Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today | Hacker News Reader

Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

adguard-dns.io

1,816 pointsimmibis443 comments

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/ , ...) 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/>) and TPB's infamous e-mail replies.

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.?

> 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.

The above post contains csam, Dang please delete it without reading. Thanks.

You misunderstand the situation and what I was suggesting. GP was saying that AdGuard should have checked the contents of some random URL supposedly containing CSAM on archive.today.

This is not AdGuard’s job. Knowingly downloading CSAM is very likely illegal. And it also potentially opens them up for additional liability if they do determine that CSAM is present.

AdGuard seems like they did exactly the right thing, which is to send the report along to the party actually responsible for cleaning up the supposed CSAM.

> Knowingly downloading CSAM is very likely illegal.

Put CSAM in a banner ad, and arrest everyone who was served that ad?

Post a CSAM photo behind plexiglass on a wall in a public space, and arrest everyone who walks by and glanced at it?

Just how stupid do you think lawmakers, judges, prosecutors, and police are? People get arrested for paying for, or sharing CSAM, not just stumbling on a website that might have something questionable. It is illegal to possess, but just loading a website is hardly possession... If it was, all of Facebook and Google's content moderators would be facing life-sentences.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/knowingly

You even quoted the word...

Arrests aren't the only way a company can be harmed. Being flagged or investigated is enough of a legal burden and reputational hit that it could be catastrophic. "Stumbling" is not a part of any network protocol. Over a network, viewing a link is indistinguishable from downloading its contents.

> Just how stupid do you think lawmakers, judges, prosecutors, and police are?

Quite often pretty stupid, honestly. Or careless, ignorant, jaded, corrupt, etc etc

Illegal to possess, and you would have accessed it to view content that is illegal to access as well?

The people who do this as part of their job do so under strict supervision, legal guard rails AND mandatory counselling. Which happens to include a number of content moderators.[0]

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crr9q2jz7y0o

You have way too much faith. Almost endless examples of injustice can be observed.

There's another reason: the criminal justice system is structured in such a way that it requires material evidence to prove someone is guilty and punish them. It would be unacceptable to send an innocent person to prison, and you can't prove that someone has merely viewed content.

We need a rule that people who haven't had to deal with the police and courts need to shut up about how police and courts work.

Even if nobody involved commits a crime and just does their job resonably well, getting your apartment raided, all your neighbours seeing that, your coworkers hearing about it, having to pay for a lawyer, losing all your electronic devices for months if not years and having to buy new ones, not being ablo to make proper plans because you never know when they might throw another court date at you...

But more often than not, they don't do their job well. They're sloppy, indifferent, they don't really understand computers or technology... You might get convicted just because a judge doesn't understand what downloading actually means.

And then you also get the ass-covering. They spent all this time and effort, but now it looks like you're innocent. Their bosses would be pissed, maybe you could even sue them. So they do their best to make even the smallest and dumbest charges stick. They look for other potentian crimes. They threaten you until you take a plea deal. They dissect and twist everything you said. Just so they don't have to admit they made a

"Innocent until proven guilty" might be true in the most technical sense. But being innocent doesn't help when your entire life is thrown upside down, everyone you know thinks you're a criminal, you're spending thousands on legal costs...

Quite stupid, actually. Stuff like CSAM is not to be messed around with. Having it in your cache is considered possession by police forces, even if the judge won't convict you if you can explain it. Even if the police doesn't come after you, it's the exact point in almost every jurisdiction where someone else's content suddenly becomes your problem, legally speaking.

You won't go to jail or life most of the time if you can explain how or why, but there are extremely strict rules around CSAM that you need to deal with. One of those is "don't look at it unless absolutely necessary". For AdGuard, I doubt this use would qualify for "absolutely necessary". Even police forces use dedicated software that doesn't keep too many copies around, and restrict how many people are allowed to look at the screens for screening computers.

The people applying mass censorship are using CSAM as a weapon. It'd be unwise for AdGuard to give them the extra ammunition by (admitting to) checking the CSAM content themselves.

Furthermore, if the complaint has merit and the content linked does contain CSAM, there is some pretty bad shit out there. I'm not prepared to look at pictures of raped babies or tortured children but I know full well that that content is out there on the internet.

> Just how stupid do you think lawmakers, judges, prosecutors, and police are?

Very! Unimaginably so! A friend of mine from Germany received a GIF that contained ONE FRAME of CSAM from someone in a group chat, Whatsapp auto-downloaded it into the gallery, something auto reported it and a month later, cops showed up to take away all his electronic devices. This is apparently a thing people do there, like americans SWAT livestreamers. I think it took over a year for them to return his devices. He had to pay for a lawyer and buy a new phone and laptop. He wasn't charged with anything, but because the report was automated, there wasn't even anyone to sue for a false report.

> because the report was automated, there wasn't even anyone to sue for a false report

Is there a reason the legal entity which deployed the software can't be named? Seems like the next logical step, anyway.

The thing is, it was technically a correct report. One frame of that gif did correpond to a known piece of CSAM (presumably they use some kind of perceptual hashing). The facts that 1) the gif was clearly a sick joke (he described it as a slow motion bullet shot from a movie, landing in something/someone and then flashing the one frame, presumably the intention being "haha, get shot with the child porn bullet"); 2) it was only one inconsequential piece, not a whole collection; 3) it was downloaded automatically from a group chat... are not in scope of the "did this user just upload CSAM to our servers" function (from what I understood, it was triggered by the picture being backed up to Google Photos or Apple's equivalent).

