13 ms·

Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

1816 points by immibis 1y ago

atomicfiredoll 1y ago
I don't know anything about Adguard, but good on the team for doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. Even better that they're sharing what they've found with everyone else.
- hirako2000 1y ago
  Yes kudo. The pressure could simply be inferred as due to the arrogant trend one can observe, the editing of history.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- diebillionaires 1y ago
  yes, major respect to adguard.
- econ 1y ago
  Their DNS is great. Removing websites without a good reason would quickly ruin everything for them.
  - abnercoimbre 1y ago
    I'm not well-versed in this: is AdGuard roughly equivalent to Pi-hole?
    - danek_szy 1y ago
      Their self-hosted product (AdGuard Home) is. ;)
    - GeekyBear 1y ago
      They do run a public DNS server that is equivalent to a Pihole. It's worth trying on devices where you can't install ad blocking software, but can change the TCP/IP settings.
    - nasduia 1y ago
      yes, and it will happily run on a reasonable OpenWRT system such as a GL.iNet Flint 2.
    - brewtide 1y ago
      You can also install AdGuard home as a home-assistant add-on, and then configure your router to hand that IP out as the network DNS server -- so all of your network traffic is ad blocking as soon as it hits your wifi. (like a pihole). It's pretty slick, highly recommend. (Also super useful to see what devices are reaching out to where and how frequently, custom block lists, custom local DNS entries, etc).
  - dizhn 1y ago
    Their pihole alternative is great too. Single go binary. Fantastic software.
    - ksynwa 1y ago
      Is it open source?
      - vin047 1y ago
        It is - GPLv3 https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/LICEN...
      - dizhn 1y ago
        Oh yeah
  - workfromspace 1y ago
    How would they compare to NextDNS?
  - 1970-01-01 1y ago
    As a satisfied customer, I just recommended their adblockimg DNS on here a few days ago but am happy to do it again. If you really don't want to install anything, at least adblock at the DNS level. https://adguard-dns.io/en/welcome.html https://adguard-dns.io/en/welcome.html
  - alickz 1y ago
    I use their app on Android and it blocks ads system wide I would recommend it
    - spixy 1y ago
      best thing is that it works even without their app, just change dns in settings
- like_any_other 1y ago
  > doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. That's the intention of intermediary liability laws - to make meritless censorship be the easy, no-risk way out. To deputize corporations to act as police under a guilty-until-proven-innocent framework.
- luke727 1y ago
  Unfortunately they went along with it initially but at least they came to their senses in the end: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586 https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586
  - encroach 1y ago
    Thanks for the context - it changes the light of the parent article.
  - vin047 1y ago
    This is why it’s better to use AdGuard only for its DNS blocking capability and not for DNS resolving - use a real resolver like unbound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbound_(DNS_server) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbound_(DNS_server)
    - ameshkov 1y ago
      I would advise against using unbound on the client side as this way all your DNS queries will be unencrypted and visible to your ISP. Besides that, the DNS responses can be modified, this kind of censorship is very popular and used in many countries. IMO it is safer to use a big popular DNS recursor (google, cloudflare, adguard, quad9, etc), use DoT/DoH/DoQ and maybe add some additional filtering on top of it.
  - tkel 1y ago
    Yeah, their CTO accepting and repeating the complaint at face value, in less than 10 words to justify the censorship, is not a good look https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586#issuecomment-3484083493 https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586#...
    - ameshkov 1y ago
      I tried not to share too much details while we were still in process of figuring out the details. The legal advice we got was basically “block asap or risk jail time”. Moreover, the risk would still be there even if the complainant is shady or hiding their identity. So it took us some time to do the digging and make sure that illegal content was removed which was the prerequisite to unblocking. The digging is not finished btw, we’ll later post a proper analysis of our reaction and the results of the research.
nikanj 1y ago
archive.is is frequently used to bypass paywalls, I wonder if this is motivated by that somehow
- mattmaroon 1y ago
  100%. It's like Lenin said, you look for the person who will benefit… and, uh, uh, you know… You know, you'll uh, uh—well, you know what I'm trying to say…
  - pimlottc 1y ago
    I’m not sure what you’re referencing, but the principal goes back way back to the Romans: Cui bono? [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono%3F
    - trevithick 1y ago
      They're referencing this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HlZhPuDYqbU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HlZhPuDYqbU
  - _blk 1y ago
    It's a valid way to look for probable cause but it's important differ "you know" and "you assume" - I'm all for accountability but most conspiracy theories thrive exactly because of that sort of framing. As to Lenin: The mouse died because it didn't understand why the cheese was free
- pogue 1y ago
  That's most likely the reason pressure is being put on them. Big media companies successfully shutdown 12ft.io, which was used to bypass paywalls, and forced the BPC (Bypass Paywalls Chrome) browser extension off the Mozilla Extension store, then Gitlab, then Github. Now the dev is hosting it on a Russian Github clone, presumably making it untouchable. Since archive[.]today is using some very obscure hosting methods with multiple international mirrors, it makes it incredibly difficult for law enforcement to go after.
supriyo-biswas 1y ago
Its interesting that being unable to find a legal route to dig up dirt on archive.is, they're going the route of CSAM allegations. I first heard of this technique on a discussion on Lowendtalk from a hoster discussing how pressure campaigns were orchestrated. The host used to host VMs for a customer that was not well liked but otherwise within the bounds of free speech in the US (I guess something on the order of KF/SaSu/SF), so a given user would upload CSAM on the forum, then report the same CSAM to the hoster. They used to use the same IP address for their entire operation. When the host and the customer compared notes, they'd find about these details. Honestly at the time I thought the story was bunk, in the age of residential proxies and VPNs and whatnot, surely whoever did this wouldn't just upload said CSAM from their own IP, but one possible explanation would be that the forum probably just blocked datacenter IPs wholesale and the person orchestrating the campaign wasn't willing to risk the legal fallout of uploading CSAM out of some regular citizen's infected device. In this case, I assume law enforcement just sets up a website with said CSAM, gets archive.is to crawl it, and then pressurize DNS providers about it.
- HeckFeck 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
    Cocaine is a hell of a drug
  - attila-lendvai 1y ago
    wait...! do you mean the commenter or the people in law enforcement?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- mattmaroon 1y ago
  I doubt they’d have to. If the site truly doesn’t remove CSAM automatically I’ve no doubt plenty of it would end up there organically. You wouldn’t have to upload any anywhere, you’d only need to know some URLs to look for which presumably any major law enforcement agency would.
master_crab 1y ago
This just shows that LCEN, DMCA, etc are poorly crafted laws. They ineffectually stop the abuse they claim to end (like copyright infringement). But it does allow large organizations a cudgel to protect their own IP.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  I think they’re well crafted laws because I think that’s their intended purpose.
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
    - robocat 1y ago
      POSIWID - not really: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
      - Brian_K_White 1y ago
        Actually I think that articles very opening premis is exactly as obviously false as they say the original articles premis is. In other words for example they have not shown that the purpose of a cancer hospital is not in fact to cure 2/3 of cancers. They say it's obviously absurd but that's just a bald assertion with no backing meat. It can absolutely be argued that the hospital is doing exactly what it's intended to do, because it's what everyone involved is satisfied with letting it do. Yes obviously it doesn't sound like an obvious way to interpret the functioning of the hospital. No one needs to write an article to explain that the world works the way it appears to or claims to. The whole point of the original POSIWID is to show that some other less obvious, possibly even intentionally hidden interpretation of a system is at least valid and logically "not inconsistent" with the facts and observations. If the operators and funders of a hospital would like to cure all cancers but physically can't, one way to say that is that the hospital is simply doing the next best thing. Everyone involved has settled for some compromise and balance of resources devoted to it such that the amount of cost is as high as they are willing to go for the amount of cancers they are curing. However many they are curing, and even if 100% is not possible, there is still always some amount better they could do for some amount more investment, until all possible resources are devoted to that and nothing else. Everyone stops somewhere short of that and lives with the 2/3 performance instead of the 3/4 performance. And so the system is doing what everyone involved has decided it shall do. The purpose of the system is what it does. That's not an absurd argument at all, and this rebuttal does not invalidate it.
marcosscriven 1y ago
The wording in that follow-up email is so emotive it reads more like a Tweet than formal contact from a federal organisation. That in itself is quite shocking really.
- phyzome 1y ago
  Well, as the post indicates, it likely isn't from a government body.
  - InsomniacL 1y ago
    I thought they were suggesting it was a government body (an FBI operation)
    - phyzome 1y ago
      I think they don't have sufficient evidence on that, and they're just wondering if the timing is coincidence or not. (And there are many ways the two could be connected -- it wouldn't have to be a direct FBI op.)
    - trimethylpurine 1y ago
      I understood that they suspect a lone unknown criminal, and that they filed a police report based on that suspicion.
      - permo-w 1y ago
        my understanding of the article is that they suspect FBI involvement based on the timing but don't have any concrete evidence to support it
        trimethylpurine 1y ago
        I appreciate so much the pragmatist's approach to their methods. They mentioned the coincidence and that they had no evidence to support that hypothesis. They did not accuse anyone of anything, they only requested investigation. I'm stating this because I think it might be the most important distinction in our lifetime. I think that wars are fought, lives are lost, and maybe even society itself will be lost, on that distinction and those of its like.
xbmcuser 1y ago
I speculate, and the conspiracy theorist in me believes, something of a compromising nature has been archived and they want that data inaccessible, but at the same time, pointing out what they want hidden would shine a light on it. It is even more interesting the US government is coming after archive.today at the same time, or maybe that is just a coincidence, and this is just a tech-savvy philanderer trying to hide something from his wife.
- lsihgsligh99 1y ago
  If we're speculating, there is another reason to censor archiving site - if you recently committed well documented genocide and want the evidence erased. Given the systematic removal of such content from social media, it would not be surprising if this was related.
- rarkins 1y ago
  This seems to me to be the most likely explanation. Someone important and/or rich wants something memory-holed and the archive sites are amongst the last to contain the content, so someone else is creating a facade organization as an attempt to get it taken down in every way possible. And yes it's entirely possible that the archive sites have multiple "enemies".
  - rossant 1y ago
    That doesn't seem totally implausible.
- IAmGraydon 1y ago
  I doubt it’s one thing. People in powerful positions need the ability to control the narrative and gaslight the public on an ongoing basis by disappearing content. Being able to call them out on it breaks their system, so they’re trying to fix that.
- hopelite 1y ago
  Like a genocide? Or maybe various statements of politicians and events around and related to Ukraine, elections, Epstein, and any number of hot button topics, especially as the writing is on the wall that populations all around the West are starting to get extremely fed up? I know for a fact that political classes of several European countries have started openly talking about destroying evidence if they lose power and America just declared Antifa a terrorist organization; that all seems to be a plausible motivation.
