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Someone is trying to steal archive.is's domain

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1–10 of 48 posts

Re: Someone is trying to steal archive.is's domain

#3

I don't see the value in a high profile stolen domain for a trader. Anyone have any ideas on why this would be financially worthwhile? I am assuming financial motives.

It would be valuable for a large entity to censor content that would make it look bad; by disrupting operations & breaking existing links to content.

Re: Someone is trying to steal archive.is's domain

#4

I don't see the value in a high profile stolen domain for a trader. Anyone have any ideas on why this would be financially worthwhile? I am assuming financial motives.

Maybe it's an attempt at blackmailing to get something deleted?

31 Jan 2018, "I will make a donation every month. Please delete what we ask": https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/958760127359840257

Re: Someone is trying to steal archive.is's domain

#5
I don't see how this could get very far, considering that the people in Iceland who run the root for .IS are known to the network engineering community of ISPs in Iceland. The population just isn't that high. People with the equivalent of root or enable on core ISP infrastructure are maybe less than 50 persons in the entire country.

You could literally take public transit across Reykjavik and go knock on the door of the persons responsible.

Re: Someone is trying to steal archive.is's domain

#9

I don't see the value in a high profile stolen domain for a trader. Anyone have any ideas on why this would be financially worthwhile? I am assuming financial motives.

It would be valuable for a large entity to censor content that would make it look bad; by disrupting operations & breaking existing links to content.

This looks like a job for: Blockchain!

Seriously, though, imagine a public, distributed, append-only log, containing the hashes of the content stored by archive.is, with the data effectively signed by a (e.g. wallet) private key of the archive maintainers. People could volunteer to locally store copies of all the data that was archived, but only serve the data that goes "missing" from archive.is.

With such a dead man's switch in place, there would be no harm in archive.is taking down any content that they were threatened (legally or otherwise) over, and then other sites (hopefully too many to attack) could publish the taken down content, alongside the cryptographic proof that the data was originally published by archive.is.

You're right though that there would still be disruption, as the original archive.is links would (in the worst case) return unhelpful error pages.

Re: Someone is trying to steal archive.is's domain

#10
post #8

I really hope this domain hijacking doesn't succeed, because I use archive.is all the time.

Not to worry. They have other domains too, as stated in the Twitter thread: .TODAY .FO .LI .VN .MD .PH

I'm not sure the existence of alternatives, advertised through Twitter, is much of a comfort here. The integrity of the domain name system shouldn't depend on someone having a well-known twitter account that can advertise alternatives in the event of a hostile takeover.
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