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FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

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Re: FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

#31

Post by dpark »

Galanwe wrote: post #29
egberts1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just no. A simple four-hash like BSD or Gentoo Linux do with their repository is more than sufficient. No need to record who is requesting the recording, much leas fetchibg.

The hash to verify content is only half of the problem. You also need to store the _actual_ content of the page. What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore? A blockchain is, at its core, a distributed database, it is exactly made for this use case.

A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar. How many millions (billions?) would Wikipedia need to spend to stash everything they reference in the blockchain?

> What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?

It would be way cheaper for Wikipedia to run a durable archive service themselves than to use the blockchain as an archive.

Re: FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

#32

Post by Galanwe »

dpark wrote: post #31
Galanwe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hash to verify content is only half of the problem. You also need to store the _actual_ content of the page. What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore? A blockchain is, at its core, a distributed database, it is exactly made for this use case.

A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar. How many millions (billions?) would Wikipedia need to spend to stash everything they reference in the blockchain? > What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore? It would be way cheaper for Wikipedia to run a durable archive service themselves than to use the blockchain as a…

> A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar

That's nonsensical, the price of using a service on a blockchain is essentially a floating value. That is the whole point of having a token in the first place: people willing to store and people storing are participating in the price of the service.

Last I checked, filecoin was a few cents per GB per month.

You can create a blockchain of kind hearted people to store Wikipedia as well, it's really up to you. But comparing apples and oranges makes no sense.

Re: FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

#33

Post by dpark »

Galanwe wrote: post #32
dpark wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar. How many millions (billions?) would Wikipedia need to spend to stash everything they reference in the blockchain? > What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore? It would be way cheaper for Wikipedia to run a durable archive service themselves than to use the blockchain as a…

> A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar That's nonsensical, the price of using a service on a blockchain is essentially a floating value. That is the whole point of having a token in the first place: people willing to store and people storing are participating in the price of the service. Last I checked, filecoin was a few cents per GB per month. You can create…

> That's nonsensical, the price of using a service on a blockchain is essentially a floating value.

This is kind of a ridiculous response. The price of oil is also a floating value and yet it is not nonsensical to discuss the price of a barrel of oil.

Yes, the cost to store something on the bitcoin blockchain floats. Several sources indicate that roughly a dollar is a reasonable approximation currently. If you disagree I’d be interested in seeing your data.

> Last I checked, filecoin was a few cents per GB per month.

I don’t know a ton about filecoin but it seems like retrieving data is pretty cumbersome. It’s not clear that this would actually be useable for a Wikipedia reference archive.

> You can create a blockchain of kind hearted people to store Wikipedia as well, it's really up to you. But comparing apples and oranges makes no sense.

Blockchain for its own sake. Sure, you could create a custom blockchain. You could also just pay AWS for georeplicated blob storage and it would be way less complex.

Re: FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

#34

Post by cosmojg »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17
dogma1138 wrote: post #10

Regardless of this situation I actually think that websites like Archive and TWBM should be fully transparent. A very large partition of citations in Wikipedia for example relies on them. Most of the pages that cite archived copies do so because the live version is no longer available I would like to have some assurances that archive.is and the likes are not altering their content in any way over time. Unironically c…

> very large partition of citations in Wikipedia for example relies on them Is the Internet Archive related to archive.is?

No, the Internet Archive is an organization that runs a web archive at archive.org while archive.is is an alternative domain for archive.today, a competing web archive run by an individual.

Re: FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

#35

Post by walletdrainer »

namibj wrote: post #14
t0mas88 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "requested" part sounds like it's not mandatory, otherwise they would have used something like "you're not allowed to..." or similar language.

Sounds like a notice that disclosure could result in outcomes that make the discloser liable of (the crime? of) interfering-with-an-investigation. And thus to avoid that risk, to think twice before disclosing. Disclosure would only be punished if the specific circumstances actually result in legally-considered-(unlawful-)interference.

There needs to be specific intent to obstruct, merely sharing the subpoena does not demonstrate this.

“Hey, we got this subpoena. You better quickly wipe all your drives” probably would.

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