I just sent a DMCA takedown last week to remove my site. They’ve claimed to follow meta tags and robots.txt since 1998, but no, they had over 1,000,000 of my pages going back that far. They even had the robots.txt configured for them archived from 1998.

I’m tired of people linking to archived versions of things that I worked hard to create. Sites like Wikipedia were archiving urls and then linking to the archive, effectively removing branding and blocking user engagement.

Not to mention that I’m losing advertising revenue if someone views the site in an archive. I have fewer problems with archiving if the original site is gone, but to mirror and republish active content with no supported way to prevent it short of legal action is ridiculous. Not to mention that I lose control over what’s done with that content – are they going to let Google train AI on it with their new partnership?

I’m not a fan. They could easily allow people to block archiving, but they choose not to. They offer a way to circumvent artist or owner control, and I’m surprised that they still exist.

So… That’s what I think is wrong with them.

From a security perspective it’s terrible that they were breached. But it is kind of ironic – maybe they can think of it as an archive of their passwords or something.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We see this and think of an amazing and essential public service. A capitalist sees this and tries to find a way to make money with it, and the first step is to ruin the free product.

Dipshits thought it was affiliated with the US government and attacked it to “avenge” Gaza.

We just need to accept that there’s terrible people in this world