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Wait, so every time someone makes a citation on wikipedia it causes Archive.org to archive that URL? This seems like it could be abused by a malicious agent, no
by RandomInteger4 10y ago
Wait, so every time someone makes a citation on wikipedia it causes Archive.org to archive that URL? This seems like it could be abused by a malicious agent, no?
- voxic11 10y agoYou can already just tell archive.org to archive a URL. How would this be different?
- smitherfield 10y agoYou could have a "reverse DDoS" where archive.org blocks requests from Wikipedia, removing the ability to add Wikipedia citations.
- klodolph 10y agoThere's no such thing as a "reverse DDoS", that's just a regular denial of service attack.
- cmdrfred 10y agoA theoretical reverse DDoS: You somehow prevent traffic from reaching their load balancer so it automatically scales their AWS instances to zero.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoYour minimum instances would always be 1 in the autoscaling group associated with your ELBs (or now, ALBs). Regardless, neither the Internet Archive nor Wikimedia use AWS or other cloud providers, as it would be prohibitively expensive. They both run their own infrastructure/ops.
- cmdrfred 10y agoMostly a joke, just trying to think of what that term would mean.
- smitherfield 10y agoWhat I meant was: 1. Get Wikipedia to send lots of requests to Archive. 2. Archive blocks requests from Wikipedia. 3. Wikipedia citations are disabled. In other words getting Wikipedia to DDoS Archive, so that Archive's defense hurts Wikipedia. A very silly scenario of course, just coming up with one for why an attacker might want to indirectly DDoS Archive via Wikipedia.
- jon-wood 10y agoThat's still not a DDoS, as its missing the Distributed element. Almost by definition if you can block all requests at source its not a DDoS, its just a regular old DoS.
- smsm42 10y agoWhat would probably happen between 1 and 2 is that archive.org notices spike in traffic from Wikipedia, talks to Wikipedia engineers, they find out who is generating all these requests, and block them from editing Wikipedia. Though it's certainly possible to generate enough junk edit traffic to cause disruption on Wikipedia, but that's nothing new. It's the nature of Wikipedia as the resource - it trusts the internet community to be good on average. So far it worked.
- simcop2387 10y agoI think a reverse DoS attack would be one that actually increases the capacity of the service. I'm not sure what scenario would allow that to happen though.
- lmm 10y agoSome streaming sites (e.g. 4 on Demand, IIRC) have a peer-to-peer element; you could reverse-DDOS those by running a lot of computers "seeding" (perhaps by leaving them on the page but at the end of the video) distributed all over the globe.
- danso 10y agoWell, in my hypothetical world, the Wikipedia editor page would include a widget in which a user could submit a URL, and Wikipedia would generate the markup, including an archive URL. Deciding how to implement this so that it works efficiently will have some overlap with issues on that 2nd hardest computer science problem of cache invalidation.
- cmdrfred 10y agoGood idea, after that it's really just rate limiting and perhaps only looking up the same URL every X days. Perhaps a per domain limit as well. No problem they probably haven't already solved.
- ohyes 10y agoEasy enough, but what do we call it? The Wikiarchivator?
- colejohnson66 10y agoThere's already the citation tool in the default editor. Shouldn't be too hard to just fire off an AJAX request to the Archive when the citation is added, right?