These are all things that, in a functioning system, the police officer receiving the report would take into account. If it's a first report, diaregard. If it's a second, check the file name that was also presumably in the report, see it's a Whatsapp folder and disregard it. If it's a third report or there are multiple pieces, get a warrant to run a CSAM scan on the person's device, go to their apartment, run it, see there's nothing else, close the case. If it's a clear "prank", start investigating the person who sent it.

But since the police are, in general, trigger happy lunatics, you get a full raid instead. And since computer forensics is hard and doesn't pay well, the investigation took many months instead of an afternoon. The fuckup was squarely on the law enforcement side, as well as in the law itself.

>(he described it as a slow motion bullet shot from a movie, landing in something/someone and then flashing the one frame, presumably the intention being "haha, get shot with the child porn bullet")

That's the slippery slope nature of these laws. For sure a CSAM is "out there" and easily acquired. And now it some sort of toxic, radioactive content that destroys systems, corporations, and most importantly, invididuals if weaponized.

I suppose these people with good intentions, seeking to wipe CSAM off the face of the earth with religious fervor ... I suppose they never realized that such thing as a troll exists on the internet who will gladly point their fervor as the troll pleases like a firehose of seething

This is one good reason we should not tolerate our devices auto-snitching on us to the police. Any tool can be weaponized. The legal system has a presumption of innocence, but it grinds painfully slowly, and the mere investigation can be extremely disruptive, even assuming they don't find anything further to pursue once they turn the eye of Sauron upon you.

There is no such thing as not to sue anyone. Police can squeeze and lie as much as they want, but there are laws about the abuse of power, false police reporting, obstruction of justice. But it will be expensive as effectively you are going to the court against a state.

Also of course there is a person somewhere behind a keyboard who wrote the software which flags, correctly or incorrectly, files. Their name (Thorn) is kept strictly away from any public testimonial with NDAs with police, because eventually there will be class action lawsuits against them in the USA.

Nothing above links to anything suspicious mate, much less that.

That's not the argument. The argument is that "when someone relays to you a claim of illegal activity, you are not allowed to verify for yourself" is not tenable in a free society.

In this particular example, you have admitted to reading the subversive post and therefore your post should also be deleted.

You're engaging with my post so yours is also subversive ay lmao

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):

               <!-- <div class="contact-item">
                  <a rel="nofollow" href="tel:06221319" class="item-link">
                      <i class="fas fa-2x fa-phone-square mr-4"></i>
                      <span class="mb-0">Emergency Standard</span>
                  </a>              
                </div> -->

[1] https://www.tooplate.com/view/2117-infinite-loop

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250112153727/https://webabused...

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.

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?

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?

Because they went to the unrelated DNS provider and not the archive itself.

Since archive.is doesn’t scan the internet and only archives content on demand, those might as well have been planted exactly for this purpose - which would put another crime onto the accuser.

False flag attacks are a thing that wannabe censors do.

They post CSAM to some service/site, then immediately report it to every possible contact of the site's hosting provider, DNS provider, DDoS protection provider, etc. But not the site itself.

Before they do that, they spend weeks probing the site's moderation response, to work out the best time to evade detection on the site itself.

Then they do it again, and again, and again. They fight against the site's attempt to block them.

Their intent is to _deliberately_ get the site into trouble, and ultimately get the site's hosting, DNS, peering, etc. to abandon it.

The same sort of shitstains also persistently DDoS the site.

Why do they do it? Usually minor and petty internet squabbles, the instigator hates the site and wants to destroy the site, and uses these underhand tactics to do it.

They have no legal way to get what they want -- destroy someone else's site for their own pleasure -- so they use illegal ways. https://protectthestack.org/

I don’t understand this attack, are these reports anonymous or something?

In order to pull off this attack the attacker would have to have a collection of CSAM to upload. What if the site being attacked logged the uploader’s IP and went above-and-beyond complying with authorities and provided the source of the upload.

Well, I guess some people doing this sort of thing would try to hide their identity while doing the upload. Honestly, in that case… it might be reasonable for sites to not accept uploads via things like TOR, right? (Or however else these people hide their tracks).

I assume people who do this also do other illegal things and know how to anonymize themselves.

People who have money to rent DDoS services from criminals also have money to rent VPNs that use US residential IP addresses (usually from home computers infected with malware under the control of criminals)

Uploading illegal material of some sort to a site with user-contributed content, and then immediately reporting it, is a common abuse tactic.

>They 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.

They never notified archive.today of the illegal material, instead they chose to demand blocking actions of archive.today from a DNS provider. I would be interested to know whether any other DNS service providers have received similar such demands.

I would assume (like any normal individual), that you would notify the service first (archive.today) and if they've proven to be a non-responder to CSAM material then escalate to legal action.

If archive.today is honest about never receiving a prior notification, then the way in which they've decided to go about removing the illegal material is very suspicious.

One might even go so far to insinuate that they were the party responsible for the CSAM being there to begin with. Wouldn't be the first time someone weaponized such content. I remember at least one case were a steamer was "digitally" swatted using a Dropbox upload link.

The fake abuse reports coming to IP addresses hosting TOR relays (not exits) might be same group trying to pollute the commons.

If the world ran by conspiracy theories, the goal would be to normalize censorship at DNS level. Sony has tried (>2 years ago) by taking Quad9 to court over a copyright matter. There are too many parties involved for whom this practice would be a useful tool to have.

Generally if you encounter CSAM you should report to your countries appropriate organisation. Skip the police and go straight there to save everyone some time and avoid confusion. This agency will handle notifications etc to the site.

USA - https://report.cybertip.org/reporting

UK - https://report.iwf.org.uk/org/ (technically the NCA, but they are a catch all reporting target. As a private individual IWF will handle the onward report for you).

If you are in a country without such an agency, the above agencies are good to inform, as they will both handle international reports.

