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

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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    12 days ago

    Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that he only did this in response to a malicious dox attempt.

    • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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      12 days ago

      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.

    • Anon518@sh.itjust.works
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      12 days ago

      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.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        12 days ago

        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
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      12 days ago

      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
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        12 days ago

        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
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      12 days ago

      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.