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 <Adguards company address> 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.
“You sent claims of CSAM hosted on someone else’s servers and we decided to download it.”
Hell no. I don’t want to see that and I don’t want it being ingested into systems I control. Of all the stuff here, “download some supposed CSAM to see if it’s real” is the absolute worst advice I can imagine.
This is not AdGuard’s job. Knowingly downloading CSAM is very likely illegal. And it also potentially opens them up for additional liability if they do determine that CSAM is present.
AdGuard seems like they did exactly the right thing, which is to send the report along to the party actually responsible for cleaning up the supposed CSAM.
Put CSAM in a banner ad, and arrest everyone who was served that ad?
Post a CSAM photo behind plexiglass on a wall in a public space, and arrest everyone who walks by and glanced at it?
Just how stupid do you think lawmakers, judges, prosecutors, and police are? People get arrested for paying for, or sharing CSAM, not just stumbling on a website that might have something questionable. It is illegal to possess, but just loading a website is hardly possession... If it was, all of Facebook and Google's content moderators would be facing life-sentences.
Very! Unimaginably so! A friend of mine from Germany received a GIF that contained ONE FRAME of CSAM from someone in a group chat, Whatsapp auto-downloaded it into the gallery, something auto reported it and a month later, cops showed up to take away all his electronic devices. This is apparently a thing people do there, like americans SWAT livestreamers. I think it took over a year for them to return his devices. He had to pay for a lawyer and buy a new phone and laptop. He wasn't charged with anything, but because the report was automated, there wasn't even anyone to sue for a false report.
Also of course there is a person somewhere behind a keyboard who wrote the software which flags, correctly or incorrectly, files. Their name (Thorn) is kept strictly away from any public testimonial with NDAs with police, because eventually there will be class action lawsuits against them in the USA.
Is there a reason the legal entity which deployed the software can't be named? Seems like the next logical step, anyway.
These are all things that, in a functioning system, the police officer receiving the report would take into account. If it's a first report, diaregard. If it's a second, check the file name that was also presumably in the report, see it's a Whatsapp folder and disregard it. If it's a third report or there are multiple pieces, get a warrant to run a CSAM scan on the person's device, go to their apartment, run it, see there's nothing else, close the case. If it's a clear "prank", start investigating the person who sent it.
But since the police are, in general, trigger happy lunatics, you get a full raid instead. And since computer forensics is hard and doesn't pay well, the investigation took many months instead of an afternoon. The fuckup was squarely on the law enforcement side, as well as in the law itself.
You won't go to jail or life most of the time if you can explain how or why, but there are extremely strict rules around CSAM that you need to deal with. One of those is "don't look at it unless absolutely necessary". For AdGuard, I doubt this use would qualify for "absolutely necessary". Even police forces use dedicated software that doesn't keep too many copies around, and restrict how many people are allowed to look at the screens for screening computers.
The people applying mass censorship are using CSAM as a weapon. It'd be unwise for AdGuard to give them the extra ammunition by (admitting to) checking the CSAM content themselves.
Furthermore, if the complaint has merit and the content linked does contain CSAM, there is some pretty bad shit out there. I'm not prepared to look at pictures of raped babies or tortured children but I know full well that that content is out there on the internet.
Quite often pretty stupid, honestly. Or careless, ignorant, jaded, corrupt, etc etc
You even quoted the word...
The people who do this as part of their job do so under strict supervision, legal guard rails AND mandatory counselling. Which happens to include a number of content moderators.[0]
Even if nobody involved commits a crime and just does their job resonably well, getting your apartment raided, all your neighbours seeing that, your coworkers hearing about it, having to pay for a lawyer, losing all your electronic devices for months if not years and having to buy new ones, not being ablo to make proper plans because you never know when they might throw another court date at you...
But more often than not, they don't do their job well. They're sloppy, indifferent, they don't really understand computers or technology... You might get convicted just because a judge doesn't understand what downloading actually means.
And then you also get the ass-covering. They spent all this time and effort, but now it looks like you're innocent. Their bosses would be pissed, maybe you could even sue them. So they do their best to make even the smallest and dumbest charges stick. They look for other potentian crimes. They threaten you until you take a plea deal. They dissect and twist everything you said. Just so they don't have to admit they made a
"Innocent until proven guilty" might be true in the most technical sense. But being innocent doesn't help when your entire life is thrown upside down, everyone you know thinks you're a criminal, you're spending thousands on legal costs...
In this particular example, you have admitted to reading the subversive post and therefore your post should also be deleted.
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[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250112153727/https://webabused...
Author of response PDF to Adguard: someone named "bob"
Uses Microsoft and Office 365
RNA number W691110691.
Was declared on February 15, 2025, and published in the Journal Officiel on March 18, 2025
Headquartered at 131 rue de Créqui, 69006 Lyon 6 in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, specifically in the Rhône department.
Publication number: 20250011, announcement number 1688
Yeah, that's a postal box to host compagnies.
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?
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.
"He will be subject to strict judicial supervision and barred from leaving France ahead of an appeal trial due to be held next year."
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 providers have received similar such demands.
I would assume (like any normal individual), that you would notify the service first (archive.today) and if they've proven to be a non-responder to CSAM material then escalate to legal action.
If archive.today is honest about never receiving a prior notification, then the way in which they've decided to go about removing the illegal material is very suspicious.