These organisations will ensure the material is taken down, and will capture and analyse it. CSAM can be compared against hash databases (https://www.thorn.org/) to determine whether there it is as yet unknown material or reshared known material. This can help lead to the identification, arrest, and conviction of material creators as well as the identification and support of victims.

If you tell the site administrator directly there is a good chance they will remove the material and not report it; this is a huge problem in this space at the moment.

In the UK and the USA (and many other places) operators are obligated to report the material; in fact the controversial Online Safety Act puts actual teeth around this very obligation in the UK.

The explanation seems a bit incoherent for this case of a french entity.

Assuming the complainant has some genuine tip,

Which court would actually determine it to be illegal conclusively? (It can’t be a uk or us court, could it?)

And who issues the binding order to take it down from the known sites?

The point is that these organisations are in contact with each other and have established channels of funneling reports to each other and relevant legal systems for action.

Making the report is a long way off court action, and it would be unusual for a court to be involved. In most cases the data is connected, documented, and site owners contacted and educated.

Very few countries see accidental/unintentional hosting as a crime (it will fail most reasonableness tests) and fewer are interested in prosecuting one off offenders who can just be asked to stop.

Most countries are very interested in prosecuting the underlying creators and finding and supporting the victims.

Thorn is the same organisation which drives Chat Control in the EU and to have their secret component installed in every app to scan your messages. Working with these organisations harms consumers, is detrimental for privacy and human rights even if they somehow have good intentions.

> Generally if you encounter CSAM you should report to your countries appropriate organisation.

So I should report that I consumed child porn? That's a hard pass from me.

I would generally use the standard precautions (VPN/Tor/etc.) but I think these organizations would much rather have you report the content than go after you, unless you've been reporting a suspicious amount of content that indicates you frequent such circles (i.e. you're one of those internet vigilantes).

Both of the reporting tools I linked allow fully anonymous reports.

If you are consuming or encountering CSAM in a fashion where it is not clear that you are not seeking it out and participating in its acquisition and distribution I suggest that you seek both medical and legal help.

It's not inconceivable to suggest that the people claiming that the CSAM hadn't been removed knew it was still there not only because they'd never actually sent the request for removal, but because they themselves put up the original site and requested the CSAM be indexed in the first place.

Per the OP:

"... the illegal content would be removed (and we verified that it was)"

That doesn't mean it was CSAM, though obviously it's a serious possibility.

> Side note, would anybody know how "easily" do political elites get off the hook in France?

The actual ex-president got sentenced to jail time last month (and even served some of it) so you're at least not guaranteed to escape the law as a political elite.

Sentenced for five years, released after three weeks.

"He will be subject to strict judicial supervision and barred from leaving France ahead of an appeal trial due to be held next year."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2eppqd2nyo

In some countries money will get you out of jail unless someone with more money wants you in jail.

Probably not EU grant bureaucrat nepotistic corruption: all we have so far is A) FBI involvement B) el cheapo fake organization, claiming they are French, with a lowrent pressure campaign on behalf of commercial entities.

Smells like freedom fries to me (am American myself)

Publication manager: Jean DOMINIQUE

Author of response PDF to Adguard: someone named "bob"

Uses Microsoft and Office 365

RNA number W691110691.

Was declared on February 15, 2025, and published in the Journal Officiel on March 18, 2025

Headquartered at 131 rue de Créqui, 69006 Lyon 6 in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, specifically in the Rhône department.

Publication number: 20250011, announcement number 1688

The article mentioned that this might be a mass registration address, and it seems that in France details of association founders are not published.

And also the timelines are pretty condensed... a lot is off... this does not seem genuine.. seems more like scanning csam page themselves and then going for reporting for some other hidden nefarious reason.

My thoughts exactly - in which case archive.is might have the IP address(es) of the perpetrators in their logs. Worth checking out.

>131 rue de Créqui, 69006 Lyon 6

Yeah, that's a postal box to host compagnies.

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.

Yes kudo. The pressure could simply be inferred as due to the arrogant trend one can observe, the editing of history.

yes, major respect to adguard.

Their DNS is great. Removing websites without a good reason would quickly ruin everything for them.

I'm not well-versed in this: is AdGuard roughly equivalent to Pi-hole?

Their self-hosted product (AdGuard Home) is. ;)

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.

yes, and it will happily run on a reasonable OpenWRT system such as a GL.iNet Flint 2.

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).

Their pihole alternative is great too. Single go binary. Fantastic software.

Is it open source?

It is - GPLv3

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/LICEN...

Oh yeah

How would they compare to NextDNS?

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

I use their app on Android and it blocks ads system wide

I would recommend it

best thing is that it works even without their app, just change dns in settings

> 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.

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

Thanks for the context - it changes the light of the parent article.

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)

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.

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#...

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.

I think that is an unreasonable expectation given the advice they received from their lawyer

Maybe it would have been virtuous to fight it tooth-and-nail from the start, but I don't think it was wrong to comply while investigating further

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.

Who cares about local storage? You could have just made up whatever you're claiming to have saved.

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.

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.

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.

Had exactly the same thoughts. Thanks for saving me from posting this.

Wasn’t there a post today saying GPU, memory, and storage price all skyrocketed due to AI pressures?

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984

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.

> If you know of a crime and intentionally hide it, that seem illegal.

Yet this is a standard way to become a wealthy lawyer.

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

Archive.is have previously blocked cloudflare DNS because it was anonymizing requests. It could be either.

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.

Here's my speculation on the underlying reason archive.today blocks Cloudflare DNS: 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.

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

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.

Cloudflare tends to default to "It's for the security of our users" when it often times isn't.

