Wayback Machine back online in read-only mode

The Internet Archive was shuttered by a hack days ago, but the Wayback Machine is back online, at least for reading. "Please be gentle," writes Brewster Kahle.

The @internetarchive's Wayback Machine resumed in a provisional, read-only manner. Sorry, no Save Page Now yet. Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.

Tim Warren reports on the hack:

A pop-up from a purported hacker claimed the archive had suffered a "catastrophic security breach" last week, before Have I Been Pwned confirmed data was stolen. The theft included email addresses, screen names, hashed passwords, and other internal data for 31 million unique email accounts.

The Internet Archive outage came just weeks after Google started adding links to archived websites in the Wayback Machine. Google removed its own cached pages links earlier this year, so having the Wayback Machine linked in Google search results is a useful way to access older versions of websites or archived pages.

One "funny" thing about this hack was the posterior justification after it was accomplished: to punish America for Gaza. Anyone familiar with the Internet Archive would know better than to think it was federally-funded or operated and the hacker has been widely mocked as a result online. If some media are eager to take the hacker's pro-Palestinian affectations at face value, the low-effort surveillance-tactical branding and constant posting more credibly identifies them as, well, you know who.

Previously:
An obscure copyright law is letting the Internet Archive distribute books published 1923-1941
Internet Archive beleaguered by DDoS attacks, also hacked
Internet Archive ending free e-books program over publisher lawsuit, National Emergency Library to close for 2 weeks
Internet Archive to ignore robots.txt directives