Hey friends and folks, Six here. I’m posting this on both the site and the Patreon, and it’s identical on both, so if you’ve read it one place, there’s no need to read it again. Though I am not gonna stop you if you want to I suppose! But. I wanted to give y’all a quick update on what’s going on.
You may have noticed that a lot of Scanline podcasts are having trouble downloading. There’s a pattern to it, actually: everything on the Patreon is fine! Everything on the site is busted. But! It would actually be more accurate to say everything on… archive.org is busted.
See, all our non-Patreon pods are hosted on archive.org. It’s a wonderful site. We could probably pursue a different solution at this point if we had to, but certainly to start with, it was the only way we could make it work. I really can’t overstate how grateful I am to that site, not just for enabling Scanline’s work to occur at all, but also for all the other hosting services they provide. Abandonware, books, the Wayback Machine, and much much more.
Unfortunately, the world, and especially the internet, has “shitheads” on it. Some shitheads hacked archive.org, stole data, and did a DDoS (Dedicated Denial of Service, though I’m betting most if not all of us know that one by now) attack on it. It’s been offline for days now.
The staff of archive.org are working like crazy to make sure all the data is intact, to add additional security and protections to their servers to fight future attacks, and to bring everything back online. Currently, their estimate is Monday the 14th, which is frankly astonishingly fast given the task on their hands.
If you’ve been following us a long time, you’ll know that we personally have experience with shitheads, and DDoSing. It’s been… gosh, nine and a half years now, since our site was aggressively DDoS’d in the wake of us calling out GamerGate during the height of their toxicity. It took us longer than five days to bring the site back up, I’ll tell you that. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a very similar group of people giving archive.org trouble now.
Anyway. Thank you to everyone who’s messaged to ask what’s going on, thank you to everyone being patient, thank you to our listeners, readers, and viewers. As soon as archive.org is back, we’ll be back on schedule ourselves. Maybe consider donating to those folks: they could use the support, and god knows they’ve earned more than a little faith.