demarq 1y ago
Finally someone does some digging
orbital-decay 1y ago
The FBI investigation might be a coincidence. Unsurprisingly, archive.today is attacked with CSAM uploads+reports all the time, you can find occasional mentions of this in their blog from 3 and 9 years ago, and I bet there was a ton of this in between.
rs186 1y ago
I still can't wrap my head around why a DNS provider is required to block websites, especially one that is not associated with ISP or used as default on any device. Oversimplifying this, it's a glorified hash map, so whoever wants to take down the illegal content should just deal with the website owner?
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Presumably they have failed to do the latter and are just reaching at this point.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- tuetuopay 1y ago
  Let's say our dear politicans view most illicit contents as nails, and view DNS as a hammer. Unfortunately they are now aware that people can trivially get around the ISP restrictions by using another DNS provider, and have started to pressure third-party providers to apply the same blockings as the ISP ones. This is why a few "neutral" providers have outright blocked France because they refuse to block websites.
- chrneu 1y ago
  I think a large part of it is the tech-illiteracy of world leaders. I'd wager that a lot of the folks implementing these policies don't know the difference between a DNS server and a VPN. They think DNS=VPN, so all the hackers are using cloudflare to get around restrictions. In general, most folks who use the internet don't know how it works and they don't want to know.
- cocainemonster 1y ago
  aren't we all just glorified atoms
codedokode 1y ago
I used the site several times to archive some page or send it to someone who cannot access the site directly. I never archived anything illegal and never stumbled upon illegal things there. So I don't know why they want to arrest the owner. Also the site is pretty advanced, it can handle complicated sites and even social networks. > But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper? > Unfortunately, we couldn’t dig any deeper about who exactly is behind WAAD. That's a red flag. Why would an NGO doing work for the public hide its founder(s) and information about itself? Using NGOs to suggest/promote/lobby certain decisions is a well known trick in authoritarian countries to pretend the idea is coming from "the people", not from the government. I hope nobody falls for such tricks today. Furthermore, they seem to have no way to donate them money. That's even the redder flag. Also France doesn't have a good reputation in relation to the observing rule of law. For example, they arrested Russian agent^w enterpreneur Durov, owner of Telegram, claiming they have lot of evidence against him involved in drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering [1], but a year later let him free (supposedly after he did what they wanted). France also bars popular unwanted candidates from elections. Both these cases strongly resemble what Russia does. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
- pards 1y ago
  >> But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls > How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper? Someone with a subscription logs into the site, then archives it. Archive.is uses the current user's session and can therefore see the paywalled content.
  - codedokode 1y ago
    Do they have such an option? I don't see it on the site, and the browser extension seems to send only the URL [1] to the server. Can you provide more information? [1] https://github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page/blob/main/Firefox/background.js https://github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page/blob/main/Firefox/ba...
  - rkagerer 1y ago
everythingever 1y ago
[flagged]
- harvey9 1y ago
  You don't need to apologise for something you didn't do just because it happened in your country.
  - Dilettante_ 1y ago
    [Germany's ears perk up]
    - harvey9 1y ago
      I'm addressing an individual, not a state.
      - Dilettante_ 1y ago
        [Germans' ears perk up], then. What I'm saying is by that logic, no german needs to uphold their historical responsibility/debt.
        harvey9 1y ago
        I'm glad the German state takes its history seriously but I do not expect Germans not even born in the nazi era to make personal apologies any more than I expect the Indian whose post began this chain to apologise because other Indians are scammers. That said, you make a tacky point which devalues itself by invoking Nazism in the not-even-slightly-comparable context of scams. Are you next going to tell me about all the swastikas you saw when you travelled through India on your gap year?
M0r13n 1y ago
A few weeks ago I noticed DNS4EU couldn’t resolve archive.is and assumed it was just a configuration mistake. I emailed them about it, and after a couple of days or weeks (not really sure) the domain started resolving again. Given AdGuard’s recent report about suspicious pressure on DNS providers to block Archive.today, I’m starting to wonder if DNS4EU’s temporary block was actually related to the same campaign
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- snthd 1y ago
  Archive.is have previously blocked cloudflare DNS because it was anonymizing requests. It could be either. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 >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.
  - Buge 1y ago
    Here's my speculation on the underlying reason archive.today blocks Cloudflare DNS: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/135229/229725 https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/135229/229725 I speculate it's due to archive.today wanting granular (not overly broad) legal censorship compliance. Which is somewhat related to this post.
  - ndiddy 1y ago
    Someone asked the archive.is owner why he does this in the past. It's because of similar situations to this one where someone who wants to get archive.is taken down uploads illegal content, requests archive.is to save it, and immediately reports archive.is to their country's legal authorities. His solution to this is using the EDNS information to serve requests from the closest IP abroad, so any takedown procedure requires international cooperation and therefore enough bureaucratic overhead that he gets notified and has time to take the content down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650 I also find the "we don't want to leak a requester's IP" explanation for blocking EDNS to be suspect. The way DNS works is that you ask for the IP address for a domain name, you get the IP, and then you connect to it. With Cloudflare's DNS, the server doesn't know your IP when you do the DNS lookup, but that doesn't matter because you're connecting to the server anyway so they'll still get your IP. Even if you're worried about other people sniffing network traffic, the hostname you're visiting still gets revealed in plaintext during the SNI handshake. What Cloudflare blocking EDNS does do is make it much harder for competing CDNs to efficiently serve content using DNS based routing. They have to use Anycast instead, which has a higher barrier to entry.
A_Venom_Roll 1y ago
Archive.is doesn't work on all sites to bypass the paywall. Media companies that are truly concerned about this should modify their paywall configuration.
- Plasmoid2000ad 1y ago
  I've seen some theories or maybe more like guesses as to how the paywall bypass works - I don't think anyone (or at least no one posting places like here) seems to know. One I saw suggested they've a set of subscriptions to the paywalled sites and some minimal custom work to hide the signed in account used - which seems plausible. That makes the defense most likely used to catch the account used and ban them - which would be a right pain.
  - codedokode 1y ago
    They probably just set user agent (and reverse DNS name) to Google or some other company that can bypass the firewall.
    - Worksheet 1y ago
      This seems the most likely way it works. Which makes me unsympathetic to publishers who complain about it. Digital distribution will always have this issue. Substack goes from strength to strength because they don't give an inch on the paywall.
      - codedokode 1y ago
        Maybe they also use Google Cloud to look more convincing.
- nervysnail 1y ago
  For example, similar to mondediplo.com
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 1y ago
https://archive.is/Nirff https://archive.is/Nirff
- joshuadan867 1y ago
  [dead]
joshuadan867 1y ago
[dead]
Havoc 1y ago
The amount of forces seemingly actively trying to kill the internet of old is disconcerting. Chat control, DNS as arbiter of whats allowed, walled gardens etc.
- andy99 1y ago
  Don’t forget cloudflare
  - forgotoldacc 1y ago
    Cloudflare has always weirded me out. Back before everyone was using it, a lot of sites would be running just fine for years, then they'd suddenly be shut down for a few days due to DDoS attacks. Then they'd proudly announce they were on cloudflare when they came back. Funny thing was I noticed sites having more frequent downtime after using moving to cloudflare. I don't see those cloudflare pages much these days, but something about it in those early days always gave me protection money vibes. Cloudflare seemed to come out of nowhere during a wave of DDoS attacks across the internet in the late 2000s and found their way into every site. They had some incredible timing.
    - verisimi 1y ago
      Just one of many protection rackets
      - Buge 1y ago
        Are you saying that cloudflare conducts or promotes DDoS?
        pigggg 1y ago
        Most of the ddos as a service booter/stresser websites and front doors are on cloudflare.
        gruez 1y ago
        The accusation is that cloudflare also refuses to take down ddos for hire sites, which some interpret as them at least condoning such sites, and they benefit from those sites being up because it makes their services necessary. The counterargument to this is that cloudflare doesn't host any content and therefore shouldn't be subject to takedown requests, similar to how you wouldn't send takedown requests to Lumen Technologies (a tier 1 transit provider) because they provide transit to some VPS provider that ultimately hosts the ddos for hire site.
anal_reactor 1y ago
Different question, but what are realistic use cases of archive.today that could be interesting for average person?
- j-bos 1y ago
  Have you ever wanted to reread an old article/blog from a ling dead website? Needed to compare the old TOS with the latest TOS? Been looking for what was that video on your playlist about that got removed from youtube? Things like that are fairly average. It can also be helpful for dispute resolutuon and holding public parties to account.
- betaby 1y ago
  News agencies edit the history all the time.
BoppreH 1y ago
So they're pressuring a DNS resolver to block a specific website? That seems like an incredibly slippery slope. What stops them from forcing Chrome to block the website, or LetsEncrypt to not issue any more certificates for the domain, or Microsoft and Apple to add them to their firewalls? Hell, can they go after the infrastructure software developers and say, force nginx to add a check and refuse to serve the domain? Then what happens when a fake report is sent to an open source project without budget for lawyers?
- fuzzy2 1y ago
  We already did the slipping. Sony sued Quad9 to have them block The Pirate Bay. They only lost after a lengthy legal exchange. There's also voluntary censorship, so without any real due process, in some countries. Mostly at ISP level, but all the other entities you mentioned could also implement it. They may be forced to, as a means of dodging liability. There's all kinds of nefarious schemes.
- tuetuopay 1y ago
  Oh trust me, if they could enforce the block at the browser level they would. We're well past the start of the slippery slope here in France when it comes to surveillance and control. I started with telling ISPs to block websites at the DNS level. The people started using 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9 and so on. So now they pressure those third-party DNS providers to do the same. This is why 9.9.9.9 is now unavailable here: they stopped serving France because they did not want to comply.
- superkuh 1y ago
  They've almost realized where to put the pressure. Almost. Once these kinds of attackers realize the real chokepoint of the modern web: certificate authorities for HTTPS certs, we're doomed. Everyone centralizes in the handful of companies and those companies decide every ~90 days which websites are visitable. Because browsers now come pre-configured to not allow visiting HTTP websites and people don't do HTTP+HTTPS anymore. Just HTTP-only. The DNS resolver attacks are but pin pricks compared to the coming centralized control via CAs.
- codedokode 1y ago
octagons 1y ago
The wording and tone of the emails sent to Adguard reads just like phishing emails with a hint of political SMS spam. Glad to see the people behind there thinking critically and acting rationally despite such language.
- mkagenius 1y ago
  It was a little weird that they didnt suspect phishing from the get go.