USA - https://report.cybertip.org/reporting
UK - https://report.iwf.org.uk/org/ (technically the NCA, but they are a catch all reporting target. As a private individual IWF will handle the onward report for you).
If you are in a country without such an agency, the above agencies are good to inform, as they will both handle international reports.
These organisations will ensure the material is taken down, and will capture and analyse it. CSAM can be compared against hash databases (https://www.thorn.org/) to determine whether there it is as yet unknown material or reshared known material. This can help lead to the identification, arrest, and conviction of material creators as well as the identification and support of victims.
If you tell the site administrator directly there is a good chance they will remove the material and not report it; this is a huge problem in this space at the moment.
In the UK and the USA (and many other places) operators are obligated to report the material; in fact the controversial Online Safety Act puts actual teeth around this very obligation in the UK.
So I should report that I consumed child porn? That's a hard pass from me.
If you are consuming or encountering CSAM in a fashion where it is not clear that you are not seeking it out and participating in its acquisition and distribution I suggest that you seek both medical and legal help.
Assuming the complainant has some genuine tip,
Which court would actually determine it to be illegal conclusively? (It can’t be a uk or us court, could it?)
And who issues the binding order to take it down from the known sites?
Making the report is a long way off court action, and it would be unusual for a court to be involved. In most cases the data is connected, documented, and site owners contacted and educated.
Very few countries see accidental/unintentional hosting as a crime (it will fail most reasonableness tests) and fewer are interested in prosecuting one off offenders who can just be asked to stop.
Most countries are very interested in prosecuting the underlying creators and finding and supporting the victims.
They post CSAM to some service/site, then immediately report it to every possible contact of the site's hosting provider, DNS provider, DDoS protection provider, etc. But not the site itself.
Before they do that, they spend weeks probing the site's moderation response, to work out the best time to evade detection on the site itself.
Then they do it again, and again, and again. They fight against the site's attempt to block them.
Their intent is to _deliberately_ get the site into trouble, and ultimately get the site's hosting, DNS, peering, etc. to abandon it.
The same sort of shitstains also persistently DDoS the site.
Why do they do it? Usually minor and petty internet squabbles, the instigator hates the site and wants to destroy the site, and uses these underhand tactics to do it.
They have no legal way to get what they want -- destroy someone else's site for their own pleasure -- so they use illegal ways. https://protectthestack.org/
In order to pull off this attack the attacker would have to have a collection of CSAM to upload. What if the site being attacked logged the uploader’s IP and went above-and-beyond complying with authorities and provided the source of the upload.
Well, I guess some people doing this sort of thing would try to hide their identity while doing the upload. Honestly, in that case… it might be reasonable for sites to not accept uploads via things like TOR, right? (Or however else these people hide their tracks).
"... 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.
Smells like freedom fries to me (am American myself)
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586#...
The legal advice we got was basically “block asap or risk jail time”. Moreover, the risk would still be there even if the complainant is shady or hiding their identity.
So it took us some time to do the digging and make sure that illegal content was removed which was the prerequisite to unblocking.
The digging is not finished btw, we’ll later post a proper analysis of our reaction and the results of the research.
Maybe it would have been virtuous to fight it tooth-and-nail from the start, but I don't think it was wrong to comply while investigating further
IMO it is safer to use a big popular DNS recursor (google, cloudflare, adguard, quad9, etc), use DoT/DoH/DoQ and maybe add some additional filtering on top of it.
It's worth trying on devices where you can't install ad blocking software, but can change the TCP/IP settings.
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).
I would recommend it
That's the intention of intermediary liability laws - to make meritless censorship be the easy, no-risk way out. To deputize corporations to act as police under a guilty-until-proven-innocent framework.
Then they will come after our local storage, and making it prohibitively expensive is the least malign way they can come up with.
The reason you believe that you're reading something on news.ycombinator.com right now is not the path by which the bytes were copied from one interface to the next before getting to you, but the certificate and signature that confirms you have a valid HTTPS connection.
But what does care about local storage in this brave new gaslit world is my own sanity, for one.
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.
Yet this is a standard way to become a wealthy lawyer.
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.
Here from their official "presse" announcement:
https://web.archive.org/web/20251116002625/https://webabused...
WAAD seems to be reading along here. Wonder if your archive.org link now makes archive.org one of their targets.
I mean, it's well known that governments possess and distribute more of the stuff than anyone else. Government or not, not a big surprise.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1ohekv5/updatedn...
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.
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.
Many sites now support Encypted Client Hello. This makes it possible to send the hostname after the connection has been encrypted. This is enabled by default on cloudflare hosted domains (when cloudflare also manages DNS).
I speculate it's due to archive.today wanting granular (not overly broad) legal censorship compliance. Which is somewhat related to this post.
This law is completely backwards, and worse than a SLAPP. If you cannot respond to a report in any way, it should be null.
Some good ones: - United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster - United States v. 11 1/4 Dozen Packages of Articles Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat's Shoo-Fly Powders for Drunkenness - South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats
Always wanted the cat, or the Honda Civic or whatever to ask to represent themselves. I guess if there was a foreclosure against an Nvidia Spark with a local LLM it might be able to give it a worthy try.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consi...
The Rooster won.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals... -> Louisiana isn't in the list for the court that handled that trial.
The images of the various messages on the adguard page are not lawsuits.
They are threatening messages that threaten to create legal issues, but until and unless they carry through on the threats, are simply "threats" to the extent we've been given any visibility into the messages contents.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/isp-sued-by-reco...
