21 ms·

FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is

• Projectiboga 11mo ago
  The FBI is attempting to unmask the owner behind archive.today, a popular archiving site that is also regularly used to bypass paywalls on the internet and to avoid sending traffic to the original publishers of web content, according to a subpoena posted by the website. The FBI subpoena says it is part of a criminal investigation, though it does not provide any details about what alleged crime is being investigated. Archive.today is also popularly known by several of its mirrors, including archive.is and archive.ph. The subpoena, which was posted on X by archive.today on October 30, was sent by the FBI to Tucows, a popular Canadian domain registrar. It demands that Tucows give the FBI the “customer or subscriber name, address of service, and billing address” and other information about the “customer behind archive.today.” “THE INFORMATION SOUGHT THROUGH THIS SUBPOENA RELATES TO A FEDERAL CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED BY THE FBI,” the subpoena says. “YOUR COMPANY IS REQUIRED TO FURNISH THIS INFORMATION. YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFINITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.” The subpoena also requests “Local and long distance telephone connection records (examples include: incoming and outgoing calls, push-to-talk, and SMS/MMS connection records); Means and source of payment (including any credit card or bank account number); Records of session times and duration for Internet connectivity; Telephone or Instrument number (including IMEI, IMSI, UFMI, and ESN) and/or other customer/subscriber number(s) used to identify customer/subscriber, including any temporarily assigned network address (including Internet Protocol addresses); Types of service used (e.g. push-to-talk, text, three-way calling, email services, cloud computing, gaming services, etc.)” -snip- Read more: https://www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to-unmask-owner-of-infamous-archive-is-site/ https://www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to-unmask-owner-of-infamou...
  • hrimfaxi 11mo ago
    > YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFINITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW. Is this actually a mere request, as in the receiver is _not_ required to avoid disclosure? Separately—can't believe tucows is still around!
    • righthand 11mo ago
      Well Tucows is Canadian so the FBI can take their “request” somewhere else.
    • mothballed 11mo ago
      Isn't the whole thing a request? The FBI has no power in Canada unless they go through Canadian legal channels, no? If I received a subpoena from a foreign sovereign I would just use it as toilet paper.
      • squarefoot 11mo ago
        Pretty sure if Tucows had been in the US, the "request" would have been a gag order or something alike.
      • bossyTeacher 11mo ago
        Until you travel to the US 10 years later for someone's wedding or what not completely forgetting about the matter and you end up arrested
        • deleted 11mo ago
          [deleted]
    • c22 11mo ago
      They probably cannot require this. They may be able to get you on interfering with their investigation if you disclosed with the intent of interfering. Probably adding this notice helps them prove you were aware of the potential to cause interference, at least. IANAL.
    • andrewmcwatters 11mo ago
      [dead]
  • yatopifo 11mo ago
    As a Canadian, I really hope Tucows is going to send a particularly nasty response to the FBI. Canada should never collaborate with any US authorities!
    • wikipedia 11mo ago
      > Canada should never collaborate with any US authorities! Cross-border collaboration is a good thing. Our agencies regularly collaborate to bring people who feel insulted and emboldened to account for their crimes. This works both ways. As someone who has dealt with media of me as a minor (~around 11/yo) from Omegle being shared across the internet, the role archivers play in keeping illegal content “alive” isn’t well recognized. Thankfully, the Internet Archive has a matured process to purge pages that host illegal content. We do not know what the investigation is for. All is up to speculation. Not all investigations are bad. Here is an example on archive.is. I submitted multiple complaints to NCMEC but didn’t get results. Germany, though, was able to get the archives purged. https://archive.is/https://ezgif.com/maker/* https://archive.is/https://ezgif.com/maker/* On the page, you will see: > In response to a request we received from 'jugendschutz.net' the page is not currently available. That page held many, many images of minors. It is good that it is gone. August 12, 2025 - Canadian Man Sentenced to 188 Months for Attempted Online Enticement of a Minor and Possessing Child Pornography [1] August 21, 2024 - Canadian National Extradited To The United States Pleads Guilty To Production Of Child Sex Abuse Material And Enticement Of Minors December 20, 2024 - Extradited Canadian National Sentenced To Life In Federal Prison for producing child sexual abuse material and enticement of a minor [3] [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/canadian-man-sentenced-188-months-attempted-online-enticement-minor-and-possessing https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/canadian-man-sentenced-... [2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/canadian-national-extradited-united-states-pleads-guilty-production-child-sex-abuse https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/canadian-national-extra... [3] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/extradited-canadian-national-sentenced-life-federal-prison https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/extradited-canadian-nat...
      • maerF0x0 11mo ago
        > Cross-border collaboration is a good thing IMO it's only a good thing when it's a good thing. There are plenty of reasons it could be a bad thing too. For example, Edward Snowden probably would have been hung by now if russia cross-border collaborated.
  • mystraline 11mo ago
    The term that Cory Doctorow has called these styles of stunts is: Felony contempt of business model. Turns out, our very user, Saurik, came up with this term! https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/ https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaki...
• superkuh 11mo ago
  "Infamous"? About as infamous as heise.de. Weird framing. Many people do not like the past being available for reference when they lie about in the future. And that's what this federal attack stems from. "who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"
  • Projectiboga 11mo ago
    I just posted an exerpt of the 404 article but decided to link the source.
  • aids_bomb 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • cyansmoker 11mo ago
    My thoughts exactly. This title is needlessly editorializing.
  • johnnienaked 11mo ago
    Why on earth did you get downvoted?
