[HN Gopher] ArchiveTeam Warrior
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       ArchiveTeam Warrior
        
       Author : xnx
       Score  : 219 points
       Date   : 2024-08-02 18:34 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (warrior.archiveteam.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (warrior.archiveteam.org)
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | Very easy to set up. Glad to contribute back in some small way
       | now that I my Internet plan is "unlimited". Was trying to figure
       | out if I could run ArchiveTeam Warrior scripts on an unused
       | Android phone, but that's not directly supported and above my
       | skillset.
        
         | NortySpock wrote:
         | Agree, I found it trivial to run in a docker-composed container
         | on an x86 box.
         | 
         | I wish I had spare time to try to figure out how to get it set
         | up inside QEMU on a Raspberry Pi... Seems like publishing such
         | a compose file would unlock it for even more people.
        
           | jeroenhd wrote:
           | No need to mess with QEMU. You may need to build the
           | container for ARM, though:
           | https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-
           | dockerfile/tree/maste...
           | 
           | There's a specific "wget-lua.raspberry" file in the repo, so
           | Raspberry Pi seems to be supported almost natively.
        
             | tech234a wrote:
             | I believe that file isn't actually supported because of
             | potential data consistency issues in how wget runs on ARM
             | devices.
        
       | simlevesque wrote:
       | Is it possible to work on multiple projects at the same time ?
        
         | luuurker wrote:
         | Not with the Warrior, as far as I'm aware, but you can do it
         | with docker. It's usually the repos with -grab at the end:
         | 
         | https://github.com/orgs/ArchiveTeam/repositories
        
         | diggan wrote:
         | You can run multiple warriors, select different projects for
         | each one you run (or run both with "auto"). I think it's
         | advisable to only run one warrior per IP though, if you're
         | doing many warriors for same project, as otherwise it's a lot
         | easier to get rate-limited by whatever website/service you're
         | helping to archive.
         | 
         | https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-dockerfile makes it
         | pretty easy to setup.
        
         | alexwasserman wrote:
         | I created a VM and then just duped the VM. Definitely overkill
         | for this purpose, but nicely segregates them out.
         | 
         | Right now I run three instances. Pretty low resource
         | utilization and they're totally segregated into their own
         | instances so just boot them and they run, shut them down and
         | they stop.
         | 
         | Given they're running arbitrary external commands I wanted them
         | kept on their own machines as much as possible.
        
         | myself248 wrote:
         | Not in a single warrior, but you can run multiple warriors. I
         | do this; I have one running Telegrab and one running URLTeam.
         | 
         | Once in a while, a site will tolerate a large number of
         | connections, and since the Warrior VM only supports a
         | concurrency of 6, it can make sense to run multiple warriors on
         | the same project. But this is almost always a bad idea, and
         | many sites will 429 you with a concurrency of anything more
         | than 2 or 3, always check the project-specific IRC channel for
         | concurrency recommendations.
        
       | toomuchtodo wrote:
       | Please consider running a warrior appliance or docker container
       | to contribute to digital preservation efforts.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       |  _ArchiveTeam Warrior: archiving as much of imgur as possible_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35983510 - May 2023 (2
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Help preserve the internet with Archiveteam 's warrior_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30524842 - March 2022 (51
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _ArchiveTeam Warrior backing up Reddit_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29584622 - Dec 2021 (71
       | comments)
        
       | rglullis wrote:
       | These projects are very much needed, but I also believe that we
       | need to go beyond simple "archiving" and have a way to make this
       | data _actually_ available to the public.
       | 
       | For example: I don't think that Reddit ever felt threatened by
       | the fact that a bunch of people are pulling their data and
       | creating a backup that can not be easily accessible. But I think
       | that Reddit would be _very much_ afraid of a distributed network
       | of nodes running partial copies of Reddit and making it available
       | for local-first clients and /or Lemmy mirrors.
        
         | tech234a wrote:
         | Most projects output WARC files which are batched, uploaded to
         | archive.org, and go into the Wayback Machine:
         | https://web.archive.org/
         | 
         | (Note that Archive Team is separate from Internet Archive)
        
           | lopkeny12ko wrote:
           | That still doesn't solve the discoverability problem. The
           | Wayback Machine is only useful if you happen to know the URL
           | where a piece of content used to live.
        
             | rglullis wrote:
             | That, and the fact that the data is "frozen". There is no
             | way to add a comment to a Reddit thread that has been
             | archived without going to Reddit first. I'd like to have a
             | two-way mirror.
        