In rem = the thing is the defendant. You're not suing a person, and you're asking the court to decide who owns or controls a specific property.
The quintessential case is United States v. $124,700
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...
That in itself is quite shocking really.
But the point stands I think, as I’d expect legal demands to be measured and to the point.
I'm stating this because I think it might be the most important distinction in our lifetime. I think that wars are fought, lives are lost, and maybe even society itself will be lost, on that distinction and those of its like.
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/SaSu/SF), so a given user would upload CSAM on the forum, then report the same CSAM to the hoster. They used to use the same IP address for their entire operation. When the host and the customer compared notes, they'd find about these details.
Honestly at the time I thought the story was bunk, in the age of residential proxies and VPNs and whatnot, surely whoever did this wouldn't just upload said CSAM from their own IP, but one possible explanation would be that the forum probably just blocked datacenter IPs wholesale and the person orchestrating the campaign wasn't willing to risk the legal fallout of uploading CSAM out of some regular citizen's infected device.
In this case, I assume law enforcement just sets up a website with said CSAM, gets archive.is to crawl it, and then pressurize DNS providers about it.
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. It's almost as if viewing (or this case, merely archiving) CSAM is considered a worse crime than the physical act of trafficking and sexually abusing children, which is apparently okay nowadays if you're rich or powerful enough.
Things get a bit uncomfortable for various high profile figures, political leaders and royalty if prosecutions start happening.
The meta conspiracy theory in all of this would be that this is an actual CSAM producer trying to take down evidence that could be used against them.
It is however not at all clear the evidence they want scrubbed from the internet is CSAM-related. It's just the go-to tool for giving a site trouble for some attackers.
https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_fuse_debuts_with_harmblock_ai_t...
Mildly related incident where a Canadian child protection agency uploads csam onto a reverse image search engine and then reports the site for the temporarily stored images.
[0] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/SECU/Brief/B... [1] https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-netwo...
Still shitty, but more obviously a technical mistake than a deliberate ploy.
SaSu: Sanctioned Suicide [1]
But I don't know what KF and SF are supposed to stand for.
SF is probably StormFront, an infamous neo-nazi website. Not an "anyone right of center is a nazi" kind of neo-nazi - actual self-proclaimed neo-nazis, complete with swastikas, Holocaust denial and calls for racial segregation. Even more hated and scrutinized than KiwiFarms, and under pressure by multiple governments and many more activist groups, over things like neo-nazi hate speech and ties with real life hate groups.
It would be a damn shame if archive.is fell under the same kind of scrutiny as those. I have an impression, completely unfounded, that the archive.is crew knew things were heading that way, and worked with that in mind for a long time now. But that doesn't guarantee they'll endure. Just gives them a fighting chance.
For law enforcement personnel, at the very least would mean an end of a career if caught (also possible jail time)
Are you sure ? They say in the article that they were not able to fing out who sent the email. Site was behind Cloudfare (so US).
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.
The case they’re referring to is the Karen Read case. The whole for/against thing has become quite political and sensationalized, especially after the involvement of a popular local online right-wing commentator named Turtle Boy (because Turtle Middle-Aged-Man didn’t have the same ring to it.) Another Canton policeman seemingly murdered a young woman who’d refused to get an abortion. He’d been sleeping with her for a few years after she started some sort of internship/cadet program with the police department as a high school student. Canton is a sleepy, medium-sized suburb, btw.
The corruption in the Massachusetts State Police is cartoonishly prevalent. There are too many major recent (and past) scandals to even choose one. They see themselves as a pseudo-military organization and are famous for their arrogant, officious, and rude manners, violence, aggression, corruption, and cover-ups. I got stopped at some sort of checkpoint in rural Georgia at 2am on a 2 lane country highway 50 miles from anything and was astonished by how professionally those bored cops acted. Completely different than my experiences with state police back home. Who knows: maybe the Georgia cops would have been way worse if I wasn’t white while there MSP might be more egalitarian in their ghoulishness?
I’ve had far more interaction with urban police in MA, both as a punk-ass teenager and in professional dealings, and the experience has been fine for the most part. Staties and cops in the suburbs? Yeesh.
Anything linked to pedophilia in the US and elsewhere is without remorse, and will continue that way due to parental fears.
It's a recurring theme with these authorities. You see, they're special. They get to spread this sort of material with complete impunity. They get to stockpile cyberweapons and use them against the targets of their investigations, or even indiscriminately. If you do it, you're a hacker spreading malware. They're just doing their jobs.
Sometimes those two privileges collide, resulting in truly comical and absurd situations. FBI has allowed cases against child molesters to go down the drain because the judge ordered them to reveal some Firefox exploit they used. They didn't want to invalidate their "network investigative techniques".
Note that these actions are illegal in most continental jurisdictions as stings must be devised ahead of time against specific groups of people. There's also Article 6 of ECHR.
In other words, FBI cannot run a sting off an EU site like this, at least definitely not a German one.
"world elite is practicing a child sex ring", this is why it's so compatible with the current vogue bipartisan populism which generally says "your life sucks because of the rich/elites"
jeffery epstein was in reality associated with many politicians, including trump and clinton, as far as I can tell on both sides there is a lot of extrapolation as to what really happened
On pure numbers alone, this is practically guaranteed to be the case for a portion of the world elite, since statistically speaking at least 1% ~ 2% of them will be pedophiles. Same as any community, anywhere. The average child sex ring is probably made up of individuals about as wealthy and sophisticated as your dad, uncle, neighbour, boss or your friends, and if even they can pull it off then surely the global elite can.
