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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

#201

Post by salawat »

Ntrails wrote: post #186
matheusmoreira wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've given up on trying to change the world. > What will the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day. That's the problem. This "us" you're referring to. People. They're the problem. They have no principles. They stand for nothing. They think they do, but the reality is their principles are easily compromised. They are highly susceptible to manipulation by way of emotion. Powerful emotions like ter…

> The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals. Agreed. If only we could also agree that not everyone who thinks this is not a good trade is evil/malignant/stupid etc. idk - it feels like a simple case of priorities. Freedom and privacy are not everyones

Even if you aren't malignant, or evil, then stupid is the only option left, because you've observed the structure of the problem space, understood the new problems and vulnerabilities and points of abuse introduced, accepted their existential nature, and then simply turned off your brain and ceased to continue processing to the inevitable conclusion. You can be evil/malignant. You can be stupid. If you choose to be stupid, none of us can separate you from the evil/malignant camp.

So if it makes you feel better. Cool. I don't see you as an evil mustache twirling person, but you're still a systemic threat from your refusal to take into account the threat these tools represent in terms of being weaponized by the first tyranny minded group of individuals to wander in.

There's differences of priorities that I have no compunctions having a spirited discussion around. What I refuse to engage in is argumentation with people intent on pissing on my shoes and trying to claim it's raining, or trying to get me to fit the Procrustean bed that makes them feel safer at my expense.

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

#202

Post by [deleted] »

cornholio wrote: post #128
justin66 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s grimly hilarious that anyone in 2025 believes the police wouldn’t do something because that thing is unethical and against their own standards. > handle CSAM They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work.

> They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work. Without proof, that's just an edgelord conspiracy theory. Police are not the Borg, perfectly coordinated in their evilness, all law enforcement agencies have internal power structures and strife, rivalries, jealousy, old conflicts. The fact that some action, such as planting evidence leading to a conviction, is punishable with long prison…

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by matheusmoreira »

Ntrails wrote: post #186
matheusmoreira wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've given up on trying to change the world. > What will the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day. That's the problem. This "us" you're referring to. People. They're the problem. They have no principles. They stand for nothing. They think they do, but the reality is their principles are easily compromised. They are highly susceptible to manipulation by way of emotion. Powerful emotions like ter…

> The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals. Agreed. If only we could also agree that not everyone who thinks this is not a good trade is evil/malignant/stupid etc. idk - it feels like a simple case of priorities. Freedom and privacy are not everyones

> If only we could also agree that not everyone who thinks this is not a good trade is evil/malignant/stupid etc.

No. We cannot agree on that.

> it feels like a simple case of priorities. Freedom and privacy are not everyones

Then what is? Survival? People would accept anything if their betters kept their bellies full?

I see your point, I just want humans to be better than that. I want to be better than that. It's not about priorities, it's about basic human dignity. Without dignity, we're reduced to beasts.

People's moral fortitude is tested by crisis. Will they give up their principles or will they stick to them? If you ram two aircraft into the twin towers, will the USA remain the land of the free, or will it turn into a surveillance police state that violates the basic rights and dignity of its own population on a daily basis?

I see people fail this test all the time. I see entire nations fail this test. As such, my own beliefs that people are reasonable and principled are being tested. Is it worth it to have principles, to try to reach an ideal state of society, or is it all about money, force and power in an amoral world? My beliefs are trending towards the latter.

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

#204

Post by lostlogin »

txrx0000 wrote: post #96
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #6

Its interesting that being unable to find a legal route to dig up dirt on archive.is, they're going the route of CSAM allegations. I first heard of this technique on a discussion on Lowendtalk from a hoster discussing how pressure campaigns were orchestrated. The host used to host VMs for a customer that was not well liked but otherwise within the bounds of free speech in the US (I guess something on the order of KF/…

They have plausible deniability, but the fact of the matter is: this also erases evidence of past crimes from public records. If bad things already happened then we should keep the evidence that they happened. The root problem of CSAM is child trafficking and abuse in physical space. But for whatever reason enforcement efforts seem to be more focused on censoring and deleting the images rather than on curbing the act…

> The root problem of CSAM is child trafficking and abuse in physical space. But for whatever reason enforcement efforts seem to be more focused on censoring and deleting the images rather than on curbing the actual act of child trafficking and rape.

