Brought to you by the Department of Erasing History.

    • @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      06 months ago

      I’ll admit they have some powerful enemies, but I can’t imagine who specifically would be behind this. Maybe it’s not a conventional attack but some wealthy idiots trying to clone the archives to feed their dumb hobby.

  • @OpenStars@discuss.online
    link
    fedilink
    English
    06 months ago

    Who would downvote something like this, without leaving a comment to explain why!?

    Sometimes I wish I could see that info, in rare circumstances like this.

    • @redcalcium@lemmy.institute
      link
      fedilink
      English
      06 months ago

      Due to how federation works, downvotes are actually somewhat public because instance owners can query them in lemmy database, though instance owners probably won’t tell you if you ask due to privacy reason. If you’re interested in something like this, you can run your own instance.

      • Dark Arc
        link
        fedilink
        English
        06 months ago

        Yeah, it’s actually … a bit creepy.

        Federated voting in general seems like it could use some rethinking to enable private voting but also to protect against vote manipulation. Right now the fediverse is arguably incredibly vulnerable to vote manipulation campaigns.

        • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️
          link
          fedilink
          English
          06 months ago

          I was wondering about this. If they didn’t keep track of who is voting, manipulation would be easier then it already is. The problem is that rogue instance admins could make votes public.

          • Dark Arc
            link
            fedilink
            English
            06 months ago

            One possible answer is to allow anyone to see votes categorized by instance, so you know where they’re originating from.

            Small/single user instances could be aggregated together/anonymized or maybe that’s just the price you pay for having a single user instance.

        • @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          06 months ago

          Open (and distributed) and private are two very difficult things to intermingle. You can mitigate some issues, but at the end of the day the two ideas have to butt against each other.

            • capital
              link
              fedilink
              English
              06 months ago

              What aspect of the points mentioned in the thread do you feel are addressed by blockchain?

              • @laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                link
                fedilink
                English
                0
                edit-2
                6 months ago

                Openly distributed while being private(-ish; I know blockchains aren’t truly private but it could at least obfuscate it adequately against casual or semi serious attempts to identify someone)

                I’ll admit I’m no expert or even particularly well versed in blockchain technologies, but my (limited) understanding of them suggests this might actually be the kind of thing it’s good at (as opposed to how it could seemingly do anything a few years ago and everyone was trying to shoehorn a blockchain into their products)

                And to underline part of my comment, I did say “I wonder if…” rather than asserting that it would work or even that I bet it would work

                • capital
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  06 months ago

                  Fedi technologies are already distributed. That’s literally what federation is about.

                  Blockchain isn’t private by default although some have gone that direction. Bitcoin, for example, is pseudonymous - all transactions are public to the world though no tx is tied to an identity on chain.

                  Any privacy features you’re imagining can be built for a blockchain solution to this problem could be built into a “normal”, web 2.0, federated solution that would be far less expensive to run, resource-wise.

                  It’s almost always the case that when someone comes up with blockchain as the solution to some problem, they mean distributed or maybe self-hosted. Neither of which requires a blockchain.

                  Check out videos involving crypto on the Cartoon Avatar’s youtube channel such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xq721IAqBo&t.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      06 months ago

      Sometimes people miss-tap while scrolling. Also, on kbin at least, you can who downvote things if they’re on kbin. I think if you run your own instance, as an admin you can see who as well?

      • GreatAlbatross
        link
        fedilink
        English
        06 months ago

        Admins that access the post through their instance can currently see the votes.

        Someone explained it to me that a lot of the downvoting is people browsing all, then getting annoyed and downvoting when they see things they’re not interested in :|

        • @atrielienz@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          06 months ago

          Which doesn’t make sense on Lemmy because it’s not algorithm based. But is probably a muscle memory reaction from using Reddit or similar.

          • @Dave@lemmy.nz
            link
            fedilink
            English
            06 months ago

            Lemmy has algorithms, it’s just that they aren’t designed to maximise profit.

            If you have the sort type set to Hot, posts are ranked based on score (upvotes minus down votes) with a decay based on post time. Active is the same but based on the last comment time.

            If you are on the website, there is a ? next to the sort option that will take you to a page explaining how the different options work.

