Technology

Who would take down what is the digital equivalent to the Library of Alexandria?

I can think of a few possibilities

1: peddlers of misinformation

2: people who love the poorly educated and want the misdeeds of their political allies to be forgotten.

3: copyright trolls.

Can't figure out if this is a joke or serious, so just in case, you might want to look up what happened to the Library of Alexandria.

Archived something someone doesn't want to be seen by the world... like any and all since-removed misinformation for one...

I have zero proof of this so take it for the musing it is, but the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine can be used to view articles that have been taken offline (sometimes for political reasons). The IA is a very accessible way to prove that once something is on the Internet, it's out there forever. I used it in a recent post to show an Israeli newspaper article that argued Israel had a right to not just Palestine, but Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and other territories. It was taken off the newspaper's website a few days later, but IA had it.

This may explain why no one is taking credit, and there are no demands. Or it could very well be another reason, including people just being assholes.

Yeah, this is a bit like vandalizing a library. They are providing a valuable public service, leave them alone.

It's probably for the lulz I guess. There's only a few places left on the internet that are decent and good, archive being one, so why not shit all over it? People are so dumb.

There's currently a fuck ton of hacking going on everywhere maybe just prior to the US elections maybe something unrelated but there's definitely a concerted effort to turn the internet on its head.

In this case it’s looking like people trying to showcase their skill and possibly get bragging rights or at least a reputation for doing these attacks which they can use to earn money from others for these types of services.

https://archive.org/donate This would be it if it were up and running. I wonder if there's any other avenues?

Point 2... if you pay for a email aliasing service, you will be locked in. What I suggest is using plus addressing. e.g.

[email protected]

As long as you keep using randomized ones, this'll be as good as an alias against automated and manual login attempts. It just does not hide your base email, which would be

[email protected]

Many email services offer some free aliases. For example, I use one alias, along with my main email that is only used for important services. Other than that, I have an alias that is used for online accounts. This way, your main inbox is free of spammers. And even if your main address were to be the target of a spammer, the automatic spamming software most likely will not chop off the plus part, so you can easily block that email with the specific plus identifier. Not as good as external email aliasing services, but at least you won't be locked into the email aliasing service. Bitwarden has a generator for such things, really nice tbh.

For e-mails, you can just get firefox relay with your own subdomain and generate infinite e-mail masks for 1$ a month. I usually take "[email protected]" for example. It's pretty great because you just make the masks on the fly.

with as long as this has been going on it really surprises me that nothing has come out as a motive. it seems kind of pointless to do this sort of thing and not make your intentions known

maybe it's a government or organization upset that they are keeping archives of things they don't like

Spare a thought for the users with accounts who upload content to IA for you to enjoy.