FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The current administration would be a good joke if it wasn't real.
If the websites were inclined to whitelist these crawlers, they’d also whitelist archive.org which is actually easy to whitelist. Archive.is is not
Methinks someone accidentally archived the Epstein files, and the FBI is desperately trying to scrub the unredacted backups before the archive URL becomes well-known. That alone would align somewhat with the CP claim,
A very large partition of citations in Wikipedia for example relies on them. Most of the pages that cite archived copies do so because the live version is no longer available I would like to have some assurances that archive.is and the likes are not altering their content in any way over time.
Unironically content sensitive hashing of archival pages might be one of the few use cases where something like a blockchain might actually be useful for.
Doing that with a blockchain like tech is one of the few use cases where the tech itself actually adds value.
Heck you might be able to store the entire pages on a blockchain or a blockchain linked storage.
The problem with these sites is that we implicitly trust them and unlike a book or other handprint media where editing or destroying all unedited existing copies is effectively impossible if a shady actor can easily start editing archived news articles and other sites that are no longer publicly available.
If you download an ISO for a Linux OS for example, they give you the hash of the file so you can check it. They don't build an entire blockchain whatever to validate the hash.
If Wikipedia recorded the hash of every referenced page you could verify that the archive.is page is unchanged.
You could certainly argue that archive.is isn’t the right place to store archives (I have no idea) but attempting to move all this to the blockchain would be very expensive.
A simple four-hash like BSD or Gentoo Linux do with their repository is more than sufficient.
No need to record who is requesting the recording, much leas fetchibg.
A blockchain is, at its core, a distributed database, it is exactly made for this use case.
These same limitations amplifies when going to outer scopes like URL itself, blockchain isn't immune to this.
Blockchain also has the same problem when attempting to track/verify each single vote.
W3C Subresource Integrity Recommendation
Source: https://www.w3.org/TR/sri-2/
> What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?
It would be way cheaper for Wikipedia to run a durable archive service themselves than to use the blockchain as an archive.
That's nonsensical, the price of using a service on a blockchain is essentially a floating value. That is the whole point of having a token in the first place: people willing to store and people storing are participating in the price of the service.
Last I checked, filecoin was a few cents per GB per month.
You can create a blockchain of kind hearted people to store Wikipedia as well, it's really up to you. But comparing apples and oranges makes no sense.
This is kind of a ridiculous response. The price of oil is also a floating value and yet it is not nonsensical to discuss the price of a barrel of oil.
Yes, the cost to store something on the bitcoin blockchain floats. Several sources indicate that roughly a dollar is a reasonable approximation currently. If you disagree I’d be interested in seeing your data.
> Last I checked, filecoin was a few cents per GB per month.
I don’t know a ton about filecoin but it seems like retrieving data is pretty cumbersome. It’s not clear that this would actually be useable for a Wikipedia reference archive.
> You can create a blockchain of kind hearted people to store Wikipedia as well, it's really up to you. But comparing apples and oranges makes no sense.
Blockchain for its own sake. Sure, you could create a custom blockchain. You could also just pay AWS for georeplicated blob storage and it would be way less complex.
Is the Internet Archive related to archive.is?
The .is TLD is run by ISNIC and they process registrations directly, and operating out of Iceland, it would be very strange if they took orders from the FBI.
Ars inventing their own colour here. This is simply not true.
What are you talking about? Right at the top of the subpoena it literally says in bold and all caps, and I quote:
>YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFNITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.
And thus to avoid that risk, to think twice before disclosing. Disclosure would only be punished if the specific circumstances actually result in legally-considered-(unlawful-)interference.
“Hey, we got this subpoena. You better quickly wipe all your drives” probably would.