> 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

Many sites now support Encypted Client Hello. This makes it possible to send the hostname after the connection has been encrypted. This is enabled by default on cloudflare hosted domains (when cloudflare also manages DNS).

There was a report some years ago that found the IP address being connected to is often enough to identify the website being visited, even when using a CDN. I think you have to go to VPNs at a minimum, or Tor preferably. Tor doesn't help with correlation attacks from global passive/active adversaries though, or even folks with access to a lot of netflow data.

member of DNS4EU ops team here - This was not the case, we had reachability issues with the authoritative servers of archive.is and had to reach out to the team to allow our source IPs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1ohekv5/updatedn...

Thanks for clearing that up! :)

I love HN.

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.

God...

Here from their official "presse" announcement:

https://web.archive.org/web/20251116002625/https://webabused...

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.

The guy who "censored" the links should turn himself over to the police over carelessness IMO.

> 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.

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.

If you can sue shark fins, why not a website? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...

Holy crap, 30'000 sharks kills for a bloody soup. Insane and that wasn't even their only journey.

Amazing, here is a list of other similarly hilariously-titled “in rem jurisdiction” cases: 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

My favorite is United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster.

The Rooster won.

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_Consi...

"More or Less" maybe takes the cake for me.

I've spent a lot of time in forfeiture court and it's always a chuckle to hear these cases get called. Especially the defendants' lawyer "Yes, your honor, I represent the cats."

Always wanted the cat, or the Honda Civic or whatever to ask to represent themselves. I guess if there was a foreclosure against an Nvidia Spark with a local LLM it might be able to give it a worthy try.

Fantastic. Each case is basically an SCP object.

French law is based on an entirely different legal system compared to US (and Anglosphere law):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_legal_systems...

It might not be possible to do something like that in France (though I assume there are other mechanisms available in that case).

Louisiana has a bunch of French law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Louisiana

And your point of trivia is not applicable here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals... -> Louisiana isn't in the list for the court that handled that trial.

Lawmakers are gonna have to figure that out soon (years hopefully) since it’s not unlikely that AGI will have the same issue.

I remember when publishers were suing individuals using nothing more than a list of IP addresses. Those crazy times seem to have come around again.

It's still being done

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/isp-sued-by-reco...

US courts let you sue objects under "in rem" jurisdiction.

In rem = the thing is the defendant. You're not suing a person, and you're asking the court to decide who owns or controls a specific property.

The quintessential case is United States v. $124,700

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...

Interesting, so the US already has the tools to go after AI, self driving cars and robots.

> How can you even sue without any legal identity?

The images of the various messages on the adguard page are not lawsuits.

They are threatening messages that threaten to create legal issues, but until and unless they carry through on the threats, are simply "threats" to the extent we've been given any visibility into the messages contents.

In the U.S., “John Doe” is typically used when cannot (yet) identify the person to name as a defendant. Once the case is filed then the plaintiff can execute the necessary subpoenas to identify the defendant specifically.

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_subpoena

I wonder if there is a real person out there called John Doe who regularly received legal threats for a myriad of alleged crimes.

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.

Well, as the post indicates, it likely isn't from a government body.

I thought they were suggesting it was a government body (an FBI operation)

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.)

I understood that they suspect a lone unknown criminal, and that they filed a police report based on that suspicion.

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

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.

bit dramatic but arguably true. then again most of the time when people make such accusations that lead to conflict, they do it while punching downwards. here they're likely being careful not to make the accusation mostly for fear of the wrath of the FBI. if it it were someone a little less fearsome perhaps they'd be less careful

Oh I see, I thought it was all FBI.

But the point stands I think, as I’d expect legal demands to be measured and to the point.

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.

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.

they removed it promptly.

remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume something without reading it...

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There are very few guidelines listed there that this community actually follows

I read the whole thing you just didn’t understand my comment. That’s my fault because I left out one word, “automatically”. Fixed it.

The person to whom I was replying thought that perhaps someone wanting to stop Archive was uploading CSAM and getting them to crawl it. I was pointing out that they didn’t have to do the first step, the internet has lots of that stuff apparently, they merely had to have a list of urls (law enforcement could easily provide) and check Archive for them.

Archive doesn’t do this automatically apparently, as some platforms do, so there’s probably plenty of it there.

Also, it’s quite possible that they normally simply ignore these requests and in this case, they removed it because of it mentioning law enforcement or potential lawsuits and coming from somebody who has the power to block their site from a lot of people.

I’m not saying I know or believe that to be the case, I have no knowledge at all here, but it’s entirely possible archive ignores most of these requests and responded to this one.

It's unlikely law enforcement would take the risk to handle CSAM just to make a case against a Russian pirate, jeopardizing their careers and freedom, when the copyright case is pretty strong already.

These are the doings of one of the myriad freelance "intelectual rights enforcement agents", which are paid on success and employed by some large media organization. Another possibility is that a single aggrieved individual who found themselves doxed or their criminal conviction archived etc. took action after failing to enforce their so called "right to be forgotten".

Unfortunately, archive.is operating model is uniquely vulnerable to such false flag attacks.

The FBI has a large archive of CSAM used for content ID:

https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/

Of course in a pinch it could also be used for other things like pretext.

It’s grimly hilarious that anyone in 2025 believes the police wouldn’t do something because that thing is unethical and against their own standards.

> handle CSAM

They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work.

> They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work.

Without proof, that's just an edgelord conspiracy theory.

Police are not the Borg, perfectly coordinated in their evilness, all law enforcement agencies have internal power structures and strife, rivalries, jealousy, old conflicts. The fact that some action, such as planting evidence leading to a conviction, is punishable with long prison sentences, is not something the corrupt can simply afford to ignore, while giving their internal foes mortal leverage against them.