• PLenz 11mo ago
  https://archive.ph/XdQRp https://archive.ph/XdQRp
  • postexitus 11mo ago
    thank you!
• 55555 11mo ago
  https://archive.is/XdQRp https://archive.is/XdQRp
  • MurkyLabs 11mo ago
    how coincidental
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • prophesi 11mo ago
    I also resorted to using archive.is when I first visited the page so that I wouldn't need to agree to their data collection for personalization.
  • serial_dev 11mo ago
    So interesting that with this link, I saw the whole article is a couple paragraphs. With the original link, I gave up after the second ad that almost covered my whole screen on mobile. Too many ads are a terrible user experience that doesn’t let us read anything.
    • karel-3d 11mo ago
      I use Brave on iOS, it mostly works and blocks ads and cookie pop ups. (Sometimes it breaks some websites but it's trivial to disable the shields.)
    • pimeys 11mo ago
      Ublock Origin, disable javascript for that site, remember the decision. Problem solved.
    • styanax 11mo ago
      Something new I found - go to any link (news article) on commondreams.org in Firefox. Now use the Reader View button in your address bar - they've figured out how to hack Reader View to not show the content and only a beg screen for money.
• hrimfaxi 11mo ago
  The government can take down huge criminal networks on the darkweb but can't identify the owner of a clearnet site?
  • r721 11mo ago
    That owner is not so simple - I recall how they alleged in a Wikipedia discussion he(?) used some botnet or proxy network for adding archive.is mirror links to Wiki entries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
  • noident 11mo ago
    They can and they will. Filing a subpoena for information is a step in that process. If the WHOIS records are falsified they'll start looking at payment information.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  • tuhgdetzhh 11mo ago
    Since you refer to the darkweb. The gov has extensivley studied Tor and likely has zero day exploits for the Tor browser and operates a bunch of Tor relays. Given enough time and effort it is very much possible for state actors to identify Tor users. But unless you are a high profile gov target, Tor protects you well.
    • FuriouslyAdrift 11mo ago
      Tor was created by the US Navy.
      • rockskon 11mo ago
        And?
• seg_lol 11mo ago
  I thought this was common knowledge? Did they try googling it?
  • jameslk 11mo ago
    Maybe they ran into a paywall
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 11mo ago
    The thought to google it doesn't really have a chance to enter their head if they don't know about it.
• r721 11mo ago
  Related HN discussion from 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
• bgwalter 11mo ago
  That is very funny. "AI" corporations are funding a scraper to subvert paywalls: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45835090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45835090 The FBI should investigate the "AI" companies and also the demise of Suchir Balaji, a copyright whistleblower who according to a sloppy local police investigation committed "suicide" hours after being seen cheerfully collecting a doordash delivery on CCTV.
  • oytis 11mo ago
    AI provides shareholder value, while archive.is reduces shareholder value, and that's all that matters
    • jrockway 11mo ago
      I don't think it's even that abstract anymore. The AI companies donated to help Trump build a ballroom. archive.is didn't.
      • lifestyleguru 11mo ago
        I'm so confused by this power dynamics. So you can torrent movies just fine from Meta/Google office in Germany? No matter how you look at it, the White House has holes in the walls as in Idiocracy.
• yawnxyz 11mo ago
  ironic that archive.is itself has so many bot protections...!
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• oytis 11mo ago
  Nothing infamous about it. It's the only way to stay informed from diverse sources since proliferation of paywalls started
  • zhobbs 11mo ago
    And if no one pays for any of that content there will be zero ways to stay informed!
    • falcor84 11mo ago
      Information has existed long before the invention of money, and will outlive it.
    • dclowd9901 11mo ago
      Are there no ads on the site?
    • throw-qqqqq 11mo ago
      IMO it is a false dichotomy to equate piracy with theft like that. I think 90-99% of anything pirated (or accessed by bypassing paywalls etc) would just never be bought/paid-for if there was no alternative.
  • charcircuit 11mo ago
    Isn't paying to remove paywalls another way?
    • oytis 11mo ago
      If you are OK with getting your information from one or two sources - why not. You can also subscribe to a newspaper. But surely internet can do (and did until relatively recently!) better than that. Paywall epidemic is a recent phenomenon, internet media managed to exist before that.
• shevy-java 11mo ago
  We need to preserve data. The FBI is trying to kill data. We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge). Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.) Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.
  • baxtr 11mo ago
    I agree. Knowledge should belong to all of humanity. But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.
    • foofoo12 11mo ago
      Big corporations aren't humans.
      • exe34 11mo ago
        they are persons under US law.
        • JadeNB 11mo ago
          But US law isn't even the law of the world, let alone the definition of reality.
• clueless 11mo ago
  Is there a dump of all archive.is sites (similar to libgen dumps) in case it goes down, so it could be set back up again?
  • rzk 11mo ago
    If only archive.is would share a dump of its archives through torrents the way Anna’s Archive does — it’d make it much more resilient.
    • DaSHacka 11mo ago
      I don't know why all the archive sites don't share backups. The Wayback Machine and archive.is are the largest archive sites by far, and they don't share bulk downloads of the majority of the websites they catalog. They of course don't have to, but having something like Anna's Archive but for website history would be great.
      • vthriller 11mo ago
        My guess is the sheer amount of data that archive.org has, which means: - even higher costs associated with seeding archives (egress traffic, storage iops capacity required etc) - chances of finding a 3rd-party seed for arbitrary file would be pretty slim, which means seeding on your own most of the time, which would make this hardly any better than offering files over HTTP only. Anna's Archive, after all, is only an index.
• scandox 11mo ago
  While we're here how does archive.today bypass paywalls?
