Re: They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

On 11/17/24 1:34 AM, Schlomo Goldberg wrote:
> D. Ray <d@ray> writes:
> 
>> Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite
>> ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has
>> been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for
>> sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over
>> content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in
>> favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content
>> survive to see the light of day.
>>
>> It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a
>> range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the
>> Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million
>> views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it
>> hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that
>> disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the
>> platform X to post all three hours.
>>
>> Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part
>> of the business model of alternative media.
>>
>> Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are
>> technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability
>> of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly,
>> the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking
>> images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have
>> gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has
>> chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
>>
>> As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted
>> for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and
>> consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about
>> partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are
>> being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole
>> memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
>>
>> The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was
>> suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only
>> took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it
>> out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a
>> read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content
>> that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public
>> display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
>>
>> In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors
>> content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the
>> invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the
>> ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of
>> researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
>>
>> It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers
>> to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration
>> systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all
>> later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the
>> only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the
>> World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which
>> was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks
>> only to this tool which is now disabled.
>>
>> What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and
>> take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some
>> user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to
>> verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and
>> when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being
>> censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths
>> of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry
>> can get away with anything and not get caught.
>>
>> We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a
>> coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We
>> just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines?
>> Here is what they say:
>>
>>> Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email
>>> addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website
>>> javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and
>>> improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and
>>> we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires
>>> heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We
>>> apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
>>
>> Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the
>> effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history
>> fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has
>> clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future
>> of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed
>> through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant
>> authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector,
>> technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from
>> the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
>>
>> To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback
>> Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have
>> continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as
>> services are secured.”
>>
>> When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be
>> some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing
>> behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in
>> read-only mode now. It is not.
>>
>> Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one
>> place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you
>> were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space
>> to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact,
>> the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the
>> Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
>>
>> Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet
>> disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th
>> election.
>>
>> Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results
>> increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives.
>> The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by
>> user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less
>> organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a
>> search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found
>> a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very
>> different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers
>> “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
>>
>> Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based
>> on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that
>> created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon.
>> That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition
>> seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of
>> status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article
>> somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it
>> was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one
>> particularly cared.
>>
>> This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system
>> worked as well as one could possibly expect.
>>
>> Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did
>> a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device)
>> with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would
>> find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about
>> Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired
>> years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming
>> overlap.
>>
>> Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web
>> ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do
>> anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
>>
>> No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it
>> was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out
>> the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high
>> prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
>>
>> All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered
>> individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our
>> information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of
>> 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly
>> accelerated these trends.
>>
>> One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and
>> hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more
>> memory.
>>
>> As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been
>> archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And
>> we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible
>> that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take
>> recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
>>
>>
>> The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require
>> herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something
>> else is quickly replacing it.
>>
>> <https://brownstone.org/articles/they-are-scrubbing-the-internet-right-now/>
>>
>> <https://archive.md/PlFOX>
> 
> Perhaps it would be good idea to start mirroring important content to
> the Usenet and other platforms.


   Replication IS useful in these dreadful times.

   There are vast numbers of hidey-holes online, and
   always hard media that can be passed around.

   Various entities really DO want to do the "Fahrenheit 451"
   trick. Know that and thwart them.