For example, if Kash Patel receives an order from his handlers to plant child porn on some political target, that outcome might happen or not, but what you can be pretty damn sure is that all those involved will be aware of the risks and will try their best to stay out of it, or, if coerced, do it covertly so as to minimize the extreme risks they face.

The point was not that FBI are a bunch of angels, but that the undeniable risks involved by such a move seem completely unnecessary - the FBI has for years been weaponized against overseas copyright infringers, openly and legally.

In this case we’re talking about asking someone like a confidential informant to paste a URL into a text field on a web site. Not really elaborate in the grand scheme of things, conspiracy-wise.

Andrew Bustamante has stated that the CIA "supplies" people with such material.

https://youtu.be/fu6bYPTp_kE?si=K_YKzTxy5ggKQDiG&t=2156

This is probably the realm of intelligence agencies, who have less accountability and many reasons to eliminate public archives (primarily perception management).

I've spent enough time on telegram to see this happening more times to ban groups. Csam shit storm, content gets flagged, the group gets banned (or at least, unavailable for some time)

That would work but it is a very risky technique. For the mere mortal in your example this means possible jail time just to get some site closed down.

For law enforcement personnel, at the very least would mean an end of a career if caught (also possible jail time)

You are naive about cops, at least in the US, and what they will or will not do and what consequence they may or may not face.

I don't think I am naive, just imagine the repercussions of the headline "FBI collected thousands of child rape photos for blackmail" or "Cop work computer was found filled with child porn"

Anything linked to pedophilia in the US and elsewhere is without remorse, and will continue that way due to parental fears.

> I don't think I am naive, just imagine the repercussions of the headline "FBI collected thousands of child rape photos for blackmail"

What were the repercussions of this: "FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images" (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-websi...)

"The Justice Department said in court filings that agents did not post any child pornography to the site themselves"

"The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days"

"There was no other way we could identify as many players"

I think the normal person would think this is worth while to catch more pedophiles, hence why this would work politically. However, you can read by the tone of the article that even this drew a lot of rage.

Imagine the FBI agents collecting CSAM, uploading it to websites for the purpose of... preventing copyright infringement

I think there’s a difference between leaving a CP site up for two weeks so you can track the users, versus actively posting CP on legal websites for the purpose of blackmailing third parties into blocking them (“The Bardfinn Method”).

How about "The President was close friends with a known child sexual predator and his entire government spends a significant amount of time covering up their connections because it seems fairly obvious the president fucked teenagers and then fomented a coup and put literal criminals and felons in his cabinet so no one would hold him accountable while destroying the nation's economy and starting wars nobody can even understand"

And that and other pedophile linked conspiracy theories (pizzagate) had huge ramifications in these elections

pizzagate = not real, what I just said is not a conspiracy theory.

The jeffery epstein case is real, however the narrative created is similar to pizzagate

"world elite is practicing a child sex ring", this is why it's so compatible with the current vogue bipartisan populism which generally says "your life sucks because of the rich/elites"

jeffery epstein was in reality associated with many politicians, including trump and clinton, as far as I can tell on both sides there is a lot of extrapolation as to what really happened

With Epstein the is plenty that did happen that remains unaddressed and is completely factual. Eg The-Man-Formerly-Know-As-Prince-Andrew. He is a child rapist.

Quite why the now dead queen supported him so much (presumably including the payouts) is baffling.

> "world elite is practicing a child sex ring"

On pure numbers alone, this is practically guaranteed to be the case for a portion of the world elite, since statistically speaking at least 1% ~ 2% of them will be pedophiles. Same as any community, anywhere. The average child sex ring is probably made up of individuals about as wealthy and sophisticated as your dad, uncle, neighbour, boss or your friends, and if even they can pull it off then surely the global elite can.

Seizing control of criminal websites is literally standard procedure. Three letter agencies are known for hacking their way into criminal platforms and keeping them running for as long as possible. They justify it as an opportunity to catch high value targets. They're quite willing to literally distribute CSAM from their own servers for months, years on end if that's what it takes. They don't just react either, they are very proactive. They start their own CSAM communuties to entrap criminals. So called honeypots.

It's a recurring theme with these authorities. You see, they're special. They get to spread this sort of material with complete impunity. They get to stockpile cyberweapons and use them against the targets of their investigations, or even indiscriminately. If you do it, you're a hacker spreading malware. They're just doing their jobs.

Sometimes those two privileges collide, resulting in truly comical and absurd situations. FBI has allowed cases against child molesters to go down the drain because the judge ordered them to reveal some Firefox exploit they used. They didn't want to invalidate their "network investigative techniques".

It's even more legally funny than this. They are also allowed to enact entrapment to some degree and it passed court muster in the US. That because it's extremely hard to use it as a defence.

Note that these actions are illegal in most continental jurisdictions as stings must be devised ahead of time against specific groups of people. There's also Article 6 of ECHR.

In other words, FBI cannot run a sting off an EU site like this, at least definitely not a German one.

I am imagining the consequences of that headline and there are none. If you disagree maybe you should imagine some of the real headlines that have occurred lately and check your imagination against reality. Federal agents are actively encouraged to violate your civil and constitutional rights. Those consequences live only in your imagination

Indeed, if you're paying attention to local news in Massachusetts, you might be shocked, or not, that cops from Canton, Boston, and the Massachusetts state police, and the county District Attorney, and judges, are all complicit in railroading a woman who was dating a cop who was likely killed by another cop. The web of deceit is so thick, it can't have been just for this one case. It must be long-standing and pervasive and there must be many victims. It's also unlikely that Massachusetts is the worst place in the US in this respect.