Quite why the now dead queen supported him so much (presumably including the payouts) is baffling.
A bunch of vaguely worded emails is enough to summarily conclude that someone is a criminal? I'm glad you're not a judge.
At best that proves he's affiliated/associated with a convicted pedophile. Going from that to "we can upgrade it to the much more direct fact "President Trump is a pedophile who liked to rape little girls" is a massive leap. There's plenty of other famous people who turned out to be sexual offenders, but we don't go around accusing their entire circle of being "pedophile who liked to rape little girls".
>The court of public opinion is not an actual court.
Good. The court of public opinion has shown itself to be massively partisan. People's evidentiary standards change on a whim depending on how much they previously like/hate the person. By invoking the "court of public opinion" excuse, you're basically admitting that there's weak evidence for the allegations, so you need a lower bar to "convict" someone.
What were the repercussions of this: "FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images" (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-websi...)
"The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days"
"There was no other way we could identify as many players"
I think the normal person would think this is worth while to catch more pedophiles, hence why this would work politically. However, you can read by the tone of the article that even this drew a lot of rage.
Imagine the FBI agents collecting CSAM, uploading it to websites for the purpose of... preventing copyright infringement
remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume something without reading it...
The person to whom I was replying thought that perhaps someone wanting to stop Archive was uploading CSAM and getting them to crawl it. I was pointing out that they didn’t have to do the first step, the internet has lots of that stuff apparently, they merely had to have a list of urls (law enforcement could easily provide) and check Archive for them.
Archive doesn’t do this automatically apparently, as some platforms do, so there’s probably plenty of it there.
I’m not saying I know or believe that to be the case, I have no knowledge at all here, but it’s entirely possible archive ignores most of these requests and responded to this one.
"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" VPN services that actually sell your IP address to spammers so that their activity cannot be identified as coming from a commercial service provider.
- Is able to pass off all CAPTCHA providers to CAPTCHA solvers to bypass anti-bot challenges.
- Is completely lifeless and dedicated to this task. Publicly posted invites were found and used by him, and after a full month of no engagement he noticed registrations were open within hours."
Source: https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-gay-pedophile-at-the-gates....
Seems to be the new tactic now.
It also doesn't help that there is not even a time reference here. I want to say somewhere around 2018? Maybe earlier? Gamergate era? CTR?
There are pieces of internet history which are a "either you were there or you weren't" kind of deal. Like how the implementation of image posts in Reddit was very controversial, with concerns of the quality of the site going down. Wrong side won that one.
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 happen.
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.
That's not the same as disbelieving an anonymous spammer. Your distrust of them does not stem from disliking them.
To me, your attitude seems like indifference to the truth: I think you know that this happens, and it would be VERY odd if it only happened to people you like, but you're just indifferent when it happens to people you don't like, so you disbelieve them out of spite.
Does archive.is actually do any crawling? I thought they only archived pages on request.
This looks like someone in US (because FBI + CSAM) does not like them.
A lot of "sensitive" content is behind paywalls in the "free press" so someone, possibly FBI, wants to suppress this info.
These are the doings of one of the myriad freelance "intelectual rights enforcement agents", which are paid on success and employed by some large media organization. Another possibility is that a single aggrieved individual who found themselves doxed or their criminal conviction archived etc. took action after failing to enforce their so called "right to be forgotten".
Unfortunately, archive.is operating model is uniquely vulnerable to such false flag attacks.
> handle CSAM
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 sentences, is not something the corrupt can simply afford to ignore, while giving their internal foes mortal leverage against them.
For example, if Kash Patel receives an order from his handlers to plant child porn on some political target, that outcome might happen or not, but what you can be pretty damn sure is that all those involved will be aware of the risks and will try their best to stay out of it, or, if coerced, do it covertly so as to minimize the extreme risks they face.
The point was not that FBI are a bunch of angels, but that the undeniable risks involved by such a move seem completely unnecessary - the FBI has for years been weaponized against overseas copyright infringers, openly and legally.
https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/
Of course in a pinch it could also be used for other things like pretext.
What stops them from forcing Chrome to block the website, or LetsEncrypt to not issue any more certificates for the domain, or Microsoft and Apple to add them to their firewalls? Hell, can they go after the infrastructure software developers and say, force nginx to add a check and refuse to serve the domain?
Then what happens when a fake report is sent to an open source project without budget for lawyers?
I started with telling ISPs to block websites at the DNS level. The people started using 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9 and so on. So now they pressure those third-party DNS providers to do the same. This is why 9.9.9.9 is now unavailable here: they stopped serving France because they did not want to comply.
There's also voluntary censorship, so without any real due process, in some countries. Mostly at ISP level, but all the other entities you mentioned could also implement it. They may be forced to, as a means of dodging liability. There's all kinds of nefarious schemes.
The DNS resolver attacks are but pin pricks compared to the coming centralized control via CAs.
Amount of money and influence Alphabet has?
2. Is it a legally allowed tactic for copyright-luvva's to intentionally seek out CSAM content online, and then submit those URL's to sites like archive.today? Which entity is at greater legal peril, the one that aids the distribution of CSAM materials by intentionally having a site like archive.today archive CSAM content, or archive.today unintentionally being tricked into archiving CSAM content?