codedokode 1y ago
Note that association's site is made from this free template [1] with minimal editing (can see it using diff). The web hosting account at name.com (prices starting from $5/year) was registered around Jan 12, 2025 [2]. The page also contains commented out section with a part of French mobile phone number and words "Emergency Standard" (the template contained fictional number here):  [1] https://www.tooplate.com/view/2117-infinite-loop https://www.tooplate.com/view/2117-infinite-loop [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250112153727/https://webabusedefense.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250112153727/https://webabused...
- betaby 1y ago
  Quite possible that's just some bureaucrats kids running that site in exchange for EU grants. In fact in couple of countries that's precisely the case.
  - user_7832 1y ago
    Well then, that would be a very interesting thing to watch when it happens! From the article, the penalty for a false report: > ...shall be punished by one year’s imprisonment and a fine of €15,000. Side note, would anybody know how "easily" do political elites get off the hook in France?
    - rgj 1y ago
      But apparently there was actual CSAM there, since the article mentioned that archive.is removed it within a few hours. So the claim was real. Why did they make up such a story around it?
      - betaby 1y ago
        Because they went to the unrelated DNS provider and not the archive itself.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Friendly reminder that archive box exists to let you self host your own archive service. https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox I dream of a day where archivebox becomes a fleet of homelabs all over the world making it drastically harder to block them all.
- codedokode 1y ago
  I think about the opposite, people reading in the news that FBI is after archiving sites, will not want to launch their own site, except maybe the radical types.
  - wartywhoa23 1y ago
    1960s: FBI/CIA invents the term "conspiracy theorist" 2020s: FBI/CIA invents the term "radical archivist"
- nikisweeting 1y ago
  I've been mulling over how to take ArchiveBox in this direction for years, but it's a really hard problem to tackle because of privacy. https://docs.sweeting.me/s/cookie-dilemma https://docs.sweeting.me/s/cookie-dilemma Most content is going behind logins these days, and if you include the PII of the person doing the archiving in the archives then it's A. really easy for providers to block that account B. potentially dangerous to dox the person doing the archiving. The problem is removing PII from logged in sites is that it's not as simple as stripping some EXIF data, the html and JS is littered with secret tokens, usernames, user-specific notifications, etc. that would reveal the ID of the archivist and cant be removed without breaking page behavior on replay. My latest progress is that it might be possible to anonymize logged in snapshots by using the intersection of two different logged-in snapshots, making them easier to share over a distributed system like Bittorrent or IPFS without doxxing the archivist. More here: https://github.com/pirate/html-private-set-intersection https://github.com/pirate/html-private-set-intersection
- e2le 1y ago
  Out of curiosity, does ArchiveBox integrate some way of verifying the contents of the archived page(s) are legitimate and unmodified?
_blk 1y ago
Kudos to adguard dns for [planing to] filing a counter-claim against potential abuse of power.
amelius 1y ago
If the US and UK block websites like archive.today, scihub, and libgen/anna's archive, then how do we think we win the information war against countries that don't give a bleep about copyright?
- morkalork 1y ago
  What are you saying, that governments should consider long term success over immediate corporate wants? That sounds like commie talk!
LelouBil 1y ago
[flagged]
neuroelectron 1y ago
I bet its mirrors of their own honeypot websites they submitted themself to remove records of websites they rather have memory-holed.
op00to 1y ago
Wouldn’t the people making the complaint also be subject to prosecution for accessing illegal materials?
avazhi 1y ago
Anti-child porn activists really are a unique new breed of fascist authoritarians. This is only the latest in a long line of outrageous and comical threatening letters where the recipient’s apparent reticence to comply with a takedown request is deemed to be, by the activists, active knowing involvement and participation, which is obviously outrageous but these dickheads bank on the fact that actual child porn elicits such strong community reactions. See also: trying to strongarm Apple into running local scans on everybody’s devices and telling Apple not to listen to its customers.
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  I write a huge comment on why and how universal per-authorized CSAM scanning that could literally open an investigation with no human oversight was bad. Back during the apple fiasco. Had a near universal negative reaction from HN. I gave up hope for any sort of non authoritarian future at that point. HN seems to lean authoritarian which is usual for the bourgeois class as they think they are exempt from being on the wall. After all if you have nothing to hide....
ngriffiths 1y ago
> a private company shouldn’t have to decide what counts as “illegal” content under threat of legal action. Immediately reminded me of patio11's amazing write up[1] of debanking, featuring banks being deputized as law enforcement for financial crimes (which is completely non controversial), and even used as a convenient tool to regulate other industries that the white house didn't like (kinda controversial). [1]: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Typically long-winded patio11 article that basically says: Banks are suspicious of crypto.
- salawat 1y ago
  I strongly disagree that financial institutions being a de facto extension of law enforcement is "non-controversial". It may be the way things are; it may be a pre-req of making financial crime tractable; but that does not detract from the fact that every financial institution is in essence, deputized law enforcement, and negate the chilling effect that comes as a consequence thereof on a business environment subject to it.
  - ngriffiths 1y ago
    Fair enough. It was something that impressed me when I first read about it. You hear about disputes between Apple and the FBI over unlocking phones and meanwhile banks are like "and over here are whole floors of analysts tracking suspicious stuff." I definitely agree there are downsides and not everyone is happy about the floors of analysts, but I do think they are very far away from the Overton window.
wartywhoa23 1y ago
The Ministry of Truth simply doesn't want unaccounted and uncontrolled snapshots of history. Too much hassle steering the narrative regarding any surfacing truth-now-meant-to-be-lies and vice versa into fake news territory, discrediting by association, cranking up troll farms.. Much easier to make this inconvenience disappear with the due cooperation from the controlled outlets of information. Then they will come after our local storage, and making it prohibitively expensive is the least malign way they can come up with.
- unwise-exe 1y ago
  Who cares about local storage? You could have just made up whatever you're claiming to have saved.
  - wartywhoa23 1y ago
    True, it's next to useless as a proof of anything for wide audience... But what does care about local storage in this brave new gaslit world is my own sanity, for one.
  - sedatk 1y ago
    Archival sites could let you download cryptographically signed copies of the archived pages. If they get removed from the archival site, the authenticity of your local copies can still be attested.
  - jMyles 1y ago
    Storage media and authenticity have zero overlap in the venn diagram. Authenticity is a cryptological feature of the internet, not a topological one. The reason you believe that you're reading something on news.ycombinator.com right now is not the path by which the bytes were copied from one interface to the next before getting to you, but the certificate and signature that confirms you have a valid HTTPS connection.
- blumomo 1y ago
  Had exactly the same thoughts. Thanks for saving me from posting this.
AstralStorm 1y ago
How can you even sue without any legal identity? This website and an organisation does not happen to have any. Might as well be some shell company in the Carribeans with no legal standing in France. It's not even good enough for public prosecution, as the tip would then go through French services. This law is completely backwards, and worse than a SLAPP. If you cannot respond to a report in any way, it should be null.
- valicord 1y ago
  If you can sue shark fins, why not a website? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately_64,695_Pounds_of_Shark_Fins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...
  - xandrius 1y ago
    Holy crap, 30'000 sharks kills for a bloody soup. Insane and that wasn't even their only journey.
  - flufluflufluffy 1y ago
    Amazing, here is a list of other similarly hilariously-titled “in rem jurisdiction” cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction#Examples Some good ones: - United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster - United States v. 11 1/4 Dozen Packages of Articles Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat's Shoo-Fly Powders for Drunkenness - South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats
    - bogwog 1y ago
      My favorite is United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster. The Rooster won.
    - robotnikman 1y ago
      My favorite one: United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consisting_of_50,000_Cardboard_Boxes_More_or_Less,_Each_Containing_One_Pair_of_Clacker_Balls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consi...
fukka42 1y ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 1y ago
  We've banned this account for engaging in political battle and ignoring an earlier appeal to stop. Please stop registering new accounts to break the guidelines with. It becomes more obvious the more you do it. The number of comments containing the word "America" alone is a pattern that has no place here. And no it's nothing to do with the site or its moderators being American; the moderators aren't American and we do exactly the same thing if it is any other country. These and other comments are plainly in breach of the guidelines against flamewar-style commenting and political battle. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45688936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45688936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45603743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45603743
  - fukka42 1y ago
    [dead]
econ 1y ago
One more reason for browsers to save all pages one visits.
sans_souse 1y ago
I wonder if ignoring the email and forcing a more official action would have been the better move here, in retrospect? Perhaps I am ignorant on the legal responsibilities of your services, just seems like something more formal than an email would have at least served more as "official notice"
tarkin2 1y ago
Well, that was stellar work. It's a little sad that such threats could work with a smaller less resourced company. Still, adguard dns got on to my radar because of this.
renewiltord 1y ago
[flagged]
- slater 1y ago
  They actually don't, oddly enough.
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    They’re often of the shape here where you have to comply with arbitrary requests at great risk. Germany being the exception and being direct about it. Most other European countries try to do this thing where the government can access anything and then they selectively enforce on what they want.
ProofHouse 1y ago
Kudos
ThouYS 1y ago
Another day, another attempt at destroying the archives.. Welp
jayess 1y ago
lol, "American Law Firm"
varenc 1y ago
Super odd to pressure an ad-blocking DNS provider to use their service to 'block' archive.today. Adguard just provides block lists that allow users to easily block ad services. If adguard starts blocking certain domains users actually want to access, users will simply switch off of adguard. No one uses adguard as a resolver by default, they switch to adguard to block ads. This seems like it'd be a pretty ineffective way of blocking sites users actually want to access.
novemp 1y ago
> While the exact nature of the FBI investigation hasn’t been confirmed, it is speculated it can be related to copyright or CSAM (child sexual abuse material) dissemination issues. Altogether, the situation suggests growing pressure on whoever runs Archive.is, and on intermediaries that help make its service accessible. Oh, so a chatbot wrote this article. Glad it tipped its hand early enough I didn't waste that much time.
chrneu 1y ago
It's wild how much stuff nowadays is people/bad actors just doing things and expecting nobody to call them out. Like, the whole patent troll "industry" is just abusing the law, hoping people don't stop them. Maybe folks should start calling eachother out?
- 52-6F-62 1y ago
  I think because what predominates is the notion that if it makes money it is good. If it makes a lot of money, then it is very good. If it claims moral superiority, that's fine and well, but if it doesn't make as much money then it doesn't deserve to live. If you say anything to the contrary, you are "irrational", perhaps worse.