            But long story short, most sorting options are affected by down votes.

      • @OpenStars@discuss.online
        link
        fedilink
        English
        0
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Kbin: Not anymore, at least last I checked. I have an old account there that I left behind due to the enormous amount of technical glitches it kept having, and checking in on it recently (maybe last week?), not one of my comments has even a single downvote there - even older ones. iirc the “reduces” tab was still present, just entirely empty. (I was looking for a particular comment, but then while there noticed the effect was much wider.) Edit: I took another look, and I the only downvotes I see are from kbin itself (example post), so it seems to not be federating downvotes from outside of itself.

        In the past when it did used to work, it also would not show downvotes from instances that it had server-wise defederated with, although someone can still get downvotes from personally blocking an instance, on a Lemmy server running v0.19.3 or greater, that the server itself had not server-wise defederated with. So there was always a very large gap there.

        The reason I thought of this all was due to the OP title: e.g. someone could mass-downvote things on the Fediverse to attempt to control the conversation by de-emphasizing things that they did not personally agree with, but outside of moderator or admin reporting that offers a degree of trust behind it. Obviously that is its intended purpose, but I mean maliciously subverting that like have 10 accounts and log into all of them to influence a post.

        About once a week lately I keep blocking some spammer accounts that randomly shill products or videos throughout the Fediverse, rather than wait for an admin to do it, but if an account(s) was more subtle and merely downvoted, then I doubt such a thing would even be noticed?

        I should add that I respect some people’s decisions if they want to be on a server that doesn’t even record or reveal downvotes - that’s fine bc it’s their choice. But otherwise it is basically public knowledge, except as you say you need to fire up an instance of your own to view them, and then protect that instance from intrusion efforts even if you use it for nothing else (or possibly there is some API call, but I doubt that knowledge would be so easy to find, and for one thing it would have to access a database that has sent out past updates, not merely listen for new ones unless it had been running prior to the downvote event).

        Anyway, I hoped people would see this post, and it seems that is happening, so this time the downvotes did not detail any conversation about the topic (with many tens-fold greater up- than down-votes), but if there had been sufficient number of downvotes delivered quickly enough… then how many of us would have even seen this, sorting Subscribed or All by Hot? So it points to a liability in the Fediverse, which at some point, someone somewhere is going to exploit.

      • Dojan
        link
        fedilink
        English
        06 months ago

        This is definitely something that has to be thought about in terms of UI/UX design. I recently developed a Outlook calendar-esque interface, and we’ve had on-and-off discussions for a couple of hours about how we best implement a way to “click” an empty spot in the calendar to create an event there.

        I’m championing “we don’t on mobile, but use double-click on desktop.” I think I’m winning.

      • Melkath
        link
        fedilink
        06 months ago

        I didn’t know know you could see who voted on kbin.

        I just knew lemmy, mbin, and some others don’t get counted, so the troll down boats don’t matter.

        • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          0
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          If you click “more” and then “activity”, its listed in the “reduces” tab. Kbin only includes kbin downvotes though, which is why downvotes look so rare on kbin.

    • DdCno1
      link
      fedilink
      06 months ago

      I sometimes wonder what needs to happen to people in order for them to confidently write nonsense like this.

        • @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          06 months ago

          Burden of proof baby… U accuse someone of something, it’s ur job to prove it (or at least come up with a hypothesis). Just commenting ur conclusion n running away giggling is not the nicest thing to do.

          • Melkath
            link
            fedilink
            06 months ago

            The irony of claiming burden of proof on a post about proof being suppressed.

            My hunch is the billions of dollars we have recently siphoned into a cyber warfare branch of the military, Project 2025, which is advancing almost identically to how The Plan for the New American Century progressed 20 years ago, and a President who is in bed with a war criminal fugitive. Oh, and they also recently started one of the largest censorship campaigns in decades Ala “STOP FREELY SHARING INFORMATION ON TIK TOK! WE ARE SUPPOSED TO FILTER RAW INFORMATION OUT AND PROPAGANDA IN VIA MAJOR NEWS NETWORKS AND ISP THROTTLES THAT WE CONTROL!!@!@”

            The 100% part was hyperbole, but America is the one doing everything in it’s power to spark WWIII, and the one that benefits most from scrubbing recent history.