               | userbinator wrote:
               | Isn't read-only one of the main points of being
               | "archived"?
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | Yeah, but I am saying that I don't want it merely
               | "archived". I want it "copied and available outside of
               | Reddit's control".
        
               | gaius_baltar wrote:
               | That's lemmy.ml . See this comment:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41143632
               | 
               | edit: they already did.
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | Did you link to my own comment? :)
        
             | userbinator wrote:
             | Indeed, what's really needed is a search engine that
             | indexes all the content on the Wayback Machine and makes it
             | accessible in a similar fashion as e.g. Google.
        
               | card_zero wrote:
               | The Wayback Machine does that, to some extent. It tends
               | to prefer to return results where the query is in the
               | URL, but sometimes it picks up on the word being in the
               | page. I don't know how much indexing it does, but it does
               | some.
        
             | hexage1814 wrote:
             | >That still doesn't solve the discoverability problem
             | 
             | I have a somewhat of a conspiracy theory that deep down
             | they don't implement a search feature on all their content
             | on purpose. Essentially if WB made easy to discover stuff,
             | you end up having to deal more and more with all those
             | shenanigans of people requesting information to be removed.
             | By making the information there, but somewhat unfindable or
             | at least very hard to find, they essentially preserve the
             | information, without having to deal with such problem (I
             | know this happens even nowadays, but if it was easier to
             | find information, it would happen even more).
        
               | Xen9 wrote:
               | Raw genius, the site even looks "old" ...
               | 
               | On related note, Internet Archive backup would probably
               | cost between 20M and 60M USD. Many EU countries would
               | have incentive to do this as public culture preservation
               | projects.
               | 
               | The archive is roughly 70 PB. Decentralized storage
               | projects have achieved 7PB already. Thus attempting a
               | decentralized backup would ALSO work.
        
               | mellosouls wrote:
               | _Many EU countries would have incentive to do this as
               | public culture preservation projects_
               | 
               | There are multiple archive projects around the world,
               | which often isn't understood when the Internet Archive
               | (the biggest and original) is discussed.
               | 
               | Various countries including some EU already have those as
               | "public culture preservation projects", targeting their
               | own nation's web presence.
               | 
               | In that context, and with scarce funding already, there
               | is not really an incentive to back up a load of
               | irrelevant (in the sense it's not their country's)
               | archive material.
        
               | Xen9 wrote:
               | Targeting a nation's own web presence cannot capture as
               | complete picture as IA. For example, discussions about
               | minor languages that are vanishing are often English. In
               | addition, IA does not only do archiving of the inernet;
               | it's rather an archive ON the internet that scans,
               | digitalizes & organizes tons of material.
               | 
               | Now, notice that the budget of many of these projects are
               | X billions:
               | 
               | https://www.ne-mo.org/cooperation-funding/funding-
               | opportunit...
               | 
               | Putting a 100 million EUR into an European IA backup
               | would be more cost effective than any of these projects.
               | 
               | Alternatively or additionally:
               | 
               | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_sta
               | tis...
               | 
               | Wikipedia could actually also probably - being dependent
               | on IA - invest 50M into the project. In fact, this would
               | probably do more what the donations were meant to do than
               | anything else they could do with the ("excess") funds.
               | 
               | Truth to be spoken, NSA probably has an IA backup. But it
               | still sort of drives me insane to know that political
               | change or natural catastrophes could lead to loss of
               | public access to the IA. No one seems to care about IA
               | enough except IA itself.
        
           | rglullis wrote:
           | Right, but AFAIK there is no way to query a WARC file, is
           | there?
           | 
           | Let me explain where I am coming from. I'm working on an
           | (open source, self-hosted) service to help people migrate
           | from Reddit to Lemmy, called Fediverser [0]. It offers the
           | following:
           | 
           | - A crowdsourced map of "reddit-to-lemmy" alternatives. - Use
           | the list of subreddits and some preferences to find a Lemmy
           | instance that is suitable for you.
           | 
           | - Lets people sign up to a "fediversed" Lemmy instance
           | directly via Reddit OAuth. Simplifies the registration
           | process, can let an admin skip the verification process (e.g,
           | reject redditors whose account are less than 3 years old)
           | 
           | - Using the crowdsourced data, automatically subscribe the
           | user to the communities that correspond to their favorite
           | subreddits.
           | 
           | - If the admin of the Lemmy instance so chooses, it can also
           | set up mirror bots, which will create "shadow accounts" for
           | each reddit author. This shadow account can then be "taken
           | over" by the real redditor if/when they sign up to the
           | instance.
           | 
           | I believe that these features together would lead to a
           | credible threat to Reddit's dominance. My remaining "problem"
           | to solve is, simply put, that I need more people running
           | this, because it's just _too much data_ for a single node. I
           | set up an instance that was mirroring ~100 reddits (posts and
           | comments). In three months, my database was already recording
           | ~3 million  "shadow" users and ~10 million posts +
           | submissions.
           | 
           | For this to work, I either need to have more instance admins
           | willing to run the Fediverser software, or I need to move the
           | "shadow" users and the mirrored content straight to the
           | client and only bring to the Lemmy server the content from
           | users who actually migrated.
           | 
           | [0]: https://fediverser.io
        