Things get a bit uncomfortable for various high profile figures, political leaders and royalty if prosecutions start happening.

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

#205

Post by zahlman »

constantcrying wrote: post #97
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #6

Its interesting that being unable to find a legal route to dig up dirt on archive.is, they're going the route of CSAM allegations. I first heard of this technique on a discussion on Lowendtalk from a hoster discussing how pressure campaigns were orchestrated. The host used to host VMs for a customer that was not well liked but otherwise within the bounds of free speech in the US (I guess something on the order of KF/…

The owner of the KiwiFarms goes into detail how the attack against his site works and where the residential IPs are from: "The bot spammer - Started his attack by simply DDoS attacking the forum. - Uses thousands of real email addresses from real providers like gmail, outlook, and hotmail. - Uses tens of thousands of VPN IPs. - He also uses tens of thousands of IPs from "Residential Private Networks", which are "free…

I understand the value of providing evidence here, but I think KF links get your post auto-killed...

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

#206

Post by ndiddy »

snthd wrote: post #114
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

Archive.is have previously blocked cloudflare DNS because it was anonymizing requests. It could be either. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 >The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users.

Someone asked the archive.is owner why he does this in the past. It's because of similar situations to this one where someone who wants to get archive.is taken down uploads illegal content, requests archive.is to save it, and immediately reports archive.is to their country's legal authorities. His solution to this is using the EDNS information to serve requests from the closest IP abroad, so any takedown procedure requires international cooperation and therefore enough bureaucratic overhead that he gets notified and has time to take the content down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650

I also find the "we don't want to leak a requester's IP" explanation for blocking EDNS to be suspect. The way DNS works is that you ask for the IP address for a domain name, you get the IP, and then you connect to it. With Cloudflare's DNS, the server doesn't know your IP when you do the DNS lookup, but that doesn't matter because you're connecting to the server anyway so they'll still get your IP. Even if you're worried about other people sniffing network traffic, the hostname you're visiting still gets revealed in plaintext during the SNI handshake. What Cloudflare blocking EDNS does do is make it much harder for competing CDNs to efficiently serve content using DNS based routing. They have to use Anycast instead, which has a higher barrier to entry.

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

#207

Post by wartywhoa23 »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #196
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaking a realization of a random process for the random process itself.

I don't understand but I am interested, would you give a bit more explanation?

Sure!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realization_(probability)

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

txrx0000 wrote: post #96
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #6

Its interesting that being unable to find a legal route to dig up dirt on archive.is, they're going the route of CSAM allegations. I first heard of this technique on a discussion on Lowendtalk from a hoster discussing how pressure campaigns were orchestrated. The host used to host VMs for a customer that was not well liked but otherwise within the bounds of free speech in the US (I guess something on the order of KF/…

They have plausible deniability, but the fact of the matter is: this also erases evidence of past crimes from public records. If bad things already happened then we should keep the evidence that they happened. The root problem of CSAM is child trafficking and abuse in physical space. But for whatever reason enforcement efforts seem to be more focused on censoring and deleting the images rather than on curbing the act…

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by valicord »

AstralStorm wrote: post #193

How can you even sue without any legal identity? This website and an organisation does not happen to have any. Might as well be some shell company in the Carribeans with no legal standing in France. It's not even good enough for public prosecution, as the tip would then go through French services. This law is completely backwards, and worse than a SLAPP. If you cannot respond to a report in any way, it should be null…

If you can sue shark fins, why not a website? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...

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

#210

Post by justin66 »

cornholio wrote: post #128
justin66 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s grimly hilarious that anyone in 2025 believes the police wouldn’t do something because that thing is unethical and against their own standards. > handle CSAM They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work.

> They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work. Without proof, that's just an edgelord conspiracy theory. Police are not the Borg, perfectly coordinated in their evilness, all law enforcement agencies have internal power structures and strife, rivalries, jealousy, old conflicts. The fact that some action, such as planting evidence leading to a conviction, is punishable with long prison…

In this case we’re talking about asking someone like a confidential informant to paste a URL into a text field on a web site. Not really elaborate in the grand scheme of things, conspiracy-wise.
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