Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

Despite all of the positive self-talk, I don't know if they realize how important they are, or how easy it would be for them to find good help and advice if their management were transparent and everything was debated in public. That may have protected it to some extent; as a counterexample, Wikipedia has been extremely fragile due to its transparency and accessibility to everyone. With IA being driven by its creator's ideology, maybe that ideology should be formalized and set in stone as bylaws, and the torch passed to people openly debating how IA should be run, its operations, and what it should be taking on.

I don't mean they should be run by the random set of Confucian-style libertarian aphorisms that is running the credibility of Wikipedia into the ground, but Debian is a good model to follow. Or maybe do better than both?

I appreciate their ethos and I've used the site many times (and donated!), but clearly it's at the point where Kahle et al just aren't equipped either personally (as a matter of technical expertise) or collectively (they are just a handful of people) to be dealing with what are probably in many cases nation-state attacks. Kahle's attitude towards (and misunderstanding of) copyright law is IMO proof that he shouldn't be running things, because his legal gambles (gambles that a first year law student could have predicted would fail spectacularly) have put IA at long term risk (see: Napster). And this information coming out over the past few weeks about their technical incompetence is arguably worse, because the tech side of things are what he and his team are actually supposed to be good at.

It's true that Google and Microsoft and others should be propping up the IA financially but that isn't going to solve the IA's lack of technical expertise or its delusional hippie ethos.

While I have no idea how Debian is actually funded I'd agree. One issue might be that The Internet Archive actually need to have people on staff, not sure if Debian has that requirement. You're not going to get people to man scanner or VHS players 8 hours a day without pay, at least not at this scale.

The Internet Archive needs a better funding strategy that asking for money on their own site. People aren't visiting them frequently enough for that to work. They need a fundraising team, and a good one.

Finding managers are probably even worse. They can't get a normal CEO type person, because they aren't a company and the type of people who apply to or are attracted to running non-profit, server the community, don't be evil organisation are frequently bat-shit crazy.

Can you elaborate? I'm aware of Wikipedia having very particular rules and lots of very territorial editors, but I'm not sure how this runs their credibility into the ground aside from pissing off the far right when they come in with an agenda to push.

Sadly, SQlite is the only software organization I know of that has this spirit.