             | abracadaniel wrote:
             | It's an iso standard. There's warc libraries around. Ex:
             | https://github.com/webrecorder/warcio
        
         | Centigonal wrote:
         | I'm not sure if threatening a corporate entity who can change
         | their API at any time is a feature here. See: PushShift,
         | Nitter, Youtube Vanced
        
           | rglullis wrote:
           | _There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept..._
           | 
           | 1) A lot of Reddit's usefulness comes from the bots. If they
           | shut down the API entirely, they would lose _a lot_ of value
           | which would accelerate their demise.
           | 
           | 2) A more cynical person would say that without bots, Reddit
           | would lose 30-40% of its "traffic", and that they can not
           | afford to do that. This is why the current API is still quite
           | generous. It's enough for most bots, but just too expensive
           | for third-party clients.
           | 
           | 3) Even if Reddit shut down its API tomorrow, the majority of
           | interesting content has already been copied/archived.
           | 
           | 4) Scraping old.reddit is quite easy, and getting rid of it
           | altogether is not something that they are willing to do.
           | 
           | All in all, I'd say that if we ever get to a point where
           | Reddit is cutting down the API, it will be a time to
           | celebrate.
        
             | gary_0 wrote:
             | > Scraping old.reddit is quite easy, and getting rid of it
             | altogether is not something that they are willing to do.
             | 
             | Really? Unless there's an ironclad public statement to the
             | contrary, the vibe I get from old.reddit is that it won't
             | be long until the axe falls, especially since they are fine
             | with "new" reddit features that malfunction in old.reddit.
             | And I'd imagine their attitude towards unhappy users once
             | they kill old.reddit will be the same as when they killed
             | the API (which was "go fuck yourselves", to put it
             | plainly).
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | Maybe it was just my corner of Reddit, but last year when
               | I was trying to convince people to move away. There were
               | a good number of people who were just saying "I don't
               | care about the API pricing changes because I just use
               | old.reddit. If they do get rid of it, then I'll leave it
               | right away."
               | 
               | My feeling is that Reddit will continue to push and nudge
               | people to new UI, but will not fully retire old. I think
               | that if they ever do it it will be the final straw and
               | mass migration will be inevitable.
        
               | immibis wrote:
               | New users always end up using the new version, and if
               | they're new to the Internet they don't realize what
               | they're missing. Old users contribute the most value, but
               | it's not captured in shareholder- or management-visible
               | statistics so they don't care and will drive them off to
               | improve the statistics they do have (like ad impressions
               | per page load). Thus old.reddit will die.
        
         | notinmykernel wrote:
         | Reddit was quite unhappy with services that mirrored their data
         | and made it publicly available. So much so they updated TOS for
         | the API, and forced services to delete data and shutter.
        
           | rglullis wrote:
           | Yet, it doesn't take a motivated actor to do it.
           | 
           | They certainly don't want to have other Big Tech companies
           | exploring "their" data, but I'd argue they would only after
           | someone who had a clear commercial interest. They are not
           | going to chase a few dozen people on /r/DataHoarder running
           | an Archive Warrior.
        
           | immibis wrote:
           | So much so, they've now blocked all search engines except for
           | Google. (Google paid a lot of money for this)
           | 
           | Reddit's become low quality now anyway. All the good old high
           | quality information that people search Reddit for is in the
           | dumps - they're not generating much more of it.
        
         | pyinstallwoes wrote:
         | P2P ad hoc offline first internet that deprecates bgp and uses
         | a globally memoized shared content/compute addressable memory
         | via DHT/virtual machine. Identity for any thing is its
         | composition.
         | 
         | I can dream.
        
       | tech234a wrote:
       | See also the page on the Archive Team wiki, with more detailed
       | instructions:
       | https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
        
         | myself248 wrote:
         | This is a much better link and really should be what the
         | headline points to.
        
