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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

#351

Post by rossant »

rarkins wrote: post #139
xbmcuser wrote: post #10

I speculate, and the conspiracy theorist in me believes, something of a compromising nature has been archived and they want that data inaccessible, but at the same time, pointing out what they want hidden would shine a light on it. It is even more interesting the US government is coming after archive.today at the same time, or maybe that is just a coincidence, and this is just a tech-savvy philanderer trying to hide…

This seems to me to be the most likely explanation. Someone important and/or rich wants something memory-holed and the archive sites are amongst the last to contain the content, so someone else is creating a facade organization as an attempt to get it taken down in every way possible. And yes it's entirely possible that the archive sites have multiple "enemies".

That doesn't seem totally implausible.

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

#352

Post by mmooss »

PinkSheep wrote: post #331

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 h…

I can see what you are getting at. Is this meant to be real advice - i.e., are you an attorney, familiar with French law, etc.?

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

#353

Post by mmooss »

rgj wrote: post #135
user_7832 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

Per the OP:

"... the illegal content would be removed (and we verified that it was)"

That doesn't mean it was CSAM, though obviously it's a serious possibility.

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

#354

Post by axiolite »

vintermann wrote: post #227
shkkmo wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions the FBI investigation but is not about that. This article is about a pressure campaign, the letter Web Abuse Association Defense sent to adguard making threats under french law and adguard's investigation in response to that letter.

A French organization with an English name, writing in English? J'en doute.

It was exceptionally clear from reading their writing, they are NOT native English speakers.

It seems 57% of people in France can speak English, which I can easily believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

No reason to doubt this is coming from a French person.

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

#356

Post by casefields »

oblio wrote: post #348
valicord wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

French law is based on an entirely different legal system compared to US (and Anglosphere law): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_legal_systems... It might not be possible to do something like that in France (though I assume there are other mechanisms available in that case).

Louisiana has a bunch of French law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Louisiana

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

#357

Post by Normal_gaussian »

dmurray wrote: post #332
user_7832 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sentenced for five years, released after three weeks.

"He will be subject to strict judicial supervision and barred from leaving France ahead of an appeal trial due to be held next year."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2eppqd2nyo

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

#358

Post by dev1ycan »

Follows suit on my other comment about how every site with information be it legal or not is being actually pressured now to take down their info after "AI" (LLMs) mafia bosses used the info to train their AI already...

It's sickening to see people okay with the destruction of the "real" knowledge filled internet in favor of a dystopia.

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

#359

Post by pinkmuffinere »

If the archive.today contact is telling the truth, then this implies that WAAD had collected links containing CSAM and chose not to contact the person who could best get rid of the material. I think it implies either:

1. WAAD has developed a good way of detecting CSAM, but is ok with the CSAM staying available longer than it needs to, and remaining accessible to a wider audience than needed, in order to pursue their ulterior motive. In this case, they could be improving the world in some significant way, but are just choosing to do something else.

2. WAAD has intentionally had archive.today index CSAM material in order to pursue their ulterior motive.

Of course, option 2 is _much_ more damning than option 1, but I feel both are really bad, and naively I'd still expect option 1 to be illegal. If you know of a crime and intentionally hide it, that seem illegal.

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

#360

Post by codedokode »

simion314 wrote: post #276
codedokode wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, there wasn't much evidence for removing a popular candidate, except for a "report" anyone could print in an hour. It turns out Europe is not much different from Russia in methods to get the wanted result.

[flagged]

> The candidate declared ZERO money spent in campaign

I thought to win you need to get more votes than competitors, not to spend more money.

Also, I think you are not seeing the obvious "backdoors" in law. Think for a second, why the punishment for errors in documentation or misreporting is barring a candidate from elections, and not a fine (or imprisonment for cases with serious fraud)? It is obviously intentional. It is relatively easy to make a mistake in documentation (given the large volume of documentation one has to deal with even in mayoral elections), and even more so if you manage to plant your man into candidate's staff or bribe/pressure someone dealing with documentation to "accidentally" make some mistakes.

Whenever you see some bureaucratic, complex procedures in election regulations (or any other law), be sure, they are intentional. The more documentation one needs to fill out correct, the more the chance to find mistakes there. And every mistake would be in the favor of whoever is in power.

Example: France, a popular, but unwanted, candidate barred from elections. Counter example: USA, where a convicted felon, who faked documentation multiple times, still won because of popular support.

In a democratic country the bar for removing a candidate should be exceptionally high. Definitely not decision of several unelected people friendly with the current government.

> TikTok bot farms including one linked to Kremlin boosting Kremlinescus posts

So what you are implying? The voters are dumb and will vote for whoever they saw in TikTok?

> you will find it weird that 25k asians are hitting like on a Romanian politician posts.

So if TikTok promoted Biden, he would win against Trump? Maybe they should replace Electoral College with like counting then and save money. Also, TikTok is mostly used by teenagers listening to dumb robotic music who have no right to vote anyway.

Also, talking about ads, TV also often provides unfair free ads to some candidates under the guise of "news". By the way Youtube - what a coincidence - also nowadays has "news" section on the main screen. Maybe the candidate skirted some rules regarding advertisement, but it's not like he stuffed fake ballots into the box.

And now think why would the voters want to vote for a random shady candidate rather than people who have been on TV screens for 20 years? Only because some evil puppeteer spent several grands on buying TikTok likes, dumb, ungrateful voters forgot about all the good things those candidates have been doing for them, and exorbitant growth of economy and their income?

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