  • cheraderama 11mo ago
    I thought it just sees a full version for crawlers?
    • runjake 11mo ago
      Nope, see r721's comment above yours for how it purportedly works.
  • r721 11mo ago
    >What scraper or headless browser are you using? it works so well. >Before 2019 - PhantomJS, after - ordinary (not headless) Chromium/80 with few small patches. https://blog.archive.today/post/618635148292964352/what-scraper-or-headless-browser-are-you-using-it https://blog.archive.today/post/618635148292964352/what-scra... (2020) >Archive.today launches real browsers (not even headless) and tries to load lazy images, unroll folded content, login into accounts if prompted with login form, remove “subscribe our maillist” modals https://blog.archive.today/post/642952252228812800/people-often-compare-various-features-of https://blog.archive.today/post/642952252228812800/people-of...
    • scandox 11mo ago
      I get that it convincingly simulates a human but so do I (because I am a human) and I don't get through the paywall...
      • r721 11mo ago
        There are some tricks which work for different websites - for example, for NYT it's enough to manually clear nytimes.com cookies, FT used to work after click from twitter/x and so on. So I guess there is some set of heuristics.
• sharts 11mo ago
  this is a waste tax payer funds.
  • pavon 11mo ago
    This might not be about copyright. I generally avoid these mirror sites because they seem like the perfect opportunity for watering hole attacks. The challenge with a normal watering hole attack is that you have to control the site in question either by hacking or infiltrating it. Imagine however if you were able to act as a middle man to the most popular websites in the world, and people would voluntarily post links to your site all over the internet, including very valuable audiences (like HN). You would have free rein to selectively inject malware to just readers at targeted IP blocks, minimizing chances of detection because most users would never be served malware. The possibilities are endless, government espionage, corporate espionage, activists, political opponents. To be clear I have no reason to believe specific instances of these sites are malicious, but I would be shocked if black hats weren't trying to get into this space in general.
    • freedomben 11mo ago
      For sure, you shouldn't just trust whatever random mirroring site pops up (in fact, you probably should trust almost none of them), but archive.is has established themselves pretty credibly IMHO. At some point it could turn, but I don't think we should kill them now just in case they turn at some point. The fact that the FBI is involved, and given the insane amount of IP protection racket stuff going on, I think it's pretty highly likely this is all about copyright. I think the powerful interests care more about copyright than they do about most other things.
  • runjake 11mo ago
    Maybe, but the subpoena doesn't shed light on what they are being investigated for. It is only demanding information. The FBI could be investigating them for archive.today, they could be investigated because of that apparent botnet, they could be investigating them because some billionaire media mogul friend of the current POTUS is outraged at the loss of revenue. To the best of my knowledge, the reasons aren't public. Still, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be asking questions or expressing concern over this.
• teeray 11mo ago
  I pay subscriptions to some of these sites and still use archive.is on them because it is a more pleasant reading experience. No auth failures, no annoying popover windows begging me to subscribe to their dumb newsletter. Just the internet equivalent of a static piece of newsprint.
  • 93po 11mo ago
    ublock with annoyance filters also solves this
  • Scoundreller 11mo ago
    I used to do the same with Lynx but enough websites have now broken it.
  • riskable 11mo ago
    Is there any more annoying popup than the newsletter popup? I'd rather see a targeted ad than that BS. NO! I do not want your newsletter! I wouldn't even have an email address if it wasn't absolutely required to operate in society today. The less email I get, the better! Email is becoming like fax machines: An old, dated technology that refuses to die.
    • fuzzy_biscuit 11mo ago
      Physical feels that way to me sometimes. In the US, I get assaulted on a constant basis by mailers and ads for things I never expressed any interest in. Waste of time, waste of paper, waste of resources.
    • kevincox 11mo ago
      Personally I don't mind an offer to subscribe to the newsletter but Substack is way to aggressive. They show the prompt even before I have finished the article (How do I know if I want to subscribe?) and obscure the article (actively working against what they know what I am trying to do). So I now just immediately back out when I see that. I won't visit sites that are purposely harming the experience.
    • 11mo ago
• greatgib 11mo ago
  When there are a few simple nice things making our lives a little bit more bearable, there are always other zealous assholes desperate to ruin that. Here I speak about this site, but everyday we have new cases of that. Like "new tax on anything that starts to be popular" for France, or Google trying to kill our privacy and F-Droid by requiring all app devs to have attestation from them.
  • poolnoodle 11mo ago
    Or the Anna's archive DNS block in European countries...
    • BrandoElFollito 11mo ago
      I am on France, it works. I tried a few countries, it works. I even specifically used the ISP DNS, it works. If there is a block it is very timid.
      • poolnoodle 11mo ago
        In Germany it's actually blocked.
• lifestyleguru 11mo ago
  Copyright lobbyists and sport broadcasters, the ultimate overlords of the web.
• perihelions 11mo ago
  They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead? It's not even in their effective jurisdiction, if this indeed is a Russian national. Don't they have more important Russian crimes to investigate? I read there was a US government investigation tracking Ukranian children abducted by Russian forces, but supposedly there weren't enough resources [0] to sustain that. [0] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5333328/trump-admin-cuts-funding-for-program-that-tracked-ukrainian-children-abducted-by-russia https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5333328/trump-admin-cut...
  • yapyap 11mo ago
    The US gov doesn’t even care about copyright infringement, just in the cases where big companies are inconvenienced by it and it’s done by an individual / small company instead of a mega AI corp swallowing up all copyrighted content to vomit out their own spin on it through algorithms.