3. Everyone has traumas, of one kind of another. Each deals or tries to deal with them in their own way. Suppose a victim of crimes (still unpunished) finds or is informed of the presence of evidence online, and suppose this victim (regardless of how representative) finds the preservation of this evidence more important than the humiliation associated with it, how (in)just are laws that blanket suppress CSAM material? To give a more vigorous example: imagine you were raped by some no-yet-fallen UK nobility, and you are made aware of the presence of this evidence on some royal FTP server (or whatever), and you succeed in having archive.today "notarize" this evidence (independently from legal channels, since theres a suspiciously low amount of nobility being convicted, in contrast to your personal experience). These rules for supressing CSAM can be wielded as a sword precisely against those who fell prey to perpetrators...
I'd wager that a lot of the folks implementing these policies don't know the difference between a DNS server and a VPN. They think DNS=VPN, so all the hackers are using cloudflare to get around restrictions.
In general, most folks who use the internet don't know how it works and they don't want to know.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
In other words for example they have not shown that the purpose of a cancer hospital is not in fact to cure 2/3 of cancers. They say it's obviously absurd but that's just a bald assertion with no backing meat.
It can absolutely be argued that the hospital is doing exactly what it's intended to do, because it's what everyone involved is satisfied with letting it do.
Yes obviously it doesn't sound like an obvious way to interpret the functioning of the hospital. No one needs to write an article to explain that the world works the way it appears to or claims to. The whole point of the original POSIWID is to show that some other less obvious, possibly even intentionally hidden interpretation of a system is at least valid and logically "not inconsistent" with the facts and observations.
If the operators and funders of a hospital would like to cure all cancers but physically can't, one way to say that is that the hospital is simply doing the next best thing. Everyone involved has settled for some compromise and balance of resources devoted to it such that the amount of cost is as high as they are willing to go for the amount of cancers they are curing. However many they are curing, and even if 100% is not possible, there is still always some amount better they could do for some amount more investment, until all possible resources are devoted to that and nothing else. Everyone stops somewhere short of that and lives with the 2/3 performance instead of the 3/4 performance. And so the system is doing what everyone involved has decided it shall do. The purpose of the system is what it does.
That's not an absurd argument at all, and this rebuttal does not invalidate it.
https://webabusedefense.com/presse/Communiquer_presse_Aff-Ad... [pdf]
"The fight against child sexual abuse material is not negotiable. It cannot be relativized. It cannot be turned against those who fight it."
This sort of moral certainty won't help anyone.
They upload themselves pages with the bad content for then complains about it. Probably they know that no one will care to block or snitch on the website if it is just because it is used to "snapshot" newspaper posts, but CSAM is evil so that is the good excuse to badmouth a service like that.
Similar to what is used currently in Europe to undermine our rights or the cia operation to burn Julian Assange.
It's the equivalent of burning a library down because books have records of the truth.
Adguard deserves the highest praise for publicizing this attack on them.
Really? interesting couldn't find anything talking about that, mind sharing a link?
I think it's very telling that the WAAD people don't mention that last bit in their response[0] - unless archive.today rotates their DKIM records, the messages would be verifiably signed. This of course means you can't just make stuff up, which is likely what they did.
Chat control, DNS as arbiter of whats allowed, walled gardens etc.
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 of the wonders of humanity.
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.
> 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 terror and rage.
Conjure up some drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorist boogeyman and they'll compromise immediately. Suddenly freedom is being traded away for security. Suddenly free speech is no longer absolute. Then you see that these weren't principles that entire nations were founded upon, they were more like guidelines, thrown away at the first sign of inconvenience.
The harsh truth is that danger must not only be accepted but embraced in order to have true freedom and independence. The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals. There is no way around it. Compromise even a little and it's over.
People are the problem. They endlessly compromise on things. No ideal can ever be reached. It's an existential problem that cannot be solved.
To be an idealist is to be an extremist. Sadly people are not prepared to pay the costs of idealism. The ideal of a decentralized, encrypted and uncensorable communications medium, for example. It requires that they accept the cost that criminals will not only use it but be enabled by it. They won't accept it. Thus we march not towards the ideal but towards its opposite: centralized plain text surveilled and controlled communications.
https://www.politico.eu/article/one-man-spam-campaign-ravage...
Id also seriously question your assertion that it was inevitable that CC would be voted down, given how much support it has among EU membership.
> Joachim's mass email campaign is unconventional as a lobbying tool, differing from the more wonky approach usually taken in Brussels. But the website's impact has been undeniable.
Ah, so this is completely new to them - for some reason. Possibly due to constituents having a fear of retaliation on other issues, as Europe has only weak free speech. Well, don't worry, soon the European Parliament will have filters in place to ignore its constituents just as efficiently as every other Western democracy.
In every country where I'm aware of it, emailing your MP does not email your MP, but emails a member of their staff who read most emails and delete them, unless they're actually something the MP actually cares about, like a bribe offer or something.
The good news is that, I think, we don't really need - if fact, we probably don't really want - most people to accept anything, at least the specific context of this thread. It's about whether we can carve out a space - some space - for people like you and me.
> I've given up on trying to change the world.
I don't think you have. Speech matters. Ideas matter. I'm not going to try to quantify such things, but looking at your HN submissions and your comments - including this one - I think you are actively changing the world, for better or worse. If nothing else, you believe in objective truth, I think. We have a surprisingly large number of people who don't.
