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I don't really see how so many of these ended up in the wayback machine. My understanding is that they were supposed to seem like fairly unremarkable websites,

I don't really see how so many of these ended up in the wayback machine. My understanding is that they were supposed to seem like fairly unremarkable websites, but were built for basically one person. So it seems surprising that so many were visited by unrelated people. Is there a log of who instigated a wayback archive? Could they have been a different group doing what this person was? >Given that we cannot rule out ongoing risks to CIA employees or assets, we are not publishing full technical details regarding our process of mapping out the network at this time I guess it's a hard thing to rule out, but I certainly hope the CIA isn't still using a communication method broken more than a decade ago.

exikyut 3y ago
> Is there a log of who instigated a wayback archive? Could they have been a different group doing what this person was? Yes, IA now has a "About this capture" popdown at the far right of the injected toolbar. The first ever capture and some of the subsequent captures for one of the sites was from Alexa Crawls, provided by Alexa Internet; some later captures were from a "Survey Crawl" based on "a list of every host in the wayback machine". So this is basically automated, long-tail vacuum cleaning work.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  I apparently misunderstood how the wayback machine worked. I thought it only archived pages that a user requested, and most pages end up archived due to people with the browser add-on installed to archive every page they visit. Thanks to both people that cleared up my mistake, it has always seemed they had much stronger coverage than they should for my mistaken view of how it worked.
  - emikulic 3y ago
    You're thinking of archive.is
- cirosantilli 3y ago
  I wonder how Alexa found those domains in the first place. Were there links to them, or did it use some kind of DNS dump?
bombcar 3y ago
The wayback machine is also a crawler; it will (or did) archive things based on crawling around the Internet sniffing things out. You can request it to archive a page at a time, but for many things it will have already found it.

exikyut 3y ago

> Is there a log of who instigated a wayback archive? Could they have been a different group doing what this person was? Yes, IA now has a "About this capture" popdown at the far right of the injected toolbar. The first ever capture and some of the subsequent captures for one of the sites was from Alexa Crawls, provided by Alexa Internet; some later captures were from a "Survey Crawl" based on "a list of every host in the wayback machine". So this is basically automated, long-tail vacuum cleaning work.

boomboomsubban 3y ago
I apparently misunderstood how the wayback machine worked. I thought it only archived pages that a user requested, and most pages end up archived due to people with the browser add-on installed to archive every page they visit. Thanks to both people that cleared up my mistake, it has always seemed they had much stronger coverage than they should for my mistaken view of how it worked.
- emikulic 3y ago
  You're thinking of archive.is
cirosantilli 3y ago
I wonder how Alexa found those domains in the first place. Were there links to them, or did it use some kind of DNS dump?

bombcar 3y ago

The wayback machine is also a crawler; it will (or did) archive things based on crawling around the Internet sniffing things out. You can request it to archive a page at a time, but for many things it will have already found it.