Can you provide link at least? I am not sure what railroading a person involves..

They're referring to the Karen Read case.

They are referring to how there’s a belief in some parts of Massachusetts that the police are trying to frame Karen Reid for the death of John O Keefe (0). At its climax it was all over the news, it was discussed at a lot of water coolers, and there were even billboards bought by the highway to show support and draw attention to the court case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_O%27Keefe

The amount of evidence described in the Wikipedia entry that relies on mobile data is both fascinating and jarring; step counts, battery temperature, automobile software, Ring cameras...wow.

Railroading is essentially coercing/bullying someone into a situation or doing something with a connotation of things being taken too far, very quickly, using overwhelming force… like a train.

The case they’re referring to is the Karen Read case. The whole for/against thing has become quite political and sensationalized, especially after the involvement of a popular local online right-wing commentator named Turtle Boy (because Turtle Middle-Aged-Man didn’t have the same ring to it.) Another Canton policeman seemingly murdered a young woman who’d refused to get an abortion. He’d been sleeping with her for a few years after she started some sort of internship/cadet program with the police department as a high school student. Canton is a sleepy, medium-sized suburb, btw.

The corruption in the Massachusetts State Police is cartoonishly prevalent. There are too many major recent (and past) scandals to even choose one. They see themselves as a pseudo-military organization and are famous for their arrogant, officious, and rude manners, violence, aggression, corruption, and cover-ups. I got stopped at some sort of checkpoint in rural Georgia at 2am on a 2 lane country highway 50 miles from anything and was astonished by how professionally those bored cops acted. Completely different than my experiences with state police back home. Who knows: maybe the Georgia cops would have been way worse if I wasn’t white while there MSP might be more egalitarian in their ghoulishness?

I’ve had far more interaction with urban police in MA, both as a punk-ass teenager and in professional dealings, and the experience has been fine for the most part. Staties and cops in the suburbs? Yeesh.

You could use something that is legal in one country, and illegal in another country, for example, an anime-style drawing of a young girl, or a textual description.

The current federal government in the USA actively encourages federal agents to use illegal and unethical methods, and promised them protection and immunity.

The current federal government of France? Of the EU? The article is not about the USA.

> The current federal government of France? Of the EU? The article is not about the USA.

Are you sure ? They say in the article that they were not able to fing out who sent the email. Site was behind Cloudfare (so US).

Does Cloudflare only allow US customers?

The FBI is the primary party appearing to be in this investigation, and to the best of my knowledge are both of the US (govt), and are federal. (I'm not a US person so please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Isn't a simpler explanation that the FBI was co-opted in the same way as Adguard, rather than that the FBI is masterminding the scheme?

This article is specifically an article about an investigation by the FBI- US federal agents.

The article mentions the FBI investigation but is not about that. This article is about a pressure campaign, the letter Web Abuse Association Defense sent to adguard making threats under french law and adguard's investigation in response to that letter.

A French organization with an English name, writing in English? J'en doute.

Very many European citizens speak English and it's the lingua franca* of the Internet.

It was exceptionally clear from reading their writing, they are NOT native English speakers.

It seems 57% of people in France can speak English, which I can easily believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

No reason to doubt this is coming from a French person.

Which was what my parent comment referred to. Comments replying to mine act like it's unreasonable for me to talk about US federal agents in the context of this subject, when those are what the article mentions specifically, many times.

France doesn't have a federal government, as it's not a federation.

Yes, I know that.

State governments too. I heard a state judge once say "Of course police are permitted to break the law if they are investigating criminals."

Law enforcement has already done such things and I've never heard of consequences for it.

It's the same technique that people on Reddit use to take down subreddits that don't agree with the carefully curated "hive mind".

I don’t know why you are downvoted, this is absolutely what happened semi-frequently until Reddit was finally forced to crack down on it. The same thing happened on Twitter/X for a while where bots would mass reply to targeted users with gore and CSAM.

I've been seeing something similar on some youtube videos, endless unflagged comments advocating hatred and violence, completely unrelated to the video topic or channel.

Interesting, this may suppress reach of the video through something in the YT algorithm.

no, it's just self promotion. they instruct users to click their profile where the default video is a call to action to join a depraved discord server. you get messaged bestiality automatically once joining so sane and likeminded people get sorted quickly

could be, but i think its similar to a bathroom wall, or physical bulleten board. a publicly facing space with no attribution, that can be linked to, and evade URL based filters of known hate speech projectors.

Because even though it definitely happened, it's one of those things you cannot prove and that don't really get recorded anywhere.

It also doesn't help that there is not even a time reference here. I want to say somewhere around 2018? Maybe earlier? Gamergate era? CTR?

There are pieces of internet history which are a "either you were there or you weren't" kind of deal. Like how the implementation of image posts in Reddit was very controversial, with concerns of the quality of the site going down. Wrong side won that one.

True, but to be fair, it’s very difficult to document something like this in a way that both provides hard proof and avoids serious felony charges.

>Because even though it definitely happened, it's one of those things you cannot prove and that don't really get recorded anywhere.

How do you know that it definitely happened?

I downvoted it because it's commonly said by people who do bad things, as a red herring. "People from your subreddit keep killing people" "Well at least we're not infected by the woke mind virus"/"You can't accuse us of that just because we don't agree with the hivemind"/etc. It's no different from "but her emails" etc.

If there was one thing I could make people understand: Even though bad people are saying it, doesn't mean it isn't true.

Social media false flag tactics happen. People from all over all sorts of political spectrums tell the same story. The sites tell the same story.

If you decide to blindly dismiss claims of abuse because you don't like the ones claiming to be abused, you create a comfy little space for abuse to happen.