            • @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              06 months ago

              Ok, we at least have a hypothesis now. So u’r saying, the US military is secretly executing a Republican plan when a Democrat is in office, when there was a Republican President in office just 3 years ago who tried to coup the government? Don’t u think the military would’ve pulled shit waaaay more noticeable than DDOSing a goddamn archive for five minutes?

              Also, why would America want to spark WW3? Businesses function best during peacetime. WW3 would definitely mean usage of nuclear weapons. By your logic, we should’ve already had a nuclear war back when the Soviet Union existed.

              This is just like the anti vax conspiracies- the US military is putting chips through vaccinations to control u.

          • @Beetlejuice001@lemmy.wtf
            link
            fedilink
            English
            06 months ago

            I’m sure there’s proof just laying around, what is the article about ? Oh nevermind if someone didn’t write about it online it’s not true. The US has no history of this type of nonsense.

            • @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              06 months ago

              Again, burden of proof. Ur comment is similar to anti vaxxers saying- “Bill Gates is putting microchips through vaccinations to control society. What, why’re you asking me for proof? Look it up! It’s right there on the internet! Plus billionaires are known to pull shit like this.”

              • @Beetlejuice001@lemmy.wtf
                link
                fedilink
                English
                06 months ago

                One is plausible. One is not. What did you do with all the time you saved typing ur instead of your you fuckin dunce

                • @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  06 months ago

                  One is plausible. One is not.

                  Again, mentioning the conclusion without the goddamn hypothesis and evidence to support the hypothesis.

                  What did you do with all the time you saved typing ur instead of your you fuckin dunce

                  I boinked ur mom (sorry, u kinda invited me for that lol)

        • capital
          link
          fedilink
          English
          06 months ago

          Have you ever heard the phrase, “that which is asserted without evidence maybe dismissed without evidence”?

          • applepie
            link
            fedilink
            06 months ago

            yeah but we also live in the age where difference between a conspiracy theory and an outright conspiracy can sometimes be as short as 6 months lol

            • capital
              link
              fedilink
              English
              06 months ago

              Sounds like it doesn’t take long to wait for evidence then hu?

              • applepie
                link
                fedilink
                06 months ago

                about the same time when they start busting corpo leakers

                • capital
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  06 months ago

                  Ok. In the meantime, I don’t have to believe anything that’s untrue.

        • DdCno1
          link
          fedilink
          06 months ago

          Yeah, no. This comment alone would go against any government NDA - and this user is just some random person who, going by their comment history, most certainly has no inside knowledge of anything.

      • @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        0
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Because US bad China good USSR was actually the good guy Uyghur genocide never happened Tiananmen square incident was a lie REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE /s

          • @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            06 months ago

            I’m not even from the US lmao. But still, good effort.

            [ 中华人民共和国寄语] Great work, Citizen! Your social credit score has increased by [100] Integers. You can now have priority transport and can now get into prestigious colleges! Keep up the good work! [ 中华人民共和国寄语]

            • Melkath
              link
              fedilink
              06 months ago

              So you are confirming that, you sir, are the outsider trying to influence American politics… by accusing other people of being outsiders influencing American politics.

              Sounds very Blue MAGA.

          • @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            06 months ago

            No sir he didn’t! Chairman Mao was the greatest communist revolutionary to ever exist, sir! The Great Leap forward was such a successful project! /s

    • DdCno1
      link
      fedilink
      06 months ago

      I sometimes wonder what needs to happen to people in order for them to confidently write nonsense like this.

  • SeaJ
    link
    fedilink
    English
    06 months ago

    I was wondering why I couldn’t get to it yesterday.

  • @Valmond@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    06 months ago

    I’m working on a protocol that makes information quite hard (I won’t say impossible because nothing probably is) to take down, because I believe in both information shouldn’t be censored and that everyone should be able to share what they want (yes moral stuff like a song).

    I’d love meeting like-minded people to learn more about what other people do and think about stuff like that :-)

    I mean there are ways to get around ddos or the “great” firewall of china for example. So why not do it?