    • dmix 11mo ago
      Federal investigations tend to only go after big fish yes. The root problem is the IP laws that congress passed. There will always be large pressure on law enforcement from the industry if you give them that leash.
  • gverrilla 11mo ago
    there's no lordship because afaik there's no direct profit
  • Aurornis 11mo ago
    > They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead? The president’s pardons are not popular with the FBI and law enforcement. The FBI is not happy about doing all of the work to prosecute people only to have the president override it for political reasons.
    • nobodyandproud 11mo ago
• naIak 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• socket0 11mo ago
  Imagine tech journalists in 2025 not knowing what a canary is...
• 4cidBurn 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • edm0nd 11mo ago
    They are probably just using proxies to scrape from and not directly or knowingly using proxies supplied by botnets.
    • 4cidBurn 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      • BriggyDwiggs42 11mo ago
        Wait why should we have a problem with this?
        • deleted 11mo ago
          [deleted]
        • 4cidBurn 11mo ago
          [flagged]
          • BriggyDwiggs42 11mo ago
            Sorry im stupid
• butlike 11mo ago
  Never knew archive.is was run by a "masked man"
  • poemxo 11mo ago
    Why does he wear the mask?
• johnnienaked 11mo ago
  This is the way to defend the free spirit of the internet.
• system2 11mo ago
  Can they enforce DNS companies (ISP, cloudflare etc) to block these domains globally if they want to?
  • neuronexmachina 11mo ago
    Cloudflare's DNS actually hasn't worked with archive.today for >5 years, due to the site returning bad results in response to Cloudflare not sending EDNS subnet info. HN comment from someone at Cloudflare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702 > Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service. > 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. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We’re aware of real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was part of the motivation for the privacy and security policies of 1.1.1.1.
    • winkelmann 11mo ago
      This was fixed/changed at some point. I use Cloudflare's DNS and it works fine for me.
• dtagames 11mo ago
  While strangely unpopular here, Yasha Levine's[0] well documented premise is that the entire existence of the internet is designed for surveillance and content control, down to the chip level, and this is mandated and enforced through laws as well as more covert agreements. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-Internet/dp/1610398025 https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...
  • akomtu 11mo ago
    Techies really like to believe that they are building a bright future for humanity. Telling them that what they build is a high-tech concentration camp won't be received well.
    • supportengineer 11mo ago
      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
  • kmeisthax 11mo ago
    It's strangely unpopular because it's wrong in the one place techies care about: the details. In broad strokes, it's true to say that the Internet was created as a surveillance and control tool. But this was not a big design up front with those goals as built-in capabilities. There's nothing in TCP/IP you can point to and say, "yes, this is the surveillance bit", or "yes, this is the government control bit". "Down to the chip level" is just plain wrong. Yes, you could argue that the Internet was enabling those things, but that's true of all communications technology, if not just the basic concept of human socialization[0]. And, in practice, if the US had actually intended for the Internet to be a surveillance and control tool, it was sure as shit really fucking bad at making use of it. The only country that actually realized it needed to censor the Internet to maintain cultural/social hegemony was China, which is why they got into network censorship early. By the time America realized it wanted that level of control it had to outsource the wetwork to creative industry and advertising companies. [0] Most neurotypical people fail to recognize this.
• neilv 11mo ago
  > There are also indications that the operator(s) are based in Russia. That's long been my assumption. What I haven't known was whether this was good Russian people (culturally valuing literature and intellect) wanting to be able to access articles that they can't afford. Nor whether it was or could become something sketchier (e.g., feeding spy databases, or one nice Chrome zero-day and strategic timing away from compromising engineering workstations at most US tech companies where an employee reads HN). But what actually bothers me about the misc `archive.*` sites is how HN routinely uses them, for US tech company workers to circumvent paywalls for struggling journalism organizations. This piracy practice seems to have the unofficial blessing of the US tech investor firm that runs and moderates HN. Besides whatever laws this is breaking, subjectively, it feels to me like crossing an ethical line, and also (economically) like punching down.
  • miohtama 11mo ago
    The problem with the paywalls is that everyone offers a subscription. If you want to read a single article you do not want to subscribe to some US newspaper. x402 solves this.
    • layer8 11mo ago
      X402 doesn’t solve this, because the publishers don’t want to sell you just a single article.
      • Ethee 11mo ago
        Just because they don't 'want' to, doesn't mean it's not a good solution. Clearly they're not getting me to pay for their whole site subscription so why not just sell me the article? The biggest issue with most of these services is the lack of consumer 'ease' by which the creator can actually get paid. It's the same reason why I'm seeing all my friends go back to piracy, it was nice when we had a consumer convenient place to consume our content. Just look at Steam, it's easier than ever to go pirate the majority of games, but my Steam library just keeps getting bigger. I'm not against buying things, I'm against shitty services.
  • 11mo ago
• layman51 11mo ago
  It is pretty sad that this is happening and that it apparently is at risk of just disappearing soon. I understand there are a lot of ethical concerns with that site, but if I use like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to try to save some specific documentation pages for certain proprietary software, it absolutely fails to actually save the content. So then it is just a bit more difficult to save a particular knowledge base article before it might get rewritten or updated.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
  One can only imagine the sharing and reading histories the operator has accumulated on the people using it. No restrictions on how the operator can use that data Archive.today is very popular with HN commenters
  • miohtama 11mo ago
    They don't collect any personal information - one of the reasons why it is so popular.
    • mmooss 11mo ago
      How do you know?
    • layer8 11mo ago
      How do you know? One’s IP address counts as PII.
