Comment by m132
20 hours ago
It's a puzzling situation:
- The DDoS was certainly unethical and unneeded
- Although the blog post only shows an extremely one-sided version of the story by skipping straight to the threats, there are reasons to think that diplomacy has also failed terribly
- The website owner has all eyes of the "thought police" on them, and given the current political situation in Russia, it's more than likely they reside somewhere where it has real power; realistically speaking, who wouldn't be losing it?
- The blog post is preserving information that could aid further investigations even if purged from the original sources, and reveals non-OSINT information in the follow ups
- At the same time, it's, to say the least, hypocritical of the archive.today owner to attempt forcefully taking the original post down, when archive.today itself is an OSINT tool
I don't think there's a way to fairly untangle this mess anymore.
Hence, I'd focus on the possible outcomes: do we want archive.today taken down over this? Who would lose and who would benefit the most from this takedown?
Gyrovague here. As linked in the blog entry, you can view both sides of the email correspondence here: https://pastes.io/correspond
As for outcomes, I'm very much a bit player/spectator in this drama, nobody's going to be "taking them down" over DDOSing an obscure nerd blog.
If they do go down, it'll be the FBI or equivalent, and it will be publicly justified as some combination of "protecting the children" (cf. WAAD) and/or copyright violations.
> As linked in the blog entry, you can view both sides of the email correspondence here: https://pastes.io/correspond
Thanks, I must have missed this.
> [...] nobody's going to be "taking them down" over DDOSing an obscure nerd blog.
> If they do go down, it'll be the FBI or equivalent, and it will be publicly justified as some combination of "protecting the children" (cf. WAAD) and/or copyright violations.
Yes, this is exactly what I fear. That we might be playing into the hands of the greater evil by escalating a small, personal conflict.
> Do we want archive.today taken down over this?
I don't think that's on the table. I would say use this as your incentive to support archive.org, who has proven much more accountable. Archive.Today is weaponizing their traffic, and reducing traffic is the best way to deal with it. Vote with your feet.
I don't think these two are exactly equivalent.
Internet Archive is a registered non-profit organization. It is more trustworthy and accountable, but it cannot realistically stand against government-imposed censorship. We've seen this unfold before with Twitter and Meta, partly with Telegram.
Archive.today may be similar on the surface, but if you take a closer look, it's actually an underground "evil twin" that has all the right tools to publish information the governments and the largest of companies want silenced.
Ideally, there would be no such information in the first place. However, the reality is that this classification has only been broadened to cover more content since the invention of the Internet, regardless of which political parties are in power. The fact that the owner of Archive.today is chased by the FBI even though the website already blocks archival of the kinds of content all of us would unanimously find disturbing speaks for itself.
If you don't like Archive.org use something else, there's plenty of ways to archive something. I think the idea that the world's most powerful organizations are trying and failing to pursue this makes "Should we shut it down?" all the more ludicrous a question.
Internet Archive's trustworthiness took a hit when they waded into fact checking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32743325
There is a perception that the use of the archive by the HN community has some positive value for the archive.
But in fact:
1. HN uses a free service that someone else pays for.
2. HN abuses its paywall bypass function, which is not its main function, is not advertised (unlike 12ft).
3. HN creates legal problems for the archive by highlighting and framing the archive as a paywall-circumvention tool first.
4. HN promotes doxing.
Who would be more motivated in reducing traffic here?
> 4. HN promotes doxing.
Source:
archive.org supports DMCA. If you don't like some information in the Wayback Machine, you just have to send a form email and it will be removed from the Waybaeck machine.
archive.today/is/ph is adversarial. It archives things that don't want to be archived. That's why Trump's FBI is trying to unmask it.