    Tried to reach out on matrix and some niche communities but they were very (very) small, so I’m still looking for some melting pot.

    Any idea?

      • @Valmond@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        06 months ago

        You can check it out here tenfingers.org

        Download & copy the binaries (setup, 10f, listener) in two different folders, run the setup, configure to 127.0.0.1 and some port, do it again (in the other folder, with another port), run the listeners and start sharing in a little microcosm. 10f has inbuilt help, for configuring and sharing.

        The source code is Python, FOSS and there to check out too.

        I’m so bad at publishing things 🥲

        • @Valmond@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          06 months ago

          Thanks! Inter Planetary File System, no less! I do love the cool/very cheezy name :-)

          I actually do know IPFS and how it works, (DHT).

          It was IMO one of the first great tries to make data distributed in a decentralised manner. I stumbled onto it in 2016 IIRC.

          What I think it is lacking is that it’s not possible to change your data without ruining your link/“uri” and that it is based on benevolent links to publish your data. Stepping stones and all that.

          I know they are trying to fix the link problem and for me it seems they traded convenience for centralisation.

          Would love to hang out somewhere chatting about stuff like that.

      • @Valmond@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        06 months ago

        Yes, stuff like IPFS, filecoin, others… my little contribution… The future censorings, what to do about it, …

  • @Tachikoma741@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    06 months ago

    Damn. I guess this is why we can’t have nice things.

    I guess I’ll take this opportunity mention if one cannot make a monetary donation to IA. You can always help them out by help seed some of their torrents. I’d appreciate it at least :P

  • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️
    link
    fedilink
    English
    06 months ago

    Reddit also has vote fuzzing where you can get the number of votes, but it’s always manipulated for some reason.

    I don’t understand the point, and tbh it’s a serious case of social media mind fuckery. It’s a real problem for anyone who creates an incredibly specific subreddit for use by a group and then everyone is left wondering who keeps downvoting them. That can have real life consequences for anyone who doesn’t understand what is happening.

    • @kent_eh@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      06 months ago

      Reddit also has vote fuzzing where you can get the number of votes, but it’s always manipulated for some reason.

      The stated reason is to prevent abuses like “piling on”.

  • Nziom
    link
    fedilink
    English
    06 months ago

    Why out of all sites why internet archive

      • Nziom
        link
        fedilink
        English
        06 months ago

        But they have back up to the entire thing am pretty sure any change would be detectable if a dictator is behind this then he’s extremely stupid

        • @Agent641@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          06 months ago

          If the internet archive goes offline we can just view a cached version of it at the internet archi OH NO!

          • Nziom
            link
            fedilink
            English
            06 months ago

            I thought there back online was there any update on the issue?

      • Nziom
        link
        fedilink
        English
        06 months ago

        Luckily non of the data was deleted

          • @KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            06 months ago

            That’s a ridiculous amount of effort to go through to slow down a scraper for one site, especially when that site could just be… turned off.

            • Saik0
              link
              fedilink
              English
              06 months ago

              If you own the domain you can disable the crawler on it. And remove previous scrapes.

              • @KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                link
                fedilink
                English
                0
                edit-2
                6 months ago

                Then it still makes no sense, as you being unable to take down the content means you also very likely can’t edit the content. I can’t think of a situation where you:

                1. Need content to not be scraped
                2. Need time to remove/edit that content
                3. Have access to do the above
                4. Don’t have access to pull the content immediately
                5. Have control of a large enough botnet to take down Internet Archive
                6. Don’t have a big enough botnet to take down the aforementioned content
                • Saik0
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  06 months ago

                  Well that’s my point… It doesn’t make sense because you can just go after the fact and make the request to take it all down.

                  You have to be stupidly paranoid and obscenely stupid to believe that a DDOS is the correct answer if this is the case.

      • Echo Dot
        link
        fedilink
        English
        0
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Well they made a bad job of it because you can’t do that with a DDOS attack. Basically it’s the same as picketing the entrance to a building. All you need is a lot of people anyone can do it at any time.

        Actually entering the building and manipulating contents it holds is much more difficult, as then you actually have to engage with the building security.

        A DDOS attack can never delete data.