  • pona-a 11mo ago
    What histories? Does archive.is take your email, phone, credit card, and passport pic when you want to read anything? The most there is is just an IP address in the server logs, for most users, rotated by their ISP on regular basis, easily obscured with a VPN. This need to make IP-infringement sound ominous by invoking some ill-defined spy plot is a tired cliche.
    • mmooss 11mo ago
      There are many mechanisms, widely used, to aggregate information from many sources into a profile of you, and using your IP as an identifier isn't hard. Many lawsuits find their targets based on IP addresses, for example. > easily obscured with a VPN I think we can expect that commercial VPNs are compromised, at least by intelligence services. Imagine you opened a bar and advertised, 'dissidents come here to drink in privacy'. I'm sure you'd attract others too to an obviously target-rich environment.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• phendrenad2 11mo ago
  Someone should make a site like archive.is that runs the saved page through an LLM to summarize the main points, and perhaps extract a few critical quotes (unfortunately, at the LLM's discretion, but better than nothing). The law is their greatest enemy.
  • mirekrusin 11mo ago
    ...as markdown please.
  • nondrool 11mo ago
    No, nobody should. Don't know why any trust the gossip slop bots given the extra work required. Pretty brave to trust another word guessing bot when its unable to stop making stuff up. Might want to ask it about Smith-Mundt 2012. Bill says discern, a lot, for a reason.
  • toofy 11mo ago
    i understand the initial inclination, but leaving our libraries worth of historical data at the whims of our tech monarchs seems like a bad idea. we know for absolute fact they’ll remove or alter data to entirely change answers. we _know_ they’ll do this.
    • phendrenad2 11mo ago
      The idea is to archive the output of the LLM. How are they going to change that?
• neilv 11mo ago
  Looks like `archive.is` is currently using reCaptcha. So Google might be able to figure out and tell the FBI who runs it. (If not by data around the registration, then by data around accesses to the site that seem to be by a developer of it, coupled with their cross-site tracking data.) I've also seen Cloudflare similarly in the loop, and they have similar cross-site tracking data. Lesson: The same third-party tech surveillance companies to which you sell out all your visitors, can also violate you.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • foresto 11mo ago
    Coincidentally, their adoption of Google CAPTCHA (along with requiring javascript) is why I stopped using archive.today. I don't particularly want either of those entities executing mystery code in my browser, or on my computer at all. Helping Google to collect records of my reading habits is also unappealing.
  • pabs3 11mo ago
    I hear it isn't actually reCaptcha, just made to look like it.
    • pingiun 11mo ago
      You can easily check this. It's an iframe of recaptcha.net, loaded in via a gstatic.com javascript file. So it is an actual reCaptcha
• syawin 11mo ago
  I will be devastated if this site gets taken down. I subscribe to pinboard.in for personal website bookmarking but even that is not 100% guaranteed to successfully cache a copy of the page.
• danso 11mo ago
  The subpoena cites the following statute as authorization: "(1)(A) In any investigation of (i)(I) a Federal health care offense; or (II) a Federal offense involving the sexual exploitation or abuse of children, the Attorney General; or (ii) an offense under section 871 or 879, or a threat against a person protected by the United States Secret Service under paragraph Secret Service determines that the threat constituting the offense or the threat against the person protected is imminent" One of the agents named in the subpoena appears to have previously worked on child exploitation cases years ago: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-6039/245948/20221107142550118_Cert%20Petition.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-6039/245948/202...
  • _aavaa_ 11mo ago
    Now that might be an interesting angle. 1. Put up CSAM on your unlisted domain briefly. 2. Archive page and delete site. 3. Send people archive link.
    • r721 11mo ago
      I think owner mentioned in a blog post (or on twitter?) this is indeed happening, but I forgot the exact wording to google it. UPD Found this by googling "site:blog.archive.today abuse": https://blog.archive.today/post/117011183286/yesterday-i-did-not-disclose-the-page-which https://blog.archive.today/post/117011183286/yesterday-i-did... (2015)
    • DebtDeflation 11mo ago
      That seems like something that should be handled with a simple takedown request and those behind archive.is would almost certainly comply. 99.999% of people using archive.is are using it to bypass news article paywalls nothing more. Which, if we're honest, is the real reason why the FBI is going after them.
      • serial_dev 11mo ago
        Personal anecdote but I almost never use these archive sites to bypass paywalls. I only use it when I want to see how establishment news sites somehow sometimes accidentally tell the truth, then, when they get the call, they try to purge their original reporting. Again, it might be my personal bias, but in my opinion, this is the main reason they are going after them. Because these websites let people prove the hypocrisy and the lies.
• joshmn 11mo ago
  As someone who has been the target of an FBI investigation for what was effectively criminal copyright infringement (later arrested and did time in prison), my only takeaway is that this, if anything, should just be a civil suit just like so many other similar cases of copyright issues. In my personal experience, the priorities of the FBI are typically highly politically motivated. The exceptions are if you’re doing something seriously icky, or doing fraud that deceives people. For those interested in what’s reported and what actually happens, I’ve made some comments on my case and my experience here: https://prison.josh.mn https://prison.josh.mn
  • Bayko 11mo ago
    Just here to say that's a banger of an url prison josh
  • redox99 11mo ago
    That was a great read
  • yreg 11mo ago
    I don't get it. You are linking an article which just says that you've deleted the original article. Here's your actual account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 edit: apparently also here: https://prison.josh.mn/self https://prison.josh.mn/self The wording of the landing page makes it sound (at least to me!) like the content is no longer there.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    • causal 11mo ago
      I was confused at first too - the story is in sections accessed at the top
  • jeanlucas 11mo ago
    >There's a certain freedom in owning your story publicly. People can't weaponize what you've already made peace with. I think that's what I'm motivated to do here. Really nice. It also builds some credibility currency, the reputation economy is not as punitive in your case as I thought it would be.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• dustractor 11mo ago
  A certain country is trying to scrub the internet of evidence for its war crimes.