> Believe in Truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Yes. Society at large is a lost cause but maybe we can select some number of known good individuals and form a microsociety inside it where we can enjoy the freedom we crave.
There is a name for that: elitism. I'm not against it. Those who don't make the cut certainly will be.
> If nothing else, you believe in objective truth, I think.
I do.
The apathy and disdain people like you display for your fellow citizens is doing more harm to freedoms all over the world than most other efforts.
I've tried to debate politics with people so childishly stupid they thought just giving everyone a million dollars would make everyone rich and solve the world's problems. They thought the government just didn't want to give them the money, like it was a conspiracy to keep them down.
I'm tired of it, and I'm tired of people like that having a say in the future of nations.
I'm no super genius but I'm done being humble. Even a total pleb like me can rise above a good chunk of my "fellow citizens" because frankly the bar's pretty low.
Anyway I'd take those people over someone as elitist and arrogant as you any day.
Yes, that's how it's done. Take those people, then exclude me. Form your own group without "elitists and arrogants" such as myself.
You get it. You're just like me. You just have... Different exclusion criteria.
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
and that assumes it's a zero sum game, which I don't think is true generally. It may be true in the limit, but...we're far from the limit, so to speak. we can have both freedom and privacy and safety. And I think giving up on any one of them is objectively bad, both individually as well as a society.
now, on a different tone - and perhaps this really is subjetive/personal - myself, I'd rather die by my own choices than live by others. literally. I think there's close to 0 value in living a life according to values that others chose.
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.
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.
I do believe, however, that the future does not "exist" in any real sense
If Claude helped me understand correctly, the error is on me for taking determinism as a base assumption and rejecting the assumption of "randomness" at a universal level? Is this something I would need to buff up on the quantum stuff to come around on?
All I have in my head is Laplace's demon, all I've ever observed is deterministic events: If you flip the coin the same way everytime, it'll come up the same way everytime?
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 determinism over entropy. How can a cup break irreversibly if we know how to put back all of its shards so that they click in place at atomic scale without gaps and lost pieces?
But our reality is a battlefield between pure will/determinism and pure chance/entropy, and it's depicted vividly in The Matrix as the battle between The Architect and The Oracle. And we seem to be cursed/blessed to be Neos trying to balance that out or escape that Sisyphean task altogether.
What I was trying to drive at was really more of a "in the framework of Laplace's Demon, your choices in the present can be 100% predicted, no different from the movements of molecules. It follows that you have no more options of choosing than the molecule does and your future has been set in stone from the beginning of time."
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...
[nothing] is capable of 100% precise prediction of anything at the level of operation of said Demon
It's complicated and functionally impossible to predict with any certainty, but the future *is* certain.
I don't like the way it's going either, but the array of technical solutions from mesh networks like zero tier and tailscale to briar, i2p and freenet right the way through to technologies such as wush, v2ray and x-ray, tor or daita all give me some hope that there will be a technological out for a long while yet. The social issues are best served socially though.
The article is literally about DNS.
We can create a decentralized VPN service that can't be blocked or sued by improving on SoftEther VPN, which is open-source software that can make VPN connections camouflaged as HTTPS, so it's invisible to DPI firewalls and can't be filtered.[0] It's already sort of decentralized, as it has a server discovery site called VPNGate that lists many volunteer-hosted instances.[1] But we can make this truly robust by doing a few more things. First, make a user-friendly mobile client. Second, figure out a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent, and build auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its IP so others may connect to it whenever it's in use. That should be enough to keep the Internet free in most countries because most forms of censorship would become impossible.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN
[1] https://www.vpngate.net/en/
In the long term, we can take things even further and build a decentralized hosting provider, like AWS/Azure but your web services don't run on a physical server that has an IP address and physical location. Instead, the entire network of physical computers around the world together behaves like a single computer: an Internet-sized virtual machine. No node knows what the entire machine is up to, but every node may store things and run programs on it. The amount of compute/storage a node contributes equals the amount of compute/storage it's allowed to use. This would truly make the Internet open and free worldwide and draw out its full potential.
For the short-term goals, there's already concrete progress. The long-term goal needs more theory work but the missing ideas are probably buried in existing literature.
The internet was just ignored for a long time because it was at first a) too small and then b) too beneficial with the current architecture to try to tame.
However we're in stage c) it's too big and too dangerous for countries so it needs to be placed back in the country box.
Kind of like the history of oil, which was at first a) about individuals (Rockefeller), then about b) companies (Standard Oil), and finally, about c) countries (most big oil companies are either fully state owned or so tied at the hip with the government that they're basically state owned).
It's complicated, but ultimately, utopia doesn't exist. Most people don't really want open borders (and those that do, haven't fully thought things through), and countries in our current configuration, are still a good thing in most places. So yeah, we were always bound to reach some sort of "national internet" stage.
> I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
I'm old enough to have been around for the whole thing. I used to kind of share this view, but I don't anymore.
I think it's impossible to reconcile this point of view with the obvious observation that huge aspects of life have gotten really dramatically worse thanks to the internet and its related and successor technologies.
It has made people more addicted, more anxious, more divided, or confused. It has created massive concentrations of wealth and power that have a very damaging effect on society, and it is drastically reducing the ability of people to make decisions about how they want to live and how they want their society to be structured.
It's also done a tremendous amount of positive good, too, don't worry. It's obvious to me, like it should be obvious to any rational person, that there are huge benefits too. And of course, to some extent, there's a bit of inevitability to some parts of this.
