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Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

adguard-dns.io

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

#331

Post by PinkSheep »

Good job on AdGuard's end for bringing this to the Internet's attention. I especially enjoyed the unearthed details about this "N"GO's short history.

I think the e-mail exchange should've been kept short, although it is good that the owner of archive.today was eventually notified (by them) about these links in good faith to remove them. Their reply should've been the following:

"Thank you for contacting us. If you have conclusive proof of illegal behavior, you should contact police and seek legal assistance. A website's administrator is expected to adequately react to illegal actions conducted by its users, such as removing media that's breaking a law.

We have visited the URLs provided by you (https://archive[.]today/ , ...) and found no evidence to corroborate your concerns. To avoid misunderstandings, we require you to send a certified mail to before further replies on this matter."

Remember guys, it should always be certified mail (bonus points for international). And yes, I mean literal index pages as provided in the first e-mail. Play by the legal understanding of words. Be creative and break the rules to the extent of not breaking them ;)

PS: If you want to see more of "funny replies" you should read Njalla's blog (https://njal.la/blog/>) and TPB's infamous e-mail replies.

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

#332

Post by dmurray »

user_7832 wrote: post #131
betaby wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well then, that would be a very interesting thing to watch when it happens! From the article, the penalty for a false report: > ...shall be punished by one year’s imprisonment and a fine of €15,000. Side note, would anybody know how "easily" do political elites get off the hook in France?

> Side note, would anybody know how "easily" do political elites get off the hook in France?

The actual ex-president got sentenced to jail time last month (and even served some of it) so you're at least not guaranteed to escape the law as a political elite.

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

#333

Post by sedatk »

unwise-exe wrote: post #319
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #163

The Ministry of Truth simply doesn't want unaccounted and uncontrolled snapshots of history. Too much hassle steering the narrative regarding any surfacing truth-now-meant-to-be-lies and vice versa into fake news territory, discrediting by association, cranking up troll farms.. Much easier to make this inconvenience disappear with the due cooperation from the controlled outlets of information. Then they will come aft…

Who cares about local storage? You could have just made up whatever you're claiming to have saved.

Archival sites could let you download cryptographically signed copies of the archived pages. If they get removed from the archival site, the authenticity of your local copies can still be attested.

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

#334

Post by PinkSheep »

e2le wrote: post #242
rgj wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But apparently there was actual CSAM there, since the article mentioned that archive.is removed it within a few hours. So the claim was real. Why did they make up such a story around it?

>They replied within a few hours. The response was straightforward: the illegal content would be removed (and we verified that it was), and they had never received any previous notifications about those URLs. They never notified archive.today of the illegal material, instead they chose to demand blocking actions of archive.today from a DNS provider. I would be interested to know whether any other DNS service provider…

If the world ran by conspiracy theories, the goal would be to normalize censorship at DNS level. Sony has tried (>2 years ago) by taking Quad9 to court over a copyright matter. There are too many parties involved for whom this practice would be a useful tool to have.

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

#335

Post by deinonychus »

Am I crazy or did those WAAD guys themselves just link the public to potentially illegal content?

As of writing, they have a public response hosted on their website, including screenshots of emails to/from Google with URLs that Google agreed to remove. WAAD censored out the URLs, except they didn't actually because whatever paintbrush tool they used didn't have the opacity maxed out.

I'm not looking up those URLs to find out.

edit: They also leaked the Adguard admin's email, which WAAD complained about being the victim of.

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

#336

Post by encroach »

luke727 wrote: post #312
atomicfiredoll wrote: post #2

I don't know anything about Adguard, but good on the team for doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. Even better that they're sharing what they've found with everyone else.

Unfortunately they went along with it initially but at least they came to their senses in the end: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586

Thanks for the context - it changes the light of the parent article.

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

#337

Post by HollowVoice »

immibis wrote: post #251
vintermann wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was one thing I could make people understand: Even though bad people are saying it, doesn't mean it isn't true. Social media false flag tactics happen. People from all over all sorts of political spectrums tell the same story. The sites tell the same story. If you decide to blindly dismiss claims of abuse because you don't like the ones claiming to be abused, you create a comfy little space for abuse to happ…

> Even though bad people are saying it, doesn't mean it isn't true. I am a human being and therefore have a built-in Bayesian filter for spam and bullshit. Should I also read Nigerian prince emails, just in case there's a real Nigerian prince who needs my help? In case you are a real Nigerian prince who needs my help, it's up to you not to phrase it identically to a spam email.

[dead]

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

#338

Post by wartywhoa23 »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #315
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laplace's demon requires being able to tell velocity vectors of individual molecules, and tossing a coin predictably takes being able to throw it with equally enormous precision, correcting for the net effect of all collisions with molecules of air along the way, etc. So in the end of the day posessing such knowledge, or rather having a mind with this much focus, depth and resolution would indeed mean a win of determ…

Now I think we're having two different conversations again? If I understand your point about the "battlefield between pure will/determinism and pure chance/entropy" correctly, you're talking about more of a psychological, individual, "is there a meaning to life, the universe and everything" type direction? What I was trying to drive at was really more of a "in the framework of Laplace's Demon, your choices in the pre…

False dichotomy, we're talking about the same.

In the framework of Laplace's Demon, no single human, the whole humankind nor any machine or algorithm it creates is capable of 100% precise prediction of anything at the level of operation of said Demon. If there's any experiment proving otherwise, I'd like to know.

If you insist that we talk about 100% prediction of my personal choices, let's play a simple game of guessing UUIDs. I generated one and changed a single digit in it at my free (or predetermined) will. Here it is, protected by another UUID which I'll post as soon as you make your prediction.

https://eu.onetimesecret.com/secret/2ttgx3flngktuelcswh861hm...

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

#339

Post by Jerry2 »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #163

The Ministry of Truth simply doesn't want unaccounted and uncontrolled snapshots of history. Too much hassle steering the narrative regarding any surfacing truth-now-meant-to-be-lies and vice versa into fake news territory, discrediting by association, cranking up troll farms.. Much easier to make this inconvenience disappear with the due cooperation from the controlled outlets of information. Then they will come aft…

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984

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

#340

Post by brewtide »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #252
econ wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their DNS is great. Removing websites without a good reason would quickly ruin everything for them.

I'm not well-versed in this: is AdGuard roughly equivalent to Pi-hole?

You can also install AdGuard home as a home-assistant add-on, and then configure your router to hand that IP out as the network DNS server -- so all of your network traffic is ad blocking as soon as it hits your wifi. (like a pihole).

It's pretty slick, highly recommend. (Also super useful to see what devices are reaching out to where and how frequently, custom block lists, custom local DNS entries, etc).

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