       | throwaway888abc wrote:
       | I can run docker for this. So looked up the repo and sweet
       | surprise - it's all there.
       | 
       | https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-dockerfile/tree/maste...
       | 
       | https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-dockerfile/blob/maste...
        
       | stavros wrote:
       | A few months ago I designed a system that will allow people to
       | contribute their disk space towards a service like archive.org.
       | Basically, you'd say "I want to host 100 GB of archive.org
       | content" and my system would talk to archive.org, figure out
       | which content is currently the most rare, and push it to you.
       | 
       | It also comes with a retrieval function, where you can say "I
       | want to get X content from this network" and it will find it for
       | you.
       | 
       | It's a fairly thin wrapper over torrents, but it something that
       | doesn't currently exist. Unfortunately, it wasn't met with much
       | interest when I contacted some archivists.
        
         | agilob wrote:
         | libgen has a tracker like this for books
         | https://phillm.net/libgen-seeds-needed.php
         | 
         | looks like it's currently broken :(
        
         | immibis wrote:
         | Archive Team had a defunct project called INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
         | (they use slightly whimsical project names) which is basically
         | this idea. Note that by using this tool, you're breaking the
         | law (copyright infringement).
        
         | tvshtr wrote:
         | Wasn't IPFS supposed to fill that role?
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | No, IPFS only lets you retrieve and store a file you want,
           | not a bunch of files someone upstream wants you to, and not
           | with a specific space target.
        
             | Kye wrote:
             | That sounds like a BOINC-like file system.
        
             | theblazehen wrote:
             | Running an IPFS Cluster follower node gets part of the way
             | there. I'm intending to do this with the data from Anna's
             | Archive. See some existing projects:
             | https://collab.ipfscluster.io/
        
         | gosub100 wrote:
         | I wish one of the file coins could have solved this. Pay a fee
         | to host blocks of data for a fixed duration and a fixed number
         | of downloads.
        
         | antoniojtorres wrote:
         | That is a fantastic idea, I wonder why they didn't take on it,
         | did they say why?
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | Unfortunately not really, I just didn't get a response, or I
           | got something like "nobody is interested in this".
        
             | mattl wrote:
             | Who did you contact?
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | A few people at the IA, and I also asked in a community
               | of archivist called "the eye".
        
       | Yeri wrote:
       | Would love to contribute using my Raspberry Pi, but it not
       | supporting ARM is a bit of a pain (and no easy way around it; I
       | want to download the container, run it and done):
       | https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior#C...?
        
         | theblazehen wrote:
         | There are some consistency issues when wget-at is compiled for
         | ARM. You can run in under QEMU user emulation however, and I do
         | that on a couple hosts
        
           | NortySpock wrote:
           | Do you have a write up or link to a page that describes how
           | to run it under QEMU emulation? I've been wanting to try it /
           | publish a docker-compose file that does it in order to make
           | it easy for Raspberry Pi users to spin up a Warrior...
        
             | theblazehen wrote:
             | I just used https://github.com/dbhi/qus to enable it for
             | all docker containers on the system (alternatively you can
             | do the binfmt config manually, eg
             | https://wiki.debian.org/QemuUserEmulation)
             | 
             | However to have it more tightly integrated, you'd want an
             | arm image at /, mount the original warrior image at
             | /warrior, then you could do something like `qemu-user-amd64
             | /warrior/bin/chroot /warrior/entrypoint` - Updating all
             | paths as relevant
        
       | DandyDev wrote:
       | I don't understand the advantage of people downloading sites and
       | then uploading them to the archive setup by archive team. What is
       | the advantage over archive team directly downloading sites into
       | their archive?
        
         | extra88 wrote:
         | A) It requires fewer resources from the archive team. B)
         | Probably more importantly, it distributes where the requests
         | are coming from so they're less likely to be throttled or
         | blocked.
        
         | mattl wrote:
         | Archive Team isn't Internet Archive.
         | 
         | They need somewhere to download things before pushing them to
         | archive.org
        
       | nh2 wrote:
       | How does this project prevent that I as an attacker insert random
       | garbage or rewrite the downloaded pages to be wrong in specific
       | ways?
       | 
       | For HTTP this seems impossible. For HTTPS, who does the TLS
       | termination? It could be safe if the warrior was just at TCP
       | proxy and Archive was the TLS client, but
       | https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
       | doesn't seem to explain that clearly.
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | How will running Warrior in the background affect the pc? Will it
       | degrade the disks overtime? I remember running the Siacoin app
       | degraded my disks a bit. Or was it IPFS?
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-03 23:01 UTC)