  • cestith 11mo ago
    It could be for something far more petty, like covering up speaking gaffes. When you give petty image-obsessed people a lot of power, they’ll use it for petty, image-preserving reasons.
  • clydethefrog 11mo ago
    I hope someone once does a deep dive when archive.org was taken down for a few weeks by hackers from a "pro-Palestinian" group. It felt like a black propaganda attack, especially with the very tame videos they shared on social media about the crimes their enemy committed (videos of buildings being blown up instead of innocent children).
• wkat4242 11mo ago
  We can't lose that site. Hacker news can't exist without it in this day and age of paywalls.
• umrashrf 11mo ago
  What is that FBI wants to hide but not making it public and why?
• umrashrf 11mo ago
  Btw their leadership names are listed on their website
• klipklop 11mo ago
  FBI wants to remind everyone that only US mega-cap companies can scrape the entire internet, not share the data, use it to train AI models and then charge people to use chatbots that use this 'laundered' data. Anybody else attempting to do this is a criminal in their eyes and must be punished.
  • scrps 11mo ago
    Archive should just rebrand as an AI start up then offer an 'llm' that is suspiciously 'over-trained' and happens to spit out the site you query exactly... Copyright infringement? Nay! Over-training! "A fix is coming soon™!"
    • HPsquared 11mo ago
      See NYT vs OpenAI
      • attisday 11mo ago
        Not just that... they want to control and erase history, so they fully control the narrative. Same as the Roman Empire did with the crusades and burning of books.
        • daymanstep 11mo ago
          I thought the crusades came after the end of the Roman Empire
          • hearsathought 11mo ago
            The roman empire ( eastern portion anyways ) lasted until the ottoman turks took them out in the 1400s. So the crusades definitely happened during the roman empire's existence.
            • SauciestGNU 11mo ago
• duxup 11mo ago
  We're pardoning fraudsters left and right who bribe the president. But archive.is ... that people use to read and be informed about the world around them, better get that guy.
  • glonq 11mo ago
    Exactly. Now that the facade of being a country with integrity and equality is thoroughly shattered, good luck getting public support for shutting down a website that lets people read news for free. Shit's on fire yo; we got bigger problems than that.
  • maerF0x0 11mo ago
    IMO this is more an indictment of the president being able to pardon (any president, not just current one). IMO the president should, at best, be an additional appeals round. (But probably just not involved in the Judicial because separation of powers is good)
  • burnt-resistor 11mo ago
    They didn't pay the bribe or tickle the diapered royal pink starfish properly. The Just Us system operates on the principle of favoritism with selective privilege/retribution rather than consistent fairness. They're perfectly fine having the DNI being a Russian mole and 47 rolling out the red carpet for a sanctioned war criminal. In this day and age, MAANG, lacking integrity and values, bet on flattery and bribery as business expenses to ensure favorable treats instead of being punished.
  • dmix 11mo ago
    The US gov isn't a monolith. We don't know where the pressure came from or when the investigation started.
    • nerdponx 11mo ago
      Follow the money
• mirekrusin 11mo ago
  FBI could just create Great America Wall and block it, what's the problem?
  • DANmode 11mo ago
    Archive everything you can in Chinese, while you still can, if you think the folks over there may have posted anything worth you reading…
• decimalenough 11mo ago
  > Another private investigation from 2024 comes to a different conclusion. It names a software developer from New York as the alleged operator. According to this investigation, following the trail to Eastern Europe proved to be a red herring. Any pointers to what this "private investigation" is? The other linked blog pointing to Russia (or at least a Russian) seems pretty convincing: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...
  • oskarkk 11mo ago
    I think it refers to this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M6PMQrehmeuRU_KDd_PTKsTtVNNB3bYl/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M6PMQrehmeuRU_KDd_PTKsTtVNN... It doesn't seem very convincing in its conclusions, but has some interesting information nonetheless. I searched for some info on this doc, and it seems that its author really did hire some private investigators, I even found gofundme for it and places where the author asked for help in the early stages of their investigation. It seems they were trying to find the website owner because he hadn’t responded to requests to delete some personal things archived by a prolific stalker.
    • decimalenough 11mo ago
      > Registering with a false name on who.is would mean taking the risk of having domain names cut off, which is not compatible with the desire to set up a long-term project, so there is a strong chance that Denis PETROV is the real name of the owner. This is "Satoshi Nakamoto is Satoshi Nakamoto" levels of stupid, and clueless on so many levels that I think we can pretty safely dismiss the entire theory.
• boringg 11mo ago
  Wait is archive.is a bad website to go to?
  • themafia 11mo ago
    Using FBI activity as a proxy for "good" or "bad" associations is folly.
• DeathArrow 11mo ago
  https://archive.ph/FEcEi https://archive.ph/FEcEi
• laurex 11mo ago
  And this very news site's settings are "Data processing by advertising providers including personalised advertising with profiling - Consent required for free use," funnily enough
• 8cvor6j844qw_d6 11mo ago
  Uh I hope for the best, some websites opted-out of archive.org, so archive.is is my alternative.
• PostOnce 11mo ago
  I notice the iamadamdev paywall bypasser extension was also taken down with a DMCA request. Mirror https://github.com/nikolqyy/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/nikolqyy/bypass-paywalls-chrome Let's build and share more and better tools to help ensure poor kids are allowed to learn. Information, knowledge, and education do not belong only to those with money.
