Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

We'll need to find even more people willing to expose themselves to legal threats and cyberattacks then.

The legal side is a big issue, true. The simplest and best workaround that I'm aware of is how the Arweave network handles it. They leave it up to the individual what parts of the data they want to host, but they're financially incentivized to take on rare data that others aren't hosting, because the rarer it is the more they get rewarded. Since it's decentralized and globally distributed, if something is risky to host in one jurisdiction, people in another can take that job and vice versa. The data also can not be altered after it's uploaded, and that's verifiable through hashes and sampling. Main downside in its current form is that decentralized storage isn't as fast as having central servers. And the experience can vary of course, depending on the host you connect to.

As for technical attacks, I'm not an expert but I'd assume it's more difficult for bad actors to bring down decentralized networks. Has the BitTorrent network ever gone offline because it was hacked for example? That seems like it would be extremely hard to do, not even the movie industry managed to take them down.

> decentralized storage isn't as fast as having central servers.

With the 30-second "time to first byte" speed we all know and love from IA, I'm pretty sure it'd only get faster when you're the only person accessing an obscure document on a random person's shoebox in Korea as compared to trying to fetch it from a centralised server that has a few thousand other clients to attend to simultaneously

I collect, archive, and host data. Haven't gotten any threats or attacks. Not one. The average r/selfhosted user hiding their personal OwnCloud behind the DDoS maffia seems more afraid than one needs to be even for hosting all sorts of things publicly. I guess this fearmongering comes from tech news about breaches and DDoS attacks on organisations, similar to regular news impacting your regular worldview regardless of how it's actually going in the world or how things personally affect you

> decentralized storage isn't as fast as having central servers.

Depending on scale that’s not necessarily true. I find even today there are many services that cannot keep up with my residential fiber connection (3Gbps symmetrical), whereas torrents frequently can. IA in particular is notoriously slow when downloading from their servers, and even taking into account DHT time torrents can be much faster.

Now if all of their PBs of data were cached in a CDN, yeah that’s probably faster than any decentralized solution. But that will take a heck of a lot more money to maintain than I think is possible for IA.

Its not a problem until it suddenly is, and by the time it becomes a problem its too late. Its not fear mongering, its risk management and the laws are draconian and fail fundamental basis for a "rule of law", we have a "rule by law".

And that's how you get preppers: it's a remote problem until it's too late, let's prepare for every eventuality before it's suddenly too late!

Risk management is a balance, not fearmongering as you say. That's why I'd rather use advice from people with daily experience than look at the newsworthy experiences ("nothing happened today, again; regular security patches working fine" you'll never see) and conclude you'd attract threats and cyber attacks just by hosting backup copies of parts of the Internet Archive