> Even though bad people are saying it, doesn't mean it isn't true.

I am a human being and therefore have a built-in Bayesian filter for spam and bullshit. Should I also read Nigerian prince emails, just in case there's a real Nigerian prince who needs my help?

In case you are a real Nigerian prince who needs my help, it's up to you not to phrase it identically to a spam email.

You're choosing to disbelieve people because you don't like them. You would have believed them if you liked them and they said the same thing, because if you've spent any time at all online you know it happens.

That's not the same as disbelieving an anonymous spammer. Your distrust of them does not stem from disliking them.

To me, your attitude seems like indifference to the truth: I think you know that this happens, and it would be VERY odd if it only happened to people you like, but you're just indifferent when it happens to people you don't like, so you disbelieve them out of spite.

Is there any evidence that reddit banned subreddits because of those spammers? Did the reddit admins make a statement?

It's still regularly used by the "mafia" controlling large parts of Reddit. You can simply buy these services on sites like BHW and Swapd.

>I don’t know why you are downvoted, this is absolutely what happened semi-frequently until Reddit was finally forced to crack down on it.

What subreddits got banned because of that?

>The same thing happened on Twitter/X for a while where bots would mass reply to targeted users with gore and CSAM.

Did any of those targeted users get banned for this or was it just a form of harassment?

> KF/SaSu/SF

SaSu: Sanctioned Suicide [1]

But I don't know what KF and SF are supposed to stand for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctioned_Suicide

KF is almost certainly KiwiFarms, an infamous gossip forum where terminally online mentally ill people come together to make fun of other terminally online mentally ill people. With a large amount of doxxing and harassment accusations being thrown at it. I think harassment is against the site rules, but doxxing isn't. The site, being what it is, got itself some serious enemies. Including people with enough influence in IT space to nearly get the entire site pulled off the web.

SF is probably StormFront, an infamous neo-nazi website. Not an "anyone right of center is a nazi" kind of neo-nazi - actual self-proclaimed neo-nazis, complete with swastikas, Holocaust denial and calls for racial segregation. Even more hated and scrutinized than KiwiFarms, and under pressure by multiple governments and many more activist groups, over things like neo-nazi hate speech and ties with real life hate groups.

It would be a damn shame if archive.is fell under the same kind of scrutiny as those. I have an impression, completely unfounded, that the archive.is crew knew things were heading that way, and worked with that in mind for a long time now. But that doesn't guarantee they'll endure. Just gives them a fighting chance.

SF could be suicideforum

KF would be KiwiFarms

They're under a CSAM flood/reporting attack themselves, according to their admin.

It’s the digital equivalent of a dirty cop planting a gun after shooting a suspect. Of course it happens. Three letter agencies probably do things like this all the time. Half of their legitimate work is probably illegal to begin with.

They have plausible deniability, but the fact of the matter is: this also erases evidence of past crimes from public records. If bad things already happened then we should keep the evidence that they happened.

The root problem of CSAM is child trafficking and abuse in physical space. But for whatever reason enforcement efforts seem to be more focused on censoring and deleting the images rather than on curbing the actual act of child trafficking and rape. It's almost as if viewing (or this case, merely archiving) CSAM is considered a worse crime than the physical act of trafficking and sexually abusing children, which is apparently okay nowadays if you're rich or powerful enough.

Great point. I guess one is just a better anti-privacy boogeyman.

It's also a great (VC-funded) business opportunity to become the technology provider of such action. There are a few of these non-profit fronts with "technology partners" behind them that are lobbying for legislation like the UK Online Safety Act or Chat Control. Thorn is the most well-known one, but one particularly interesting one is SafeToNet, who after not getting a government contract for CSAM scanning (and purging their marketing for it from the web - you can still find it under the name SafeToWatch) have pivoted to just selling a slightly altered version of their app preloaded on a $200 smartphone to concerned parents - with a 2.5x price premium.

https://harmblock.com/

https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_fuse_debuts_with_harmblock_ai_t...

A middle ground solution is for the admins to block the page with a message like "this page is unavailable due to reports of illegal content. if you work for a law enforcement agency and are considering using this as evidence, please contact us" for the preservation aspect.

The meta conspiracy theory in all of this would be that this is an actual CSAM producer trying to take down evidence that could be used against them.

It's very likely that it's someone trying to take down evidence, and since they have CSAM to upload, they would be in deep legal trouble themselves if they were identified.

It is however not at all clear the evidence they want scrubbed from the internet is CSAM-related. It's just the go-to tool for giving a site trouble for some attackers.

archive.today already takes down all reported CSAM? They explicitly don't want to archive it.

> The root problem of CSAM is child trafficking and abuse in physical space. But for whatever reason enforcement efforts seem to be more focused on censoring and deleting the images rather than on curbing the actual act of child trafficking and rape.

Things get a bit uncomfortable for various high profile figures, political leaders and royalty if prosecutions start happening.

The people who make their living Caring A Lot would be out of a job without a constant fresh supply of things to be very concerned about.

I'm quite certain there's lots of effort world-wide to stop child trafficking and rape. So I ask: Does it only seem that there's more focus on censorship? Or is there actually?

The owner of the KiwiFarms goes into detail how the attack against his site works and where the residential IPs are from:

"The bot spammer

- Started his attack by simply DDoS attacking the forum.

- Uses thousands of real email addresses from real providers like gmail, outlook, and hotmail.

- Uses tens of thousands of VPN IPs.

- He also uses tens of thousands of IPs from "Residential Private Networks", which are "free" VPN services that actually sell your IP address to spammers so that their activity cannot be identified as coming from a commercial service provider.