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  It's the lawyers. They ran out of actual lawsuits, so they're inventing them. They either find a wheelchair-bound person to sue you because your shop is in a historic building and you never bothered to spend tens of thousands on making it ADA compliant, or they sue you because your website doesn't pass ADA compliance[1] (hey, does HN pass ADA compliance? I have an idea...), or they find[2] a couple guys selling illegal truck parts and try to sue them for tens of millions. https://www.accessibility.works/blog/ada-lawsuit-trends-statistics-2024-summary/ https://www.accessibility.works/blog/ada-lawsuit-trends-stat... [1] https://www.uphe.org/priority-issues/diesel/ https://www.uphe.org/priority-issues/diesel/ [2]
Ms-J 1y ago
It has been said that the main reason for the attack on Archive is because Israel needs to cover up their crimes. There is too much evidence in the open. It's the equivalent of burning a library down because books have records of the truth. Adguard deserves the highest praise for publicizing this attack on them.
- danielxt 1y ago
  > has been said that the main reason for the attack on Archive is because Israel Really? interesting couldn't find anything talking about that, mind sharing a link?
mzajc 1y ago
> They [archive.today] replied within a few hours. The response was straightforward: the illegal content would be removed (and we verified that it was), and they had never received any previous notifications about those URLs. I think it's very telling that the WAAD people don't mention that last bit in their response[0] - unless archive.today rotates their DKIM records, the messages would be verifiably signed. This of course means you can't just make stuff up, which is likely what they did. [0] https://archive.ph/MCt4g https://archive.ph/MCt4g
PinkSheep 1y ago
Good job on AdGuard's end for bringing this to the Internet's attention. I especially enjoyed the unearthed details about this "N"GO's short history. I think the e-mail exchange should've been kept short, although it is good that the owner of archive.today was eventually notified (by them) about these links in good faith to remove them. Their reply should've been the following: "Thank you for contacting us. If you have conclusive proof of illegal behavior, you should contact police and seek legal assistance. A website's administrator is expected to adequately react to illegal actions conducted by its users, such as removing media that's breaking a law. We have visited the URLs provided by you (https://archive[.]today/ https://archive[.]today/ , ...) and found no evidence to corroborate your concerns. To avoid misunderstandings, we require you to send a certified mail to <Adguards company address> before further replies on this matter." Remember guys, it should always be certified mail (bonus points for international). And yes, I mean literal index pages as provided in the first e-mail. Play by the legal understanding of words. Be creative and break the rules to the extent of not breaking them ;) PS: If you want to see more of "funny replies" you should read Njalla's blog (<https://njal.la/blog/ https://njal.la/blog/>) and TPB's infamous e-mail replies.
- mmooss 1y ago
  I can see what you are getting at. Is this meant to be real advice - i.e., are you an attorney, familiar with French law, etc.?
- dpark 1y ago
  > We have visited the URLs provided by you “You sent claims of CSAM hosted on someone else’s servers and we decided to download it.” Hell no. I don’t want to see that and I don’t want it being ingested into systems I control. Of all the stuff here, “download some supposed CSAM to see if it’s real” is the absolute worst advice I can imagine.
  - noosphr 1y ago
    The above post contains csam, Dang please delete it without reading. Thanks.
ksynwa 1y ago
Tangential but how does archive.today stack up against other archiving services? I've always found it faster and more reliable than the wayback machine and ghostarchive. The paywall bypass feature is also invaluable to be but I don't know if other services have that provision. I would be really sad if it went down.
deinonychus 1y ago
Am I crazy or did those WAAD guys themselves just link the public to potentially illegal content? As of writing, they have a public response hosted on their website, including screenshots of emails to/from Google with URLs that Google agreed to remove. WAAD censored out the URLs, except they didn't actually because whatever paintbrush tool they used didn't have the opacity maxed out. I'm not looking up those URLs to find out. edit: They also leaked the Adguard admin's email, which WAAD complained about being the victim of.
- nervysnail 1y ago
  God... Here from their official "presse" announcement: https://web.archive.org/web/20251116002625/https://webabusedefense.com/presse/remove_google1.jpeg https://web.archive.org/web/20251116002625/https://webabused...
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    Looks like they replace the file on their website with a new, actually censored version. WAAD seems to be reading along here. Wonder if your archive.org link now makes archive.org one of their targets.
    - nervysnail 1y ago
      The guy who "censored" the links should turn himself over to the police over carelessness IMO.
- mouse_ 1y ago
  > Am I crazy or did those WAAD guys themselves just link the public to potentially illegal content? I mean, it's well known that governments possess and distribute more of the stuff than anyone else. Government or not, not a big surprise.
kazinator 1y ago
Hi there, you don't know me or were I'm calling from, but I want you to go next door and punch your neighbor in the face. Believe me when I say, he is hoarding child porn. What, you don't want to? You must not be against child porn!
cft 1y ago
Subpoena from the FBI to Tucows to disclose identity of archive.today(is) operator: https://pdflink.to/1e0e0ecd/ https://pdflink.to/1e0e0ecd/
- cactusplant7374 1y ago
  Were they able to discover their identity?
Brian_K_White 1y ago
The accuser sure seems to value their own anonymity while trying to pierce someone else's.
dev1ycan 1y ago
Follows suit on my other comment about how every site with information be it legal or not is being actually pressured now to take down their info after "AI" (LLMs) mafia bosses used the info to train their AI already... It's sickening to see people okay with the destruction of the "real" knowledge filled internet in favor of a dystopia.
pinkmuffinere 1y ago
If the archive.today contact is telling the truth, then this implies that WAAD had collected links containing CSAM and chose not to contact the person who could best get rid of the material. I think it implies either: 1. WAAD has developed a good way of detecting CSAM, but is ok with the CSAM staying available longer than it needs to, and remaining accessible to a wider audience than needed, in order to pursue their ulterior motive. In this case, they could be improving the world in some significant way, but are just choosing to do something else. 2. WAAD has intentionally had archive.today index CSAM material in order to pursue their ulterior motive. Of course, option 2 is _much_ more damning than option 1, but I feel both are really bad, and naively I'd still expect option 1 to be illegal. If you know of a crime and intentionally hide it, that seem illegal.
- point999 1y ago
  > If you know of a crime and intentionally hide it, that seem illegal. Yet this is a standard way to become a wealthy lawyer.
mcny 1y ago
web archives are so important. perhaps now more than ever. recently, a company founder / ceo swore up and down right here on this orange website that they never said the word "forever" on their pricing page until someone brought proof using a web archive. If the US government is behind this nonsense, I am very displeased by it. I wish there was a way we could stop the FBI from doing this kind of tomfoolery.
lacoolj 1y ago
Seems like there's an actual child/teenager running that "company"
Vera_Wilde 1y ago
If an opaque actor can fabricate legal-ish complaints and pressure DNS providers into blocking a site, the system is wide open for abuse. Smaller services without legal teams would just fold. Curious if others are seeing this kind of “shadow regulation” pop up more frequently elsewhere — especially in email filtering, CDN layers, and AI content moderation.
DoctorOetker 1y ago
1. I am confused, did copyright holders not amused by archive.today etc, intentionally serve CSAM material when they detected a visitor was in fact archive.today scraping one of their pages? It seems they are on the hook for more than just "inaccurate reporting of CSAM materials". 2. Is it a legally allowed tactic for copyright-luvva's to intentionally seek out CSAM content online, and then submit those URL's to sites like archive.today? Which entity is at greater legal peril, the one that aids the distribution of CSAM materials by intentionally having a site like archive.today archive CSAM content, or archive.today unintentionally being tricked into archiving CSAM content? 3. Everyone has traumas, of one kind of another. Each deals or tries to deal with them in their own way. Suppose a victim of crimes (still unpunished) finds or is informed of the presence of evidence online, and suppose this victim (regardless of how representative) finds the preservation of this evidence more important than the humiliation associated with it, how (in)just are laws that blanket suppress CSAM material? To give a more vigorous example: imagine you were raped by some no-yet-fallen UK nobility, and you are made aware of the presence of this evidence on some royal FTP server (or whatever), and you succeed in having archive.today "notarize" this evidence (independently from legal channels, since theres a suspiciously low amount of nobility being convicted, in contrast to your personal experience). These rules for supressing CSAM can be wielded as a sword precisely against those who fell prey to perpetrators...
thrdbndndn 1y ago
It looks like WAAD has posted a response to this situation: https://webabusedefense.com/presse/Communiquer_presse_Aff-Adguad_Archive-15-11-2025.pdf https://webabusedefense.com/presse/Communiquer_presse_Aff-Ad... [pdf]
- squigz 1y ago
  Scroll down in the PDF for an English translation. "The fight against child sexual abuse material is not negotiable. It cannot be relativized. It cannot be turned against those who fight it." This sort of moral certainty won't help anyone.
  - phendrenad2 1y ago
    Exactly what a shell organization for the government would say to make themselves look silly so we all stop digging.
dclowd9901 1y ago
> The illegal content was promptly removed from Archive.today after we notified them. Everything else aside, this is a big issue for archive.today and makes it very difficult to defend its continued existence. Crap.
- Longlius 1y ago
  How is it an issue for Archive.today? They immediately removed the content upon being notified about it. That's the "standard" level of responsibility for any site that hosts user-uploaded content.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Unless GP is suggesting the act of removal is what is worrying.
Quarrel 1y ago
I wonder if this is why NextDNS block the archive.today domains? While the NextDNS company is registered in Delaware, the founders are French nationals, so may feel more exposed to such threats. fwiw, you can use rewrites for these domains in the nextdns settings, or manage it in your local dns client, and get around this pretty easily.
MrDresden 1y ago
Something that I feel needs to be clarified, since I've noticed this being parroted around and it's technically incorrect: It is incorrect to say the FBI has subpoenad the register for Archive.is. The FBI can not subpoena the register for .is domains, since there is only one and it is Icelandic. US subpoenas have no power outside the US. So they are going after another of Archive.is domains, just not the Icelandic one.
miellaby 1y ago
À simple way to debunk this fake French pretending non-profit complainer is to check it's present in the Répertoire national des associations (RNA)
- desmaraisp 1y ago
  They are in the RNA: https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-detail-annonce/?q.id=id:202500111688 https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta...
ilitirit 1y ago
After I read that emotive response I couldn't help but wondering if this wasn't part of a scheme to help someone cover up a crime. This is how I would have responded: "Hi, These do appear to be quite serious crimes. I've sent all the URLs, your email address, emails and responses to the relevant law agencies. Regards, AdGuard"
greatgib 1y ago
The feeling that I have when seeing this investigation is that Waad is a covert ops by right holders like newspapers or the fbi, or some parties like that. They upload themselves pages with the bad content for then complains about it. Probably they know that no one will care to block or snitch on the website if it is just because it is used to "snapshot" newspaper posts, but CSAM is evil so that is the good excuse to badmouth a service like that. Similar to what is used currently in Europe to undermine our rights or the cia operation to burn Julian Assange.
billy99k 1y ago
I would have liked the 'suspicious pressure' when Parler was shutdown by colluding tech companies and the US government.