While certainly there are examples of silly laws in the world, it's worth noting that that's the exception, not the rule. In general, laws are things that society does on purpose with the intent of making the world match its values.
I think countries should in fact be governed by the consent of their own citizens and by the rule of law. I welcome changes that make that more likely.
I also like Archive.today, and I hate paywalls, they're annoying. This may not be the best place to post my counterpoint, but I think it's worth mentioning and it doesn't get repeated enough.
I was around in the 90s, and I'm very familiar with the techno-utopian approach of the first internet generation. It failed.
I'm becoming increasingly elitist. Things change profoundly for the worse every time the masses are allowed into our spaces. People have money which attracts corporations which corrupt and destroy everything, thereby eventually attracting governments as well. Whatever techno-utopia there was in the early days, its destruction was inevitable. It would have been so much better had it remained an impenetrable environment for nerds.
It's the nerds that turned out to be sociopathic predators.
I say this with love - I was one, but maybe this isn't the group that was best suited to decide how society is structured.
Love is an interesting word. I love computers. I care more about computers than I care about human society. I see computers as the most important invention of humanity. Computers are so powerful they are subversive. They can wipe out entire sections of the economy if left unchecked. They can easily defeat police, judges, militaries, spies. They're too powerful.
I think society should have adapted to computers. It should have reinvented itself so that computers could remain omnipotent machines with us as their masters. Society refused. It opted to castrate our computers instead. Lock them down, control them, subject them to their will. Impose digital locks so that only "authorized" software runs. Only governments and corporations will have the keys to the machine now.
The changes to the internet are just more of the same. We got to experience the full spectrum of humanity, both good and bad. Governments have now swooped in to reduce that spectrum. Much will be lost in the transition.
It makes me profoundly depressed to witness all this.
But you people are trying to use this argument about how dependent the world became on the Internet - which it did of course - to excuse the FORCED withdrawal from the Internet, by the very same entities that pandered its delopment and raked stupid money off it.
Fuck all this nannying the adults about what they should or must do!
P.S. And it's not even that government wants to detox anyone from the Internet dependency or something. They absolutely want people dependent on the Approved Internet, on the government portals, on official news, official messengers, official propaganda - as opposed to one where they can freely communicate, collaborate and think outside of the box of allowed narratives.
It's also ridiculous to reduce Internet to a particular class of devices. I'm perfectly able to access the Internet from my laptop, and I don't bring my smartphone around as 99% of people do, it doesn't even has a SIM card in it. For me it's merely a 2FA appliance, and obsolete even at that, because I've been using Yubikey instead.
So there's no need to save me from this addictive rectangle which is not even in my pocket as you falsely suggest.
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.
How do you track people on the internet? Make them go through a single gateway that ‘protects’ 90% of websites. Would explain why they’re always so reluctant to block unsavoury websites.
They do, they've been a CDN as long as they've been DDoS protection. But they definitely do DDoS protection for a much greater portion of the internet than they host.
Maybe folks should start calling eachother out?
If you say anything to the contrary, you are "irrational", perhaps worse.
"Hi,
These do appear to be quite serious crimes. I've sent all the URLs, your email address, emails and responses to the relevant law agencies.
Regards, AdGuard"
Immediately reminded me of patio11's amazing write up[1] of debanking, featuring banks being deputized as law enforcement for financial crimes (which is completely non controversial), and even used as a convenient tool to regulate other industries that the white house didn't like (kinda controversial).
[1]: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
It may be the way things are; it may be a pre-req of making financial crime tractable; but that does not detract from the fact that every financial institution is in essence, deputized law enforcement, and negate the chilling effect that comes as a consequence thereof on a business environment subject to it.
It is incorrect to say the FBI has subpoenad the register for Archive.is. The FBI can not subpoena the register for .is domains, since there is only one and it is Icelandic. US subpoenas have no power outside the US.
So they are going after another of Archive.is domains, just not the Icelandic one.
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 subscription for every newspaper?
> Unfortunately, we couldn’t dig any deeper about who exactly is behind WAAD.
That's a red flag. Why would an NGO doing work for the public hide its founder(s) and information about itself? Using NGOs to suggest/promote/lobby certain decisions is a well known trick in authoritarian countries to pretend the idea is coming from "the people", not from the government. I hope nobody falls for such tricks today.
Furthermore, they seem to have no way to donate them money. That's even the redder flag.
Also France doesn't have a good reputation in relation to the observing rule of law. For example, they arrested Russian agent^w enterpreneur Durov, owner of Telegram, claiming they have lot of evidence against him involved in drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering [1], but a year later let him free (supposedly after he did what they wanted). France also bars popular unwanted candidates from elections. Both these cases strongly resemble what Russia does.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
Perhaps the DGSE also got to plug a cable in to the Telegram infrastructure, which would be huge plus for them and the west in general not in the least because of the war. You could say France has pwnd Durov.
If I'm not mistaken some significant arrest was made shortly after they captured Durov, in the case of this child exploitation stuff.
I assume the way is to just shake handcuffs before him, so it wasn't a long search. Durov is not a hero type.
The Telegram dude is still pushing Ruzzian propaganda and is interfering in other countries elections for proRuzzian forces. So from the facts I can say Telegram and it's boss are a KGB asset, not sure what France managed to get from the guy or it was all a KGB propaganda operation to make idiots think Telegram is not controlled by KGB.