  • kristofferR 11mo ago
    Development is continuing here, the link you gave is just an old mirror: https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
    • PostOnce 11mo ago
      Thanks, wikipedia has more info and good links to related stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean see also esp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12ft#Alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12ft#Alternatives
• spelk 11mo ago
  >According to this, Archive.today uses a botnet with changing IP addresses to circumvent anti-scraping measures. Archive.today uses Tor exit nodes when all of its main server IPs are blocked, so I believe this to be a disingenuous claim.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• jMyles 11mo ago
  I'm concerned that, even here on HN, we are underestimating both the magnitude of this looming conflict and also its inevitable conclusion. The internet is bigger than you and me, and it's bigger than computers. It is an evolutionary force. It is not going to be stopped, and certainly not by states whose popularity and authority are waning so rapidly. Moreover, the internet keeps as its core function the proclivity to copy and store bytes, and from this very simple mechanism emerges a large set of tools and norms that supplant nearly all of the ways that nation states perpetuate power. What we desperately need are the elder statesmen and women to stand up and soberly see the writing on the wall, and gracefully deprecate the systems of which they will soon lose control, starting with nuclear weapons. I don't believe this has to end in violence or acrimony of any kind. But we have run out of time to act like petulant children, crying that somebody took our empire away. Very soon (ie, in the next couple centuries, maybe sooner), a few small nation states will adopt frameworks of zero IP, allowing all the content of the internet to be housed there, and from there, accessed by the entire planet. Some other nation states may attempt some kind of embargo or sanctions, but these will obviously fail, just as the attempts by Russia and China to censor the internet within their borders have failed (and are failing with greater volume with each passing day). And before you cry that adoption in China is too low to support this conclusion, consider that the work to resist the GFW has begat some of the best networking tools in the world, with rapidity of evolution increasing, not decreasing. Even if fear and violence can stem adoption for a few decades or even centuries, the toolchain continues to grow and will tip the scales over sufficiently long time scales. Let's not let this become a world information war. Let's install peace now while it's still easy to do. Let's dispense with IP and live in a world of joyous open access to information.
• yakov5776 11mo ago
  not sure what's taking the FBI so long, to me it seems obvious: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M6PMQrehmeuRU_KDd_PTKsTtVNNB3bYl/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M6PMQrehmeuRU_KDd_PTKsTtVNN...
  • dmix 11mo ago
    Surprised he's American. I hope he finds refuge but there's not many places that either don't have strong IP laws or don't have US extraditions.
  • Stagnant 11mo ago
    I took the time to read that document a while back and it almost certainly isn't the correct guy. At the very least it provides 0 evidence other than concluding that "he must be the guy" due to his name, country of origin and programming background.
    • WatchDog 11mo ago
      I’m not certain either way, but part of the document tries to make a big deal about some GitHub profiles having the “arctic code vault archive” badge, and implying that has something to do with running an archive website. Pretty much anyone who has made any kind of commit to an open source project has that badge.
      • bstsb 11mo ago
        read the same PDF a year or so back when someone spammed it across the archive.is blog, laughed when i got to that bit - it's pretty clear the person writing it doesn't know anything about development edit: it's incredibly naive of them to immediately trust the WHOIS results. i can say from experience that these are never checked
    • jorams 11mo ago
      Yeah I just read through it and it presents absolutely no useful evidence. They establish that there's a developer in the US called Denis Petrov. They establish that someone involved with archive.today is often referred to as Denis Petrov. Then they make some weird leaps to conclude that they must be the same person. A quick web search suggests Denis Petrov is not at all a unique name. Just because on of them wrote a somewhat feminist thought on a blog in 2004 and another forked a... let's call it "satirically feminist" project on GitHub does not in any way suggest they are the same person.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• Alex2037 11mo ago
  I doubt this has anything to do with copyright law. I'm certain it has everything to do with certain things needing memoryholing and archive.* operators' lack of compliance.
• beautifulfreak 11mo ago
  News aggregator The Drudge Report recently started using archive.is links to articles. That might have angered some publishers.
• crumpled 11mo ago
  Someone at archive needs to prepare a torrent file right away
• zaidf 11mo ago
  Dumb question: why do news websites have such a hard time keeping users logged in? Like I can go an entire year without getting logged out of gmail. But can't go more than a few days before getting logged out of news websites. I have subscribed to news sites and still use something like archive.is because it is faster than my paid experience.
• rkagerer 11mo ago
  Without the popups, care of the target: https://archive.ph/FEcEi https://archive.ph/FEcEi
• stefankuehnel 11mo ago
  Just a note: the White House also uses archive.ph. Search for “Americans are spending like never before: Retail sales are booming — up 5% over last year, far outpacing inflation — as Americans spend in record amounts.” [1] The phrase “up 5%” links directly to archive.ph. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/09/the-economy-is-back-on-track-under-president-trump/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/09/the-economy-is-b...
  • patcon 11mo ago
    But what reason might the whitehouse have to deprive reuters of traffic in such a petty way? /s
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  • xwolfi 11mo ago
    How did YOU find that out ?
    • kakacik 11mo ago
      You are asking dangerous questions my friend :) (yeah pretty impressive catch, maybe some llm-assisted cross-scan of gov sites)
      • Cthulhu_ 11mo ago
        Why would it be LLM-assisted when maps of what sites link where are part of the core WWW infrastructure? Google made a trillion dollar business out of that.
        • deleted 11mo ago
          [deleted]
        • jldugger 11mo ago
          Once upon a time link: would make short work of this query, but I gather the index is no longer queryable like that as it doesn't work.