1816 points by immibis 1y ago

I don't know anything about Adguard, but good on the team for doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. Even better that they're sharing what they've found with everyone else.

hirako2000 1y ago
Yes kudo. The pressure could simply be inferred as due to the arrogant trend one can observe, the editing of history.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
diebillionaires 1y ago
yes, major respect to adguard.
econ 1y ago
Their DNS is great. Removing websites without a good reason would quickly ruin everything for them.
- abnercoimbre 1y ago
  I'm not well-versed in this: is AdGuard roughly equivalent to Pi-hole?
  - danek_szy 1y ago
    Their self-hosted product (AdGuard Home) is. ;)
  - GeekyBear 1y ago
    They do run a public DNS server that is equivalent to a Pihole. It's worth trying on devices where you can't install ad blocking software, but can change the TCP/IP settings.
  - nasduia 1y ago
    yes, and it will happily run on a reasonable OpenWRT system such as a GL.iNet Flint 2.
  - brewtide 1y ago
    You can also install AdGuard home as a home-assistant add-on, and then configure your router to hand that IP out as the network DNS server -- so all of your network traffic is ad blocking as soon as it hits your wifi. (like a pihole). It's pretty slick, highly recommend. (Also super useful to see what devices are reaching out to where and how frequently, custom block lists, custom local DNS entries, etc).
- dizhn 1y ago
  Their pihole alternative is great too. Single go binary. Fantastic software.
  - ksynwa 1y ago
    Is it open source?
    - vin047 1y ago
      It is - GPLv3 https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/LICEN...
    - dizhn 1y ago
      Oh yeah
- workfromspace 1y ago
  How would they compare to NextDNS?
- 1970-01-01 1y ago
  As a satisfied customer, I just recommended their adblockimg DNS on here a few days ago but am happy to do it again. If you really don't want to install anything, at least adblock at the DNS level. https://adguard-dns.io/en/welcome.html https://adguard-dns.io/en/welcome.html
- alickz 1y ago
  I use their app on Android and it blocks ads system wide I would recommend it
  - spixy 1y ago
    best thing is that it works even without their app, just change dns in settings
like_any_other 1y ago
> doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. That's the intention of intermediary liability laws - to make meritless censorship be the easy, no-risk way out. To deputize corporations to act as police under a guilty-until-proven-innocent framework.
luke727 1y ago
Unfortunately they went along with it initially but at least they came to their senses in the end: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586 https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586
- encroach 1y ago
  Thanks for the context - it changes the light of the parent article.
- vin047 1y ago
  This is why it’s better to use AdGuard only for its DNS blocking capability and not for DNS resolving - use a real resolver like unbound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbound_(DNS_server) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbound_(DNS_server)
  - ameshkov 1y ago
    I would advise against using unbound on the client side as this way all your DNS queries will be unencrypted and visible to your ISP. Besides that, the DNS responses can be modified, this kind of censorship is very popular and used in many countries. IMO it is safer to use a big popular DNS recursor (google, cloudflare, adguard, quad9, etc), use DoT/DoH/DoQ and maybe add some additional filtering on top of it.
- tkel 1y ago
  Yeah, their CTO accepting and repeating the complaint at face value, in less than 10 words to justify the censorship, is not a good look https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586#issuecomment-3484083493 https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586#...
  - ameshkov 1y ago
    I tried not to share too much details while we were still in process of figuring out the details. The legal advice we got was basically “block asap or risk jail time”. Moreover, the risk would still be there even if the complainant is shady or hiding their identity. So it took us some time to do the digging and make sure that illegal content was removed which was the prerequisite to unblocking. The digging is not finished btw, we’ll later post a proper analysis of our reaction and the results of the research.

nikanj 1y ago

archive.is is frequently used to bypass paywalls, I wonder if this is motivated by that somehow

mattmaroon 1y ago
100%. It's like Lenin said, you look for the person who will benefit… and, uh, uh, you know… You know, you'll uh, uh—well, you know what I'm trying to say…
- pimlottc 1y ago
  I’m not sure what you’re referencing, but the principal goes back way back to the Romans: Cui bono? [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono%3F
  - trevithick 1y ago
    They're referencing this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HlZhPuDYqbU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HlZhPuDYqbU
- _blk 1y ago
  It's a valid way to look for probable cause but it's important differ "you know" and "you assume" - I'm all for accountability but most conspiracy theories thrive exactly because of that sort of framing. As to Lenin: The mouse died because it didn't understand why the cheese was free
pogue 1y ago
That's most likely the reason pressure is being put on them. Big media companies successfully shutdown 12ft.io, which was used to bypass paywalls, and forced the BPC (Bypass Paywalls Chrome) browser extension off the Mozilla Extension store, then Gitlab, then Github. Now the dev is hosting it on a Russian Github clone, presumably making it untouchable. Since archive[.]today is using some very obscure hosting methods with multiple international mirrors, it makes it incredibly difficult for law enforcement to go after.

supriyo-biswas 1y ago

Its interesting that being unable to find a legal route to dig up dirt on archive.is, they're going the route of CSAM allegations. I first heard of this technique on a discussion on Lowendtalk from a hoster discussing how pressure campaigns were orchestrated. The host used to host VMs for a customer that was not well liked but otherwise within the bounds of free speech in the US (I guess something on the order of KF/SaSu/SF), so a given user would upload CSAM on the forum, then report the same CSAM to the hoster. They used to use the same IP address for their entire operation. When the host and the customer compared notes, they'd find about these details. Honestly at the time I thought the story was bunk, in the age of residential proxies and VPNs and whatnot, surely whoever did this wouldn't just upload said CSAM from their own IP, but one possible explanation would be that the forum probably just blocked datacenter IPs wholesale and the person orchestrating the campaign wasn't willing to risk the legal fallout of uploading CSAM out of some regular citizen's infected device. In this case, I assume law enforcement just sets up a website with said CSAM, gets archive.is to crawl it, and then pressurize DNS providers about it.

HeckFeck 1y ago
[flagged]
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
  Cocaine is a hell of a drug
- attila-lendvai 1y ago
  wait...! do you mean the commenter or the people in law enforcement?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
mattmaroon 1y ago
I doubt they’d have to. If the site truly doesn’t remove CSAM automatically I’ve no doubt plenty of it would end up there organically. You wouldn’t have to upload any anywhere, you’d only need to know some URLs to look for which presumably any major law enforcement agency would.

master_crab 1y ago

This just shows that LCEN, DMCA, etc are poorly crafted laws. They ineffectually stop the abuse they claim to end (like copyright infringement). But it does allow large organizations a cudgel to protect their own IP.

nkrisc 1y ago
I think they’re well crafted laws because I think that’s their intended purpose.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
  - robocat 1y ago
    POSIWID - not really: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
    - Brian_K_White 1y ago
      Actually I think that articles very opening premis is exactly as obviously false as they say the original articles premis is. In other words for example they have not shown that the purpose of a cancer hospital is not in fact to cure 2/3 of cancers. They say it's obviously absurd but that's just a bald assertion with no backing meat. It can absolutely be argued that the hospital is doing exactly what it's intended to do, because it's what everyone involved is satisfied with letting it do. Yes obviously it doesn't sound like an obvious way to interpret the functioning of the hospital. No one needs to write an article to explain that the world works the way it appears to or claims to. The whole point of the original POSIWID is to show that some other less obvious, possibly even intentionally hidden interpretation of a system is at least valid and logically "not inconsistent" with the facts and observations. If the operators and funders of a hospital would like to cure all cancers but physically can't, one way to say that is that the hospital is simply doing the next best thing. Everyone involved has settled for some compromise and balance of resources devoted to it such that the amount of cost is as high as they are willing to go for the amount of cancers they are curing. However many they are curing, and even if 100% is not possible, there is still always some amount better they could do for some amount more investment, until all possible resources are devoted to that and nothing else. Everyone stops somewhere short of that and lives with the 2/3 performance instead of the 3/4 performance. And so the system is doing what everyone involved has decided it shall do. The purpose of the system is what it does. That's not an absurd argument at all, and this rebuttal does not invalidate it.

marcosscriven 1y ago

The wording in that follow-up email is so emotive it reads more like a Tweet than formal contact from a federal organisation. That in itself is quite shocking really.

phyzome 1y ago
Well, as the post indicates, it likely isn't from a government body.
- InsomniacL 1y ago
  I thought they were suggesting it was a government body (an FBI operation)
  - phyzome 1y ago
    I think they don't have sufficient evidence on that, and they're just wondering if the timing is coincidence or not. (And there are many ways the two could be connected -- it wouldn't have to be a direct FBI op.)
  - trimethylpurine 1y ago
    I understood that they suspect a lone unknown criminal, and that they filed a police report based on that suspicion.
    - permo-w 1y ago
      my understanding of the article is that they suspect FBI involvement based on the timing but don't have any concrete evidence to support it
      - trimethylpurine 1y ago
        I appreciate so much the pragmatist's approach to their methods. They mentioned the coincidence and that they had no evidence to support that hypothesis. They did not accuse anyone of anything, they only requested investigation. I'm stating this because I think it might be the most important distinction in our lifetime. I think that wars are fought, lives are lost, and maybe even society itself will be lost, on that distinction and those of its like.

xbmcuser 1y ago

I speculate, and the conspiracy theorist in me believes, something of a compromising nature has been archived and they want that data inaccessible, but at the same time, pointing out what they want hidden would shine a light on it. It is even more interesting the US government is coming after archive.today at the same time, or maybe that is just a coincidence, and this is just a tech-savvy philanderer trying to hide something from his wife.

lsihgsligh99 1y ago
If we're speculating, there is another reason to censor archiving site - if you recently committed well documented genocide and want the evidence erased. Given the systematic removal of such content from social media, it would not be surprising if this was related.
rarkins 1y ago
This seems to me to be the most likely explanation. Someone important and/or rich wants something memory-holed and the archive sites are amongst the last to contain the content, so someone else is creating a facade organization as an attempt to get it taken down in every way possible. And yes it's entirely possible that the archive sites have multiple "enemies".
- rossant 1y ago
  That doesn't seem totally implausible.
IAmGraydon 1y ago
I doubt it’s one thing. People in powerful positions need the ability to control the narrative and gaslight the public on an ongoing basis by disappearing content. Being able to call them out on it breaks their system, so they’re trying to fix that.
hopelite 1y ago
Like a genocide? Or maybe various statements of politicians and events around and related to Ukraine, elections, Epstein, and any number of hot button topics, especially as the writing is on the wall that populations all around the West are starting to get extremely fed up? I know for a fact that political classes of several European countries have started openly talking about destroying evidence if they lose power and America just declared Antifa a terrorist organization; that all seems to be a plausible motivation.

demarq 1y ago

Finally someone does some digging

orbital-decay 1y ago

The FBI investigation might be a coincidence. Unsurprisingly, archive.today is attacked with CSAM uploads+reports all the time, you can find occasional mentions of this in their blog from 3 and 9 years ago, and I bet there was a ton of this in between.

rs186 1y ago

I still can't wrap my head around why a DNS provider is required to block websites, especially one that is not associated with ISP or used as default on any device. Oversimplifying this, it's a glorified hash map, so whoever wants to take down the illegal content should just deal with the website owner?

