I almost wonder what Huffman is thinking right now - he could have been so very close to becoming a billionaire, managing the repository of human general technical knowledge explained simply, but he blew it by being a greedy piggy...
Not that he will ever admit that, even to himself.
I hope it lasts longer than modern AI tools themselves at this point. They have great potential, but... they cannot replace the (lack of) brains of a manager to be a magic bullet to cure all ill effects of greed, with as little effort put into deploying them as has been done so far.
(From the OG Matrix movie)
Step 1: add gasoline.
Step 2: add more gasoline.
Step 3: don't think about the bridge...
Step 4: what spaghetti?
These seem all over the place - or maybe it is just this article that is not explaining it well?
For starters, "smartphones" aren't the only SIM-carrying devices that can access the internet and install apps - dumbphones can do the former and tablets can do both, which you wouldn't even be able to visibly see someone using, if it is in their bag and they use something like a watch interface to it. Laptops too...
The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (Safe) for Kids act addresses algorithmic feeds. It would require social media platforms to provide minors with a default chronological feed composed of accounts they have chosen to follow rather than algorithmically suggested ones.
Ngl, that sounds awesome - and not even just for kids! But immediately after that the article continues:
The bill would also mandate that parents have more wide-reaching controls like the ability to block access to night-time notifications.
Isn't this already built-in to various OS's, so why put the onus onto the app itself?
Electronic devices like calculators have been a staple inside schools for half a century at least, and poor people who cannot afford one of every type of device will generally opt for one device that can install many different types of apps - so to now ban these apps, b/c they might be used in a certain particular manner... while simultaneously NOT stopping school shootings, it blows my mind.
"Political theater" is the phrase that comes to mind. Another phrase is "No child left behind", given how the parents seem to be against these policies, but the State has deemed that it knows better(TM).
Then again, perhaps it has a real purpose in mind after all, as a law designed to extract money out of big tech companies as fees pile up?
B-b-but the salesperson said that i-i-it...
If each request simply came from the same IP address then yeah, all the recipient has to do is block that one and the whole attack is over.
But what if piracy websites were trying to stream content directly from the internet archive rather than make a copy of it first, and messed up to cause this attack. So intentional to cause the traffic but unintentional to cause this amount of it. Or even if those websites first opened the door, and then someone tried to DDoS them, which propagated onwards to the internet archive, whether knowingly or otherwise.
Anyway, I was just postulating that it was theoretically possible... and odder things have and continue to happen all the time so who knows?:-P
Not "clearly" at all. It could be as simple as someone new to coding doing it accidentally, probably using masking of their request origins (granted, this does not seem very likely at all...:-D).
Also, it forces the archive to expend resources that they could have allocated elsewhere - which would have longer-term consequences far beyond the short-term duration of the attack. Enough attacks like these could cause the archive to deprioritize something else that they had wanted to do, or drop something they used to support but won't be able to continue to do so in that case.
Or, why does a bully hit someone? That too offers purely short-term pain, until the next attack. Yet they do it anyway, and often it works to cow the victim into submission so that future attacks aren't even necessary, and instead the mere threat of one may be sufficient for the bully to get their way.
Also, does the entire rest of the world submit funding to the internet archive? I don't know anything about their finances, but compared to those of e.g. Russian disinformation sources or corporate profit-seeking, surely they are tiny in comparison?
The only thing "clear" here is that the attacker seems to be using the Might Is Right principle, as they are stepping outside the bounds of society to take on this vigilante effort by themselves.
Kbin: Not anymore, at least last I checked. I have an old account there that I left behind due to the enormous amount of technical glitches it kept having, and checking in on it recently (maybe last week?), not one of my comments has even a single downvote there - even older ones. iirc the "reduces" tab was still present, just entirely empty. (I was looking for a particular comment, but then while there noticed the effect was much wider.) Edit: I took another look, and I the only downvotes I see are from kbin itself (example post), so it seems to not be federating downvotes from outside of itself.
In the past when it did used to work, it also would not show downvotes from instances that it had server-wise defederated with, although someone can still get downvotes from personally blocking an instance, on a Lemmy server running v0.19.3 or greater, that the server itself had not server-wise defederated with. So there was always a very large gap there.
The reason I thought of this all was due to the OP title: e.g. someone could mass-downvote things on the Fediverse to attempt to control the conversation by de-emphasizing things that they did not personally agree with, but outside of moderator or admin reporting that offers a degree of trust behind it. Obviously that is its intended purpose, but I mean maliciously subverting that like have 10 accounts and log into all of them to influence a post.
About once a week lately I keep blocking some spammer accounts that randomly shill products or videos throughout the Fediverse, rather than wait for an admin to do it, but if an account(s) was more subtle and merely downvoted, then I doubt such a thing would even be noticed?
I should add that I respect some people's decisions if they want to be on a server that doesn't even record or reveal downvotes - that's fine bc it's their choice. But otherwise it is basically public knowledge, except as you say you need to fire up an instance of your own to view them, and then protect that instance from intrusion efforts even if you use it for nothing else (or possibly there is some API call, but I doubt that knowledge would be so easy to find, and for one thing it would have to access a database that has sent out past updates, not merely listen for new ones unless it had been running prior to the downvote event).
Anyway, I hoped people would see this post, and it seems that is happening, so this time the downvotes did not detail any conversation about the topic (with many tens-fold greater up- than down-votes), but if there had been sufficient number of downvotes delivered quickly enough... then how many of us would have even seen this, sorting Subscribed or All by Hot? So it points to a liability in the Fediverse, which at some point, someone somewhere is going to exploit.
Who would downvote something like this, without leaving a comment to explain why!?
Sometimes I wish I could see that info, in rare circumstances like this.
After leaving Kbin (for unrelated reasons), where those spaces are blocked by default, I started to wonder if I should leave Lemmy, then realized it was not all that way but only certain spaces, easily blocked ever since 0.19.3. (Reddit had become virtually all that way, so it was making sense to me to think that social media was just becoming that way in general.)
However, saying the names of those spaces out loud is likely to trigger removal by a mod.
This is a real problem for wanting the Fediverse to grow in the future, as unsuspecting new people see that and - the sane ones anyway - don't want any part of it. Every one of us, unless we were warned, learned the hard way about "those places". By ignoring the issues, e.g. by leaving it up to each individual user to block those instances, we allow this situation to perpetuate. I for one think it would be far friendlier to block any instance where there is a >75% chance that a new user would be not merely downvoted but outright insulted and make such communities opt-in rather than the current situation of needing to first detect which ones are that way and then opt-out of each one individually.
Python, which I hate the syntax of with an actual passion, legit offers more library support though, so is this a lost cause at this point? Especially with junior devs, who to the extent they think they know how to program at all, do so in (well, JavaScript mainly iirc, but afa back-end specifically) Python?:-(