Comment by pimlottc

16 hours ago

What obscure methods are they using?

I guess it might fall under a bulletproof hosting type of setup. [1] There have been many people investigating to try and figure out who owns & operates who is actually behind archive[.]today and how they're continuously able to bypass the paywalls of paid sites, continue operating with such large infrastructure with no apparent income source.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletproof_hosting

  • Isn't it just a question of pretending to be a search bot ? Sites will allow google bot to bypass the paywall so stuff gets indexed.

    • The owner must have subscriptions to these services. Some paywalls are absolute and it bypasses all of them with ease. I don't see it now but there was a time when archiving a reddit page showed the username that their bot was using.