JKCalhoun 1y ago
Presumably they have failed to do the latter and are just reaching at this point.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
tuetuopay 1y ago
Let's say our dear politicans view most illicit contents as nails, and view DNS as a hammer. Unfortunately they are now aware that people can trivially get around the ISP restrictions by using another DNS provider, and have started to pressure third-party providers to apply the same blockings as the ISP ones. This is why a few "neutral" providers have outright blocked France because they refuse to block websites.
chrneu 1y ago
I think a large part of it is the tech-illiteracy of world leaders. I'd wager that a lot of the folks implementing these policies don't know the difference between a DNS server and a VPN. They think DNS=VPN, so all the hackers are using cloudflare to get around restrictions. In general, most folks who use the internet don't know how it works and they don't want to know.
cocainemonster 1y ago
aren't we all just glorified atoms

codedokode 1y ago

I used the site several times to archive some page or send it to someone who cannot access the site directly. I never archived anything illegal and never stumbled upon illegal things there. So I don't know why they want to arrest the owner. Also the site is pretty advanced, it can handle complicated sites and even social networks. > But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper? > Unfortunately, we couldn’t dig any deeper about who exactly is behind WAAD. That's a red flag. Why would an NGO doing work for the public hide its founder(s) and information about itself? Using NGOs to suggest/promote/lobby certain decisions is a well known trick in authoritarian countries to pretend the idea is coming from "the people", not from the government. I hope nobody falls for such tricks today. Furthermore, they seem to have no way to donate them money. That's even the redder flag. Also France doesn't have a good reputation in relation to the observing rule of law. For example, they arrested Russian agent^w enterpreneur Durov, owner of Telegram, claiming they have lot of evidence against him involved in drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering [1], but a year later let him free (supposedly after he did what they wanted). France also bars popular unwanted candidates from elections. Both these cases strongly resemble what Russia does. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

pards 1y ago
>> But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls > How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper? Someone with a subscription logs into the site, then archives it. Archive.is uses the current user's session and can therefore see the paywalled content.
- codedokode 1y ago
  Do they have such an option? I don't see it on the site, and the browser extension seems to send only the URL [1] to the server. Can you provide more information? [1] https://github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page/blob/main/Firefox/background.js https://github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page/blob/main/Firefox/ba...
- rkagerer 1y ago

everythingever 1y ago

[flagged]

harvey9 1y ago
You don't need to apologise for something you didn't do just because it happened in your country.
- Dilettante_ 1y ago
  [Germany's ears perk up]
  - harvey9 1y ago
    I'm addressing an individual, not a state.
    - Dilettante_ 1y ago
      [Germans' ears perk up], then. What I'm saying is by that logic, no german needs to uphold their historical responsibility/debt.
      - harvey9 1y ago
        I'm glad the German state takes its history seriously but I do not expect Germans not even born in the nazi era to make personal apologies any more than I expect the Indian whose post began this chain to apologise because other Indians are scammers. That said, you make a tacky point which devalues itself by invoking Nazism in the not-even-slightly-comparable context of scams. Are you next going to tell me about all the swastikas you saw when you travelled through India on your gap year?

M0r13n 1y ago

A few weeks ago I noticed DNS4EU couldn’t resolve archive.is and assumed it was just a configuration mistake. I emailed them about it, and after a couple of days or weeks (not really sure) the domain started resolving again. Given AdGuard’s recent report about suspicious pressure on DNS providers to block Archive.today, I’m starting to wonder if DNS4EU’s temporary block was actually related to the same campaign

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
snthd 1y ago
Archive.is have previously blocked cloudflare DNS because it was anonymizing requests. It could be either. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 >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.
- Buge 1y ago
  Here's my speculation on the underlying reason archive.today blocks Cloudflare DNS: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/135229/229725 https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/135229/229725 I speculate it's due to archive.today wanting granular (not overly broad) legal censorship compliance. Which is somewhat related to this post.
- ndiddy 1y ago
  Someone asked the archive.is owner why he does this in the past. It's because of similar situations to this one where someone who wants to get archive.is taken down uploads illegal content, requests archive.is to save it, and immediately reports archive.is to their country's legal authorities. His solution to this is using the EDNS information to serve requests from the closest IP abroad, so any takedown procedure requires international cooperation and therefore enough bureaucratic overhead that he gets notified and has time to take the content down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650 I also find the "we don't want to leak a requester's IP" explanation for blocking EDNS to be suspect. The way DNS works is that you ask for the IP address for a domain name, you get the IP, and then you connect to it. With Cloudflare's DNS, the server doesn't know your IP when you do the DNS lookup, but that doesn't matter because you're connecting to the server anyway so they'll still get your IP. Even if you're worried about other people sniffing network traffic, the hostname you're visiting still gets revealed in plaintext during the SNI handshake. What Cloudflare blocking EDNS does do is make it much harder for competing CDNs to efficiently serve content using DNS based routing. They have to use Anycast instead, which has a higher barrier to entry.

A_Venom_Roll 1y ago

Archive.is doesn't work on all sites to bypass the paywall. Media companies that are truly concerned about this should modify their paywall configuration.

Plasmoid2000ad 1y ago
I've seen some theories or maybe more like guesses as to how the paywall bypass works - I don't think anyone (or at least no one posting places like here) seems to know. One I saw suggested they've a set of subscriptions to the paywalled sites and some minimal custom work to hide the signed in account used - which seems plausible. That makes the defense most likely used to catch the account used and ban them - which would be a right pain.
- codedokode 1y ago
  They probably just set user agent (and reverse DNS name) to Google or some other company that can bypass the firewall.
  - Worksheet 1y ago
    This seems the most likely way it works. Which makes me unsympathetic to publishers who complain about it. Digital distribution will always have this issue. Substack goes from strength to strength because they don't give an inch on the paywall.
    - codedokode 1y ago
      Maybe they also use Google Cloud to look more convincing.
nervysnail 1y ago
For example, similar to mondediplo.com

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 1y ago

https://archive.is/Nirff https://archive.is/Nirff

joshuadan867 1y ago
[dead]

joshuadan867 1y ago

[dead]

Havoc 1y ago

The amount of forces seemingly actively trying to kill the internet of old is disconcerting. Chat control, DNS as arbiter of whats allowed, walled gardens etc.

andy99 1y ago
Don’t forget cloudflare
- forgotoldacc 1y ago
  Cloudflare has always weirded me out. Back before everyone was using it, a lot of sites would be running just fine for years, then they'd suddenly be shut down for a few days due to DDoS attacks. Then they'd proudly announce they were on cloudflare when they came back. Funny thing was I noticed sites having more frequent downtime after using moving to cloudflare. I don't see those cloudflare pages much these days, but something about it in those early days always gave me protection money vibes. Cloudflare seemed to come out of nowhere during a wave of DDoS attacks across the internet in the late 2000s and found their way into every site. They had some incredible timing.
  - verisimi 1y ago
    Just one of many protection rackets
    - Buge 1y ago
      Are you saying that cloudflare conducts or promotes DDoS?
      - pigggg 1y ago
        Most of the ddos as a service booter/stresser websites and front doors are on cloudflare.
      - gruez 1y ago
        The accusation is that cloudflare also refuses to take down ddos for hire sites, which some interpret as them at least condoning such sites, and they benefit from those sites being up because it makes their services necessary. The counterargument to this is that cloudflare doesn't host any content and therefore shouldn't be subject to takedown requests, similar to how you wouldn't send takedown requests to Lumen Technologies (a tier 1 transit provider) because they provide transit to some VPS provider that ultimately hosts the ddos for hire site.

anal_reactor 1y ago

Different question, but what are realistic use cases of archive.today that could be interesting for average person?

j-bos 1y ago
Have you ever wanted to reread an old article/blog from a ling dead website? Needed to compare the old TOS with the latest TOS? Been looking for what was that video on your playlist about that got removed from youtube? Things like that are fairly average. It can also be helpful for dispute resolutuon and holding public parties to account.
betaby 1y ago
News agencies edit the history all the time.

BoppreH 1y ago

So they're pressuring a DNS resolver to block a specific website? That seems like an incredibly slippery slope. What stops them from forcing Chrome to block the website, or LetsEncrypt to not issue any more certificates for the domain, or Microsoft and Apple to add them to their firewalls? Hell, can they go after the infrastructure software developers and say, force nginx to add a check and refuse to serve the domain? Then what happens when a fake report is sent to an open source project without budget for lawyers?

fuzzy2 1y ago
We already did the slipping. Sony sued Quad9 to have them block The Pirate Bay. They only lost after a lengthy legal exchange. There's also voluntary censorship, so without any real due process, in some countries. Mostly at ISP level, but all the other entities you mentioned could also implement it. They may be forced to, as a means of dodging liability. There's all kinds of nefarious schemes.
tuetuopay 1y ago
Oh trust me, if they could enforce the block at the browser level they would. We're well past the start of the slippery slope here in France when it comes to surveillance and control. I started with telling ISPs to block websites at the DNS level. The people started using 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9 and so on. So now they pressure those third-party DNS providers to do the same. This is why 9.9.9.9 is now unavailable here: they stopped serving France because they did not want to comply.
superkuh 1y ago
They've almost realized where to put the pressure. Almost. Once these kinds of attackers realize the real chokepoint of the modern web: certificate authorities for HTTPS certs, we're doomed. Everyone centralizes in the handful of companies and those companies decide every ~90 days which websites are visitable. Because browsers now come pre-configured to not allow visiting HTTP websites and people don't do HTTP+HTTPS anymore. Just HTTP-only. The DNS resolver attacks are but pin pricks compared to the coming centralized control via CAs.
codedokode 1y ago

octagons 1y ago

The wording and tone of the emails sent to Adguard reads just like phishing emails with a hint of political SMS spam. Glad to see the people behind there thinking critically and acting rationally despite such language.

mkagenius 1y ago
It was a little weird that they didnt suspect phishing from the get go.

