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Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

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Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#101

Post by mojosam »

pards wrote: post #49
codedokode wrote: post #25

I used the site several times to archive some page or send it to someone who cannot access the site directly. I never archived anything illegal and never stumbled upon illegal things there. So I don't know why they want to arrest the owner. Also the site is pretty advanced, it can handle complicated sites and even social networks. > But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls How? Does the site pay for subscri…

>> But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls > How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper? Someone with a subscription logs into the site, then archives it. Archive.is uses the current user's session and can therefore see the paywalled content.

> Someone with a subscription logs into the site, then archives it.

That’s not the case. I don’t have a NYT subscription, I just Googled for an old obscure article from 1989 on pork bellies I thought would be unlikely for archive.today to have cached, and sure enough when I asked to retrieve that article, it didn’t have it and began the caching process. A few minutes later, it came up with the webpage, which if you visit on archive.is, you can see it was first cached just a few minutes ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/01/business/futures-options-...

My assumption has been that the NYT is letting them around the paywall, much like the unrelated Wayback Machine. How else could this be working? Only way I could think it could work is that either they have access to a NYT account and are caching using that — something I suspect the NYT would notice and shutdown — or there is a documented hole in the paywall they are exploiting (but not the Wayback Machine, since the caching process shows they are pulling direct from the NYT).

Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#102

Post by chongli »

cluckindan wrote: post #95
matheusmoreira wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet will be destroyed as countries the world over seek to impose all of their silly and incompatible laws on it. The international network will fracture into multiple national networks with heavy filtering at the borders. I've been making this prediction for years now. Words can hardly capture the sadness I feel when I see evidence of its slow realization. I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one…

Not the entire internet, these developments are just about the WWW.

Any part of the internet which starts to become popular faces the same fate. It's been known at least since September 1993 [1]. The "true internet", as people (myself included) remember so fondly, can only live on in obscurity. This is the dark forest hypothesis [2] for the internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#103

Post by [deleted] »

M0r13n wrote: post #31

A few weeks ago I noticed DNS4EU couldn’t resolve archive.is and assumed it was just a configuration mistake. I emailed them about it, and after a couple of days or weeks (not really sure) the domain started resolving again. Given AdGuard’s recent report about suspicious pressure on DNS providers to block Archive.today, I’m starting to wonder if DNS4EU’s temporary block was actually related to the same campaign

[deleted]

Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#104

Post by betaby »

cluckindan wrote: post #95
matheusmoreira wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet will be destroyed as countries the world over seek to impose all of their silly and incompatible laws on it. The international network will fracture into multiple national networks with heavy filtering at the borders. I've been making this prediction for years now. Words can hardly capture the sadness I feel when I see evidence of its slow realization. I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one…

Not the entire internet, these developments are just about the WWW.

> these developments are just about the WWW.

The article is literally about DNS.

Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#105

Post by alansammarone »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #84
Havoc wrote: post #46

The amount of forces seemingly actively trying to kill the internet of old is disconcerting. Chat control, DNS as arbiter of whats allowed, walled gardens etc.

The internet will be destroyed as countries the world over seek to impose all of their silly and incompatible laws on it. The international network will fracture into multiple national networks with heavy filtering at the borders. I've been making this prediction for years now. Words can hardly capture the sadness I feel when I see evidence of its slow realization. I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one…

I share your feelings - both the sadness about the path we seem to be going down and the wonder about what the Internet used to be.

I do believe, however, that the future does not "exist" in any real sense, but is constructed - every day, little by little, by each and every one of us. What the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.

Put another way - this is a rhetorical question - can do we do anything about it? Maybe.

Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#106

Post by forgotoldacc »

andy99 wrote: post #63
Havoc wrote: post #46

The amount of forces seemingly actively trying to kill the internet of old is disconcerting. Chat control, DNS as arbiter of whats allowed, walled gardens etc.

Don’t forget cloudflare

Cloudflare has always weirded me out. Back before everyone was using it, a lot of sites would be running just fine for years, then they'd suddenly be shut down for a few days due to DDoS attacks. Then they'd proudly announce they were on cloudflare when they came back. Funny thing was I noticed sites having more frequent downtime after using moving to cloudflare.

I don't see those cloudflare pages much these days, but something about it in those early days always gave me protection money vibes. Cloudflare seemed to come out of nowhere during a wave of DDoS attacks across the internet in the late 2000s and found their way into every site. They had some incredible timing.

Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#107

Post by codedokode »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #100

Friendly reminder that archive box exists to let you self host your own archive service. https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox I dream of a day where archivebox becomes a fleet of homelabs all over the world making it drastically harder to block them all.

I think about the opposite, people reading in the news that FBI is after archiving sites, will not want to launch their own site, except maybe the radical types.

Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#108

Post by input_sh »

stef25 wrote: post #65
pogue wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it might fall under a bulletproof hosting type of setup. [1] There have been many people investigating to try and figure out who owns & operates who is actually behind archive[.]today and how they're continuously able to bypass the paywalls of paid sites, continue operating with such large infrastructure with no apparent income source. There was quite a good article posted here on HN about someone trying to f…

Isn't it just a question of pretending to be a search bot ? Sites will allow google bot to bypass the paywall so stuff gets indexed.

You could easily test your hypothesis yourself. It's not gonna work very well.

Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#109

Post by numpad0 »

cluckindan wrote: post #95
matheusmoreira wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet will be destroyed as countries the world over seek to impose all of their silly and incompatible laws on it. The international network will fracture into multiple national networks with heavy filtering at the borders. I've been making this prediction for years now. Words can hardly capture the sadness I feel when I see evidence of its slow realization. I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one…

Not the entire internet, these developments are just about the WWW.

(The whole http://example.com/index.html thing is considered a mere application on the Internet among many, called World Wide Web, and not the Internet itself, but this is also quite pedantic)

Re: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

#110

Post by betaby »

codedokode wrote: post #80

Note that association's site is made from this free template [1] with minimal editing (can see it using diff). The web hosting account at name.com (prices starting from $5/year) was registered around Jan 12, 2025 [2]. The page also contains commented out section with a part of French mobile phone number and words "Emergency Standard" (the template contained fictional number here): Emergency Standard --> [1] https://w…

Quite possible that's just some bureaucrats kids running that site in exchange for EU grants. In fact in couple of countries that's precisely the case.
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