• dogman1050 11mo ago
  I discovered just yesterday that Verizon home internet blocks archive.is. Changing the router DNS from their default to openDNS fixed the problem for me, so it looks like they made only a nominal effort to block it.
  • NelsonMinar 11mo ago
    That may be a Cloudflare DNS specific issue, there's been a long standing dispute between archive.today and them about some DNS details. https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-1-1-1-1-not-resolve-archive-is https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-...
    • chihuahua 11mo ago
      If I read that word salad correctly, Cloudflare says they're blocking it because they want to "protect the privacy" of users who do a DNS lookup of archive.today, to prevent the requester's IP address from being reviealed to archive. That seems ludicrous, given that after a DNS lookup, the next thing anybody does is to send an HTTP request, which obviously reveals that same IP address to the archive servers. So it's an obvious and blatant lie by Cloudflare, and I wonder what their real reason is.
    • chatmasta 11mo ago
      This issue seemed to resolve itself sometime in the past year. I’m not sure if that’s because Cloudflare decided to surrender some of my PII in exchange for eDNS resolution or if archive.is finally stopped demanding it from them.
• computerthings 11mo ago
  [dead]
• rootnod3 11mo ago
  "Make data accessible and preserve it" -> FBI "Use copyrighted data for LLM training and sell the product" -> Billions from NVIDIA
• stargrazer 11mo ago
  Is there an easier way to get around all the complicated cookie selection? I don't care if they have 183 trackers. Do I need all those? Are the important to me? I suppose they are important to them. Isn't there just a 'no to all' or at least a 'just the bare minimum for state management'?
  • zargon 11mo ago
    I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat..., though it didn't work so well for this site.
• nektro 11mo ago
  unequivocally bad move
• kylehotchkiss 11mo ago
  Oh no, how will so many people on HN fish for karma if they can’t contribute to conversations with an archive.whatever url that takes 2 seconds to generate on your own?
  • frm88 11mo ago
    Not if it isn't available in my country, I can't. Personally, I'm grateful if somebody on here provides an archive link to an article I otherwise cannot read without additional technical intervention. To label it karma fishing is really uncharitable.
• vineet_joseph 11mo ago
  [dead]
• jongjong 11mo ago
  The FBI is conspiring against the owner of archive.is I feel bad for the owner. He must be telling his friends "The FBI is out to get me" and they must think he's insane and they try to get him institutionalized... The psychiatrist will note "Patient has delusions of grandeur; he thinks he is the owner of Wayback Machine and that the CIA is after him. Diagnosis: Paranoid Schizophrenia"
• tonymet 11mo ago
  they're fighting the wrong enemy. News content is such low quality, archive.is is the only enjoyable way to consume them. Their articles aren't worth wading through relentless popups. IF I'm curious about a fact or story, it's chatgpt. if someone sends me a link , it's archive.is . When archive.is goes way, I'm never going to see a CNN, NYT, LAtimes/etc logo again.
• n0n0n4t0r 11mo ago
  So sad this wasn't shared via https://archive.ph/L2u8Z https://archive.ph/L2u8Z
• andy_ppp 11mo ago
  I had no idea archive.is was illegal… If you put massive holes in your paywall you get what you deserve IMO.
• niemandhier 11mo ago
  This does not fit well with the current Cloudflare initiative. Either the jurisdiction of a nation extend over its physical borders as long as there is a connection in digital space or it does not. If the former, EU regulations do apply to American companies and they have to comply or leave the market and make sure that their offerings are not available here.
  • tgv 11mo ago
    If you're enough of a hypocrite, it makes perfect sense.
• 6yyyyyy 11mo ago
  I thought the government was shut down? Why is this funded but not SNAP?
• evv 11mo ago
  I get freaked out when I consider the future of archive.is. Thanks to the nature of the web today, it is incredibly fragile. As the co-creator of a censorship-resistant publishing platform, I really wish we would migrate to a peer-to-peer technology. We could develop network effects on a decentralized platform with a cryptographically-provable network of trust. Most people don't realize it is possible to handle media distribution in a robust way. I'm not just trying to shill my solution! I wish there were more competitors using these techniques to try and save the web.
  • eXpl0it3r 11mo ago
    Except a lot of people wouldn't participate in a peer-to-peer network for fear of legal repercussions.
    • tremon 11mo ago
      Almost every machine in the world participates in at least one peer-to-peer network: Windows Update. There was a time when the Steam client also used bittorrent technology, not sure if they still do.
      • eXpl0it3r 11mo ago
        Obviously P2P gets used in various things, my point was just, that (most) people likely won't willingly join P2P networks to fight "censorship" or help archive things with questionable content or tainted with potential copyright infringements.
    • evv 11mo ago
      Utilizing p2p tech is not illegal. It is illegal to redistribute copyrighted content without authorization- and we are working to build this into the protocol so that peers will respect copyright by default. People can redistribute at their own risk. I'll be the first to admit that this is complicated, and we have a long way to go in this regard. Plus, the vast majority of people will just use the web frontend, with a peer on the server. Most peers can be hosted by content creators and tech-savvy friends+family.
• mrkramer 11mo ago
  For the last month or so archive.is is not working for me, is it maybe related to this? Btw I always assumed owner is from Russia because he or they were so secretive about everything except occasional blog post or occasional Q&A and Russians are usually obsessed by their web pet projects. For real someone needs to make legit business of archiving the web where you would have timestamped hashes of your archived web pages and "unlimited" storage for archiving ofc only if you pay for the "unlimited" storage.