codedokode 1y ago

Note that association's site is made from this free template [1] with minimal editing (can see it using diff). The web hosting account at name.com (prices starting from $5/year) was registered around Jan 12, 2025 [2]. The page also contains commented out section with a part of French mobile phone number and words "Emergency Standard" (the template contained fictional number here):  [1] https://www.tooplate.com/view/2117-infinite-loop https://www.tooplate.com/view/2117-infinite-loop [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250112153727/https://webabusedefense.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250112153727/https://webabused...

betaby 1y ago
Quite possible that's just some bureaucrats kids running that site in exchange for EU grants. In fact in couple of countries that's precisely the case.
- user_7832 1y ago
  Well then, that would be a very interesting thing to watch when it happens! From the article, the penalty for a false report: > ...shall be punished by one year’s imprisonment and a fine of €15,000. Side note, would anybody know how "easily" do political elites get off the hook in France?
  - rgj 1y ago
    But apparently there was actual CSAM there, since the article mentioned that archive.is removed it within a few hours. So the claim was real. Why did they make up such a story around it?
    - betaby 1y ago
      Because they went to the unrelated DNS provider and not the archive itself.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Friendly reminder that archive box exists to let you self host your own archive service. https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox I dream of a day where archivebox becomes a fleet of homelabs all over the world making it drastically harder to block them all.

codedokode 1y ago
I think about the opposite, people reading in the news that FBI is after archiving sites, will not want to launch their own site, except maybe the radical types.
- wartywhoa23 1y ago
  1960s: FBI/CIA invents the term "conspiracy theorist" 2020s: FBI/CIA invents the term "radical archivist"
nikisweeting 1y ago
I've been mulling over how to take ArchiveBox in this direction for years, but it's a really hard problem to tackle because of privacy. https://docs.sweeting.me/s/cookie-dilemma https://docs.sweeting.me/s/cookie-dilemma Most content is going behind logins these days, and if you include the PII of the person doing the archiving in the archives then it's A. really easy for providers to block that account B. potentially dangerous to dox the person doing the archiving. The problem is removing PII from logged in sites is that it's not as simple as stripping some EXIF data, the html and JS is littered with secret tokens, usernames, user-specific notifications, etc. that would reveal the ID of the archivist and cant be removed without breaking page behavior on replay. My latest progress is that it might be possible to anonymize logged in snapshots by using the intersection of two different logged-in snapshots, making them easier to share over a distributed system like Bittorrent or IPFS without doxxing the archivist. More here: https://github.com/pirate/html-private-set-intersection https://github.com/pirate/html-private-set-intersection
e2le 1y ago
Out of curiosity, does ArchiveBox integrate some way of verifying the contents of the archived page(s) are legitimate and unmodified?

_blk 1y ago

Kudos to adguard dns for [planing to] filing a counter-claim against potential abuse of power.

amelius 1y ago

If the US and UK block websites like archive.today, scihub, and libgen/anna's archive, then how do we think we win the information war against countries that don't give a bleep about copyright?

morkalork 1y ago
What are you saying, that governments should consider long term success over immediate corporate wants? That sounds like commie talk!

LelouBil 1y ago

[flagged]

neuroelectron 1y ago

I bet its mirrors of their own honeypot websites they submitted themself to remove records of websites they rather have memory-holed.

op00to 1y ago

Wouldn’t the people making the complaint also be subject to prosecution for accessing illegal materials?

avazhi 1y ago

Anti-child porn activists really are a unique new breed of fascist authoritarians. This is only the latest in a long line of outrageous and comical threatening letters where the recipient’s apparent reticence to comply with a takedown request is deemed to be, by the activists, active knowing involvement and participation, which is obviously outrageous but these dickheads bank on the fact that actual child porn elicits such strong community reactions. See also: trying to strongarm Apple into running local scans on everybody’s devices and telling Apple not to listen to its customers.

citizenpaul 1y ago
I write a huge comment on why and how universal per-authorized CSAM scanning that could literally open an investigation with no human oversight was bad. Back during the apple fiasco. Had a near universal negative reaction from HN. I gave up hope for any sort of non authoritarian future at that point. HN seems to lean authoritarian which is usual for the bourgeois class as they think they are exempt from being on the wall. After all if you have nothing to hide....

ngriffiths 1y ago

> a private company shouldn’t have to decide what counts as “illegal” content under threat of legal action. Immediately reminded me of patio11's amazing write up[1] of debanking, featuring banks being deputized as law enforcement for financial crimes (which is completely non controversial), and even used as a convenient tool to regulate other industries that the white house didn't like (kinda controversial). [1]: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

SoftTalker 1y ago
Typically long-winded patio11 article that basically says: Banks are suspicious of crypto.
salawat 1y ago
I strongly disagree that financial institutions being a de facto extension of law enforcement is "non-controversial". It may be the way things are; it may be a pre-req of making financial crime tractable; but that does not detract from the fact that every financial institution is in essence, deputized law enforcement, and negate the chilling effect that comes as a consequence thereof on a business environment subject to it.
- ngriffiths 1y ago
  Fair enough. It was something that impressed me when I first read about it. You hear about disputes between Apple and the FBI over unlocking phones and meanwhile banks are like "and over here are whole floors of analysts tracking suspicious stuff." I definitely agree there are downsides and not everyone is happy about the floors of analysts, but I do think they are very far away from the Overton window.

wartywhoa23 1y ago

The Ministry of Truth simply doesn't want unaccounted and uncontrolled snapshots of history. Too much hassle steering the narrative regarding any surfacing truth-now-meant-to-be-lies and vice versa into fake news territory, discrediting by association, cranking up troll farms.. Much easier to make this inconvenience disappear with the due cooperation from the controlled outlets of information. Then they will come after our local storage, and making it prohibitively expensive is the least malign way they can come up with.

unwise-exe 1y ago
Who cares about local storage? You could have just made up whatever you're claiming to have saved.
- wartywhoa23 1y ago
  True, it's next to useless as a proof of anything for wide audience... But what does care about local storage in this brave new gaslit world is my own sanity, for one.
- sedatk 1y ago
  Archival sites could let you download cryptographically signed copies of the archived pages. If they get removed from the archival site, the authenticity of your local copies can still be attested.
- jMyles 1y ago
  Storage media and authenticity have zero overlap in the venn diagram. Authenticity is a cryptological feature of the internet, not a topological one. The reason you believe that you're reading something on news.ycombinator.com right now is not the path by which the bytes were copied from one interface to the next before getting to you, but the certificate and signature that confirms you have a valid HTTPS connection.
blumomo 1y ago
Had exactly the same thoughts. Thanks for saving me from posting this.

AstralStorm 1y ago

How can you even sue without any legal identity? This website and an organisation does not happen to have any. Might as well be some shell company in the Carribeans with no legal standing in France. It's not even good enough for public prosecution, as the tip would then go through French services. This law is completely backwards, and worse than a SLAPP. If you cannot respond to a report in any way, it should be null.

valicord 1y ago
If you can sue shark fins, why not a website? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately_64,695_Pounds_of_Shark_Fins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...
- xandrius 1y ago
  Holy crap, 30'000 sharks kills for a bloody soup. Insane and that wasn't even their only journey.
- flufluflufluffy 1y ago
  Amazing, here is a list of other similarly hilariously-titled “in rem jurisdiction” cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction#Examples Some good ones: - United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster - United States v. 11 1/4 Dozen Packages of Articles Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat's Shoo-Fly Powders for Drunkenness - South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats
  - bogwog 1y ago
    My favorite is United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster. The Rooster won.
  - robotnikman 1y ago
    My favorite one: United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consisting_of_50,000_Cardboard_Boxes_More_or_Less,_Each_Containing_One_Pair_of_Clacker_Balls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consi...

fukka42 1y ago

[flagged]

tomhow 1y ago
We've banned this account for engaging in political battle and ignoring an earlier appeal to stop. Please stop registering new accounts to break the guidelines with. It becomes more obvious the more you do it. The number of comments containing the word "America" alone is a pattern that has no place here. And no it's nothing to do with the site or its moderators being American; the moderators aren't American and we do exactly the same thing if it is any other country. These and other comments are plainly in breach of the guidelines against flamewar-style commenting and political battle. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45688936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45688936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45603743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45603743
- fukka42 1y ago
  [dead]

econ 1y ago

One more reason for browsers to save all pages one visits.

sans_souse 1y ago

I wonder if ignoring the email and forcing a more official action would have been the better move here, in retrospect? Perhaps I am ignorant on the legal responsibilities of your services, just seems like something more formal than an email would have at least served more as "official notice"

tarkin2 1y ago

Well, that was stellar work. It's a little sad that such threats could work with a smaller less resourced company. Still, adguard dns got on to my radar because of this.

renewiltord 1y ago

[flagged]

slater 1y ago
They actually don't, oddly enough.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  They’re often of the shape here where you have to comply with arbitrary requests at great risk. Germany being the exception and being direct about it. Most other European countries try to do this thing where the government can access anything and then they selectively enforce on what they want.

ProofHouse 1y ago

Kudos

ThouYS 1y ago

Another day, another attempt at destroying the archives.. Welp

jayess 1y ago

lol, "American Law Firm"

varenc 1y ago

Super odd to pressure an ad-blocking DNS provider to use their service to 'block' archive.today. Adguard just provides block lists that allow users to easily block ad services. If adguard starts blocking certain domains users actually want to access, users will simply switch off of adguard. No one uses adguard as a resolver by default, they switch to adguard to block ads. This seems like it'd be a pretty ineffective way of blocking sites users actually want to access.

novemp 1y ago

> While the exact nature of the FBI investigation hasn’t been confirmed, it is speculated it can be related to copyright or CSAM (child sexual abuse material) dissemination issues. Altogether, the situation suggests growing pressure on whoever runs Archive.is, and on intermediaries that help make its service accessible. Oh, so a chatbot wrote this article. Glad it tipped its hand early enough I didn't waste that much time.

chrneu 1y ago

It's wild how much stuff nowadays is people/bad actors just doing things and expecting nobody to call them out. Like, the whole patent troll "industry" is just abusing the law, hoping people don't stop them. Maybe folks should start calling eachother out?

