This week in people proving we don't deserve nice things, the nonprofit Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine are being hit by "tens of thousands of fake information requests per second", per an official Archive.org blog post explaining why stability and access have been suffering since the attack started on Sunday. Fortunately, all of the actual data seems to be safe, but the Internet Archive getting knocked offline and slowed down by DDoS attacks isn't good for...anybody, really, except maybe greedy publishers and other shady interests.
Make no mistake: the Internet Archive is a very important resource for the web and its users at large. Cached web pages come in clutch whenever the original host has gone offline, and is useful for posterity/accountability with revisions, edits, errors, and so on. Indeed, the Wayback Machine is so fundamental that when Google cut its own web page caching service, and told everyone to use Internet Archive instead!