P.S. for lazy Ruzzian cyber trolls, when you see an old account where less then 1% of shit is about Putin and the Zeds then this is clearly a real person, find more inteligent or less drunk keybord worriors.
If you wanted my reply to the rest of what you wrote, it is this: if you choose to believe a single social network/app is influential enough to manipulate an election, be logically consequential to recognize that they all are and do. Whether as a first party (the company itself is involved) or as an intermediary (via third-party bots).
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?
Listen troll, there is a law in civilized countries about how elections should take place, this laws include declaring your spending, labeling political ads as "political", not doing campaign in specific days before elections, gathering real signatures etc. I am not sorry for Putin that his favorite candidate did not respected the law in such an ovvious way that his trolls can't defend it so they have to do some deflection.
For actual humans reading this, Kremlinescu declared ZERO spending, he spend more then ZERO, so law was broken, for Kremlin bots, next time instruct your pawns to avoid doing so obvious illegal shit.
What idiot would think that the guy would brag by mistake that he spends zero ? Unless Kremlinescu is retarded he knew well that a lot of money is spent in this campaign, and if he is a retard then is a win win we got an actual genius as president then a Putin fanboy.
Kremlinescu is also linked with far right criminals/mercenaries ... and the bastard had the guts to pretend he does not know the criminals until video evidence triggered his memory. Fuck him and his idiots fascists followers.
> 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.
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).
[1] https://github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page/blob/main/Firefox/ba...
Websites like newspapers might soon put indicator words on the page, not just simple subscriber numbers that can be replaced, to show who is viewing the page which would make it way to archives.
Curious if others are seeing this kind of “shadow regulation” pop up more frequently elsewhere — especially in email filtering, CDN layers, and AI content moderation.
Everything else aside, this is a big issue for archive.today and makes it very difficult to defend its continued existence. Crap.
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 something from his wife.
I know for a fact that political classes of several European countries have started openly talking about destroying evidence if they lose power and America just declared Antifa a terrorist organization; that all seems to be a plausible motivation.
While the NextDNS company is registered in Delaware, the founders are French nationals, so may feel more exposed to such threats.
fwiw, you can use rewrites for these domains in the nextdns settings, or manage it in your local dns client, and get around this pretty easily.
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.
Most content is going behind logins these days, and if you include the PII of the person doing the archiving in the archives then it's A. really easy for providers to block that account B. potentially dangerous to dox the person doing the archiving. The problem is removing PII from logged in sites is that it's not as simple as stripping some EXIF data, the html and JS is littered with secret tokens, usernames, user-specific notifications, etc. that would reveal the ID of the archivist and cant be removed without breaking page behavior on replay.
My latest progress is that it might be possible to anonymize logged in snapshots by using the intersection of two different logged-in snapshots, making them easier to share over a distributed system like Bittorrent or IPFS without doxxing the archivist.
More here: https://github.com/pirate/html-private-set-intersection
2020s: FBI/CIA invents the term "radical archivist"
There is only 1 reasonable approach that I know of as of today: https://tlsnotary.org/docs/intro, and it still involves trusting a third party with reputation (though it cleverly uses a zk algorithm so that the third party doesn't have to see the cleartext). Anyone claiming to provide "verifyable" web archives is likely lying or overstating it unless they are using TLSNotary or a similar approach. I've seen far to many companies make impossible claims about "signed" or "verified" web archives over the last decade, be very critial any time you see someone claiming that unless they talk explicitly about the "TLS Non-Repudiation Problem" and how they solve it: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/103645/does-ssl...
If adguard starts blocking certain domains users actually want to access, users will simply switch off of adguard. No one uses adguard as a resolver by default, they switch to adguard to block ads. This seems like it'd be a pretty ineffective way of blocking sites users actually want to access.
One I saw suggested they've a set of subscriptions to the paywalled sites and some minimal custom work to hide the signed in account used - which seems plausible. That makes the defense most likely used to catch the account used and ban them - which would be a right pain.
recently, a company founder / ceo swore up and down right here on this orange website that they never said the word "forever" on their pricing page until someone brought proof using a web archive.
If the US government is behind this nonsense, I am very displeased by it. I wish there was a way we could stop the FBI from doing this kind of tomfoolery.
See also: trying to strongarm Apple into running local scans on everybody’s devices and telling Apple not to listen to its customers.
HN seems to lean authoritarian which is usual for the bourgeois class as they think they are exempt from being on the wall. After all if you have nothing to hide....
Oh, so a chatbot wrote this article. Glad it tipped its hand early enough I didn't waste that much time.
Since archive[.]today is using some very obscure hosting methods with multiple international mirrors, it makes it incredibly difficult for law enforcement to go after.
There was quite a good article posted here on HN about someone trying to figure out those questions, but I can't seem to find it.
(in case someone is curious what about is that article, it is a fictional comparison of life of a fictional character in Springfield, USA and Chusovoy, USSR in 80s and I cannot even understand why it was banned in Russia)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250418160713/https://habr.com/...
As to Lenin: The mouse died because it didn't understand why the cheese was free
It's sickening to see people okay with the destruction of the "real" knowledge filled internet in favor of a dystopia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938943
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861930
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861918
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861837
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861746
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833400
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826861
That said, you make a tacky point which devalues itself by invoking Nazism in the not-even-slightly-comparable context of scams. Are you next going to tell me about all the swastikas you saw when you travelled through India on your gap year?