52-6F-62 1y ago
I think because what predominates is the notion that if it makes money it is good. If it makes a lot of money, then it is very good. If it claims moral superiority, that's fine and well, but if it doesn't make as much money then it doesn't deserve to live. If you say anything to the contrary, you are "irrational", perhaps worse.
phendrenad2 1y ago
It's the lawyers. They ran out of actual lawsuits, so they're inventing them. They either find a wheelchair-bound person to sue you because your shop is in a historic building and you never bothered to spend tens of thousands on making it ADA compliant, or they sue you because your website doesn't pass ADA compliance[1] (hey, does HN pass ADA compliance? I have an idea...), or they find[2] a couple guys selling illegal truck parts and try to sue them for tens of millions. https://www.accessibility.works/blog/ada-lawsuit-trends-statistics-2024-summary/ https://www.accessibility.works/blog/ada-lawsuit-trends-stat... [1] https://www.uphe.org/priority-issues/diesel/ https://www.uphe.org/priority-issues/diesel/ [2]

Ms-J 1y ago

It has been said that the main reason for the attack on Archive is because Israel needs to cover up their crimes. There is too much evidence in the open. It's the equivalent of burning a library down because books have records of the truth. Adguard deserves the highest praise for publicizing this attack on them.

danielxt 1y ago
> has been said that the main reason for the attack on Archive is because Israel Really? interesting couldn't find anything talking about that, mind sharing a link?

mzajc 1y ago

> They [archive.today] replied within a few hours. The response was straightforward: the illegal content would be removed (and we verified that it was), and they had never received any previous notifications about those URLs. I think it's very telling that the WAAD people don't mention that last bit in their response[0] - unless archive.today rotates their DKIM records, the messages would be verifiably signed. This of course means you can't just make stuff up, which is likely what they did. [0] https://archive.ph/MCt4g https://archive.ph/MCt4g

PinkSheep 1y ago

Good job on AdGuard's end for bringing this to the Internet's attention. I especially enjoyed the unearthed details about this "N"GO's short history. I think the e-mail exchange should've been kept short, although it is good that the owner of archive.today was eventually notified (by them) about these links in good faith to remove them. Their reply should've been the following: "Thank you for contacting us. If you have conclusive proof of illegal behavior, you should contact police and seek legal assistance. A website's administrator is expected to adequately react to illegal actions conducted by its users, such as removing media that's breaking a law. We have visited the URLs provided by you (https://archive[.]today/ https://archive[.]today/ , ...) and found no evidence to corroborate your concerns. To avoid misunderstandings, we require you to send a certified mail to <Adguards company address> before further replies on this matter." Remember guys, it should always be certified mail (bonus points for international). And yes, I mean literal index pages as provided in the first e-mail. Play by the legal understanding of words. Be creative and break the rules to the extent of not breaking them ;) PS: If you want to see more of "funny replies" you should read Njalla's blog (<https://njal.la/blog/ https://njal.la/blog/>) and TPB's infamous e-mail replies.

mmooss 1y ago
I can see what you are getting at. Is this meant to be real advice - i.e., are you an attorney, familiar with French law, etc.?
dpark 1y ago
> We have visited the URLs provided by you “You sent claims of CSAM hosted on someone else’s servers and we decided to download it.” Hell no. I don’t want to see that and I don’t want it being ingested into systems I control. Of all the stuff here, “download some supposed CSAM to see if it’s real” is the absolute worst advice I can imagine.
- noosphr 1y ago
  The above post contains csam, Dang please delete it without reading. Thanks.

ksynwa 1y ago

Tangential but how does archive.today stack up against other archiving services? I've always found it faster and more reliable than the wayback machine and ghostarchive. The paywall bypass feature is also invaluable to be but I don't know if other services have that provision. I would be really sad if it went down.

deinonychus 1y ago

Am I crazy or did those WAAD guys themselves just link the public to potentially illegal content? As of writing, they have a public response hosted on their website, including screenshots of emails to/from Google with URLs that Google agreed to remove. WAAD censored out the URLs, except they didn't actually because whatever paintbrush tool they used didn't have the opacity maxed out. I'm not looking up those URLs to find out. edit: They also leaked the Adguard admin's email, which WAAD complained about being the victim of.

nervysnail 1y ago
God... Here from their official "presse" announcement: https://web.archive.org/web/20251116002625/https://webabusedefense.com/presse/remove_google1.jpeg https://web.archive.org/web/20251116002625/https://webabused...
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  Looks like they replace the file on their website with a new, actually censored version. WAAD seems to be reading along here. Wonder if your archive.org link now makes archive.org one of their targets.
  - nervysnail 1y ago
    The guy who "censored" the links should turn himself over to the police over carelessness IMO.
mouse_ 1y ago
> Am I crazy or did those WAAD guys themselves just link the public to potentially illegal content? I mean, it's well known that governments possess and distribute more of the stuff than anyone else. Government or not, not a big surprise.

kazinator 1y ago

Hi there, you don't know me or were I'm calling from, but I want you to go next door and punch your neighbor in the face. Believe me when I say, he is hoarding child porn. What, you don't want to? You must not be against child porn!

cft 1y ago

Subpoena from the FBI to Tucows to disclose identity of archive.today(is) operator: https://pdflink.to/1e0e0ecd/ https://pdflink.to/1e0e0ecd/

cactusplant7374 1y ago
Were they able to discover their identity?

Brian_K_White 1y ago

The accuser sure seems to value their own anonymity while trying to pierce someone else's.

dev1ycan 1y ago

Follows suit on my other comment about how every site with information be it legal or not is being actually pressured now to take down their info after "AI" (LLMs) mafia bosses used the info to train their AI already... It's sickening to see people okay with the destruction of the "real" knowledge filled internet in favor of a dystopia.

pinkmuffinere 1y ago

If the archive.today contact is telling the truth, then this implies that WAAD had collected links containing CSAM and chose not to contact the person who could best get rid of the material. I think it implies either: 1. WAAD has developed a good way of detecting CSAM, but is ok with the CSAM staying available longer than it needs to, and remaining accessible to a wider audience than needed, in order to pursue their ulterior motive. In this case, they could be improving the world in some significant way, but are just choosing to do something else. 2. WAAD has intentionally had archive.today index CSAM material in order to pursue their ulterior motive. Of course, option 2 is _much_ more damning than option 1, but I feel both are really bad, and naively I'd still expect option 1 to be illegal. If you know of a crime and intentionally hide it, that seem illegal.

point999 1y ago
> If you know of a crime and intentionally hide it, that seem illegal. Yet this is a standard way to become a wealthy lawyer.

mcny 1y ago

web archives are so important. perhaps now more than ever. recently, a company founder / ceo swore up and down right here on this orange website that they never said the word "forever" on their pricing page until someone brought proof using a web archive. If the US government is behind this nonsense, I am very displeased by it. I wish there was a way we could stop the FBI from doing this kind of tomfoolery.

lacoolj 1y ago

Seems like there's an actual child/teenager running that "company"

Vera_Wilde 1y ago

If an opaque actor can fabricate legal-ish complaints and pressure DNS providers into blocking a site, the system is wide open for abuse. Smaller services without legal teams would just fold. Curious if others are seeing this kind of “shadow regulation” pop up more frequently elsewhere — especially in email filtering, CDN layers, and AI content moderation.

DoctorOetker 1y ago

1. I am confused, did copyright holders not amused by archive.today etc, intentionally serve CSAM material when they detected a visitor was in fact archive.today scraping one of their pages? It seems they are on the hook for more than just "inaccurate reporting of CSAM materials". 2. Is it a legally allowed tactic for copyright-luvva's to intentionally seek out CSAM content online, and then submit those URL's to sites like archive.today? Which entity is at greater legal peril, the one that aids the distribution of CSAM materials by intentionally having a site like archive.today archive CSAM content, or archive.today unintentionally being tricked into archiving CSAM content? 3. Everyone has traumas, of one kind of another. Each deals or tries to deal with them in their own way. Suppose a victim of crimes (still unpunished) finds or is informed of the presence of evidence online, and suppose this victim (regardless of how representative) finds the preservation of this evidence more important than the humiliation associated with it, how (in)just are laws that blanket suppress CSAM material? To give a more vigorous example: imagine you were raped by some no-yet-fallen UK nobility, and you are made aware of the presence of this evidence on some royal FTP server (or whatever), and you succeed in having archive.today "notarize" this evidence (independently from legal channels, since theres a suspiciously low amount of nobility being convicted, in contrast to your personal experience). These rules for supressing CSAM can be wielded as a sword precisely against those who fell prey to perpetrators...

thrdbndndn 1y ago

It looks like WAAD has posted a response to this situation: https://webabusedefense.com/presse/Communiquer_presse_Aff-Adguad_Archive-15-11-2025.pdf https://webabusedefense.com/presse/Communiquer_presse_Aff-Ad... [pdf]

squigz 1y ago
Scroll down in the PDF for an English translation. "The fight against child sexual abuse material is not negotiable. It cannot be relativized. It cannot be turned against those who fight it." This sort of moral certainty won't help anyone.
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  Exactly what a shell organization for the government would say to make themselves look silly so we all stop digging.

dclowd9901 1y ago

> The illegal content was promptly removed from Archive.today after we notified them. Everything else aside, this is a big issue for archive.today and makes it very difficult to defend its continued existence. Crap.

Longlius 1y ago
How is it an issue for Archive.today? They immediately removed the content upon being notified about it. That's the "standard" level of responsibility for any site that hosts user-uploaded content.
- squigz 1y ago
  Unless GP is suggesting the act of removal is what is worrying.

Quarrel 1y ago

I wonder if this is why NextDNS block the archive.today domains? While the NextDNS company is registered in Delaware, the founders are French nationals, so may feel more exposed to such threats. fwiw, you can use rewrites for these domains in the nextdns settings, or manage it in your local dns client, and get around this pretty easily.

MrDresden 1y ago

Something that I feel needs to be clarified, since I've noticed this being parroted around and it's technically incorrect: It is incorrect to say the FBI has subpoenad the register for Archive.is. The FBI can not subpoena the register for .is domains, since there is only one and it is Icelandic. US subpoenas have no power outside the US. So they are going after another of Archive.is domains, just not the Icelandic one.

miellaby 1y ago

À simple way to debunk this fake French pretending non-profit complainer is to check it's present in the Répertoire national des associations (RNA)

desmaraisp 1y ago
They are in the RNA: https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-detail-annonce/?q.id=id:202500111688 https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta...

ilitirit 1y ago

After I read that emotive response I couldn't help but wondering if this wasn't part of a scheme to help someone cover up a crime. This is how I would have responded: "Hi, These do appear to be quite serious crimes. I've sent all the URLs, your email address, emails and responses to the relevant law agencies. Regards, AdGuard"

greatgib 1y ago

The feeling that I have when seeing this investigation is that Waad is a covert ops by right holders like newspapers or the fbi, or some parties like that. They upload themselves pages with the bad content for then complains about it. Probably they know that no one will care to block or snitch on the website if it is just because it is used to "snapshot" newspaper posts, but CSAM is evil so that is the good excuse to badmouth a service like that. Similar to what is used currently in Europe to undermine our rights or the cia operation to burn Julian Assange.

billy99k 1y ago

I would have liked the 'suspicious pressure' when Parler was shutdown by colluding tech companies and the US government.