Comment by coppsilgold
18 hours ago
You don't even need active measures. If a publisher is serious about tracing traitors there are algorithms for that (which are used by streamers to trace pirates). It's called "Traitor Tracing" in the literature. The idea is to embed watermarks following a specific pattern that would point to a traitor or even a coalition of traitors acting in concert.
It would be challenging to do with text, but is certainly doable with images - and articles contain those.
You need that sort of thing (i.e. watermarking) when people are intentionally trying to hide who did it.
In the archive.today case, it looks pretty automated. Surely just adding an html comment would be sufficient.
If they use paid accounts I would expect them to strip info automatically. An "obvious" way to do that is to diff the output from two separate accounts on separate hardware connecting from separate regions. Streaming services commonly employ per-session randomized stenographic watermarks to thwart such tactics. Thus we should expect major publishers to do so as well.
At which point we still lack a satisfactory answer to the question. Just how is archive.today reliably bypassing paywalls on short notice? If it's via paid accounts you would expect they would burn accounts at an unsustainable rate.
Watch https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=1vuio0pswjnm7 they post AT-free recipes for many paywalls