere else online ?

Also, yt-dlp is also not working: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10128

Example: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-016-introductory-biology-fall-...

adamnew1234562• 2 years ago

I seed a torrent of the SICP lectures that originally came from IA, I'll have to see if that's still up and if there's some way of getting the other torrents from the tracker.

If you're lucky there's other seeds around, and not just the IA web seeds which (I assume?) are down too.

adamnew1234562• 2 years ago

No such luck :( Both the bt1.archive.org and b2.archive.org trackers appear to be down.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:1814b8e2673e8a4547fd9c4f1a417b05860230b4&dn=MIT_Structure_of_Computer_Programs_1986&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdownload%2F&ws=http%3A%2F%2Fia600204.us.archive.org%2F15%2Fitems%2F

PeterCorless• 2 years ago

Attacking the Internet Archive is like robbing from your own grandmother.

twosdai• 2 years ago

Thank the internet.

TruffleLabs• 2 years ago

There are other things still not available, like this!

“Lisp lore : a guide to programming the Lisp machine”

https://archive.org/details/lisploreguidetop0000brom

I discover this reference and boom the Internet Archive book is not available:(

“Wayback Machine (provisional, read-only) service.

Other Internet Archive services are temporarily offline.

Please check our official accounts, including Twitter/X, Bluesky or Mastodon for the latest information.

We apologize for the inconvenience.”

sandwichmonger2• 2 years ago

I'm really disappointed with the Internet Archive's level of unprofessionalism when it comes to any form of downtime whatsoever (let alone the blog). The monolithic one stop shop "Internet Library" can not even bother to put updates on their downtime page and instead directs their user base to social media platforms.

Call me a nut, but I feel the IA would work better if it was run by the Library of Congress, but then again that has it's own pitfalls.

AceStar• 2 years ago

This article appears to be referring to just the Wayback Machine.

The Internet Archive itself is still down.

jawshwa• 2 years ago

What a goober

The Internet Archive is back online

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