XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.misc, alt.censorship   
   XPost: alt.politics, alt.fan.usenet   
   From: schlomo.goldberg@mailinator.com   
      
   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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)