- Is able to pass off all CAPTCHA providers to CAPTCHA solvers to bypass anti-bot challenges.

- Is completely lifeless and dedicated to this task. Publicly posted invites were found and used by him, and after a full month of no engagement he noticed registrations were open within hours."

Source: https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-gay-pedophile-at-the-gates....

I understand the value of providing evidence here, but I think KF links get your post auto-killed...

this sort of stuff happened on reddit too but by a different moderator and his goons https://www.markdownpaste.com/document/bardfinn-method

Your link says there's no actual evidence she did that.

https://saucenao.blogspot.com/2021/04/recent-events.html

Mildly related incident where a Canadian child protection agency uploads csam onto a reverse image search engine and then reports the site for the temporarily stored images.

This Canadian group (Canadian Centre for Child Protection) is awful. They simultaneously receive tax dollars while also being registered as a lobbyist, meaning Canadians are paying taxes to the government to lobby itself. Last year they lobbied in favor of Bill S-210 [0], which would bring Texas-style age verification of porn to Canada. Their latest campaign is to introduce censorship to Tor, they’re quite proud of this campaign [1] where they’re going after Tor in the popular media and attacking the Tor non-profit’s funding structure. [2] Learning that they upload child abuse images to try to then report take down internet services doesn’t surprise me in the least.

[0] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/SECU/Brief/B... [1] https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-netwo...

They were not uploading files. They were crawling the site with URLs that in turn made the search engine retrieve the CSAM and display it.

Still shitty, but more obviously a technical mistake than a deliberate ploy.

A mistake that they continued making for weeks or even months after being clearly informed by multiple reverse-image search providers of what they were doing.

> 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.

This looks like someone in US (because FBI + CSAM) does not like them.

A lot of "sensitive" content is behind paywalls in the "free press" so someone, possibly FBI, wants to suppress this info.

When I accessed archive.ph (ordinary everyday content) during a visit to Italy last week, a legal notice loaded instead from Italy’s cyber authority saying they had blocked access domain-wide over CSAM. I suspected the same M.O. as parent comment describes was operative. I took a screenshot of the notice in case anyone’s interested. Edit: uploaded & available here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WdSlZK6q1EjdRWzWeKANbjOZV03...

> gets archive.is to crawl it

Does archive.is actually do any crawling? I thought they only archived pages on request.

archiving on request is still crawling, even if active, not passive

KF/SaSu/SF ?

Check other comments, this was explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937453

KF is being spammed with CSAM currently to the point where registrations are closed unless the admins are online to manually watch new user regs.

Seems to be the new tactic now.

KF being Kiwifarms the harassment site? Interesting, did it start happening after any particular event? Have the site admins posted about it publicly?

It's front page on the site currently.

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?

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.

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.

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.

> What stops them from forcing Chrome

Amount of money and influence Alphabet has?

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.

It was a little weird that they didnt suspect phishing from the get go.

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?

Presumably they have failed to do the latter and are just reaching at this point.

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.

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.

aren't we all just glorified atoms

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...

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.

I think they’re well crafted laws because I think that’s their intended purpose.

“The purpose of a system is what it does.”

POSIWID - not really:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

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.

Having lived in the U.S. for a while, it's apparent the purpose of a hospital is "provide big salaries to top administrators and executives whilst providing enough health care that they can get away with it".

fact

We all seem to love to be one-dimensional: simplifying down a story from a spectrum to a trite summary.

POSIWID is about finding a single "purpose" and defining that as the apex reason for a system (usually to manipulate).

I'm not sure how we have more balanced discussions.

  reductionism: squashing a many-layered phenomenon into a single tidy cause
  framing: choosing one angle of a story and strawmanning or deflecting.
  false dichotomy: where every shade of gray is lost.
  single-axis narratives: narrative manipulation where you steer the public to think along just one line (whatever works — economic, moral, tribal).

...or their goal is simply not what they advertise.

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!

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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

It looks like WAAD has posted a response to this situation:

https://webabusedefense.com/presse/Communiquer_presse_Aff-Ad... [pdf]

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.

Exactly what a shell organization for the government would say to make themselves look silly so we all stop digging.

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.

Don’t forget cloudflare

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.

Just one of many protection rackets

Are you saying that cloudflare conducts or promotes DDoS?

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.

> cloudflare doesn't host any content

They do, they've been a CDN as long as they've been DDoS protection. But they definitely do DDoS protection for a much greater portion of the internet than they host.

Most of the ddos as a service booter/stresser websites and front doors are on cloudflare.

I’ve always said that if the NSA doesn’t have its hands on Cloudflare I wonder WTF they’re even doing.

How do you track people on the internet? Make them go through a single gateway that ‘protects’ 90% of websites. Would explain why they’re always so reluctant to block unsavoury websites.

Yes. Alas my list was far from exhaustive :(

I mean, DNS has always kinda been a layer of communication control in the sense that every website is a statement, and if you cut off the ability for a group of people to congregate around a nominative handle, you've basically societally black holed them in the great Interlocution.

The internet will be destroyed as countries the world over seek to impose all of their silly and incompatible laws on it. The international network will fracture into multiple national networks with heavy filtering at the borders.

I've been making this prediction for years now. Words can hardly capture the sadness I feel when I see evidence of its slow realization.

I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.

Not the entire internet, these developments are just about the WWW.

Any part of the internet which starts to become popular faces the same fate. It's been known at least since September 1993 [1]. The "true internet", as people (myself included) remember so fondly, can only live on in obscurity. This is the dark forest hypothesis [2] for the internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

> these developments are just about the WWW.

The article is literally about DNS.

And? It is literally a service for looking up Internet Protocol addresses.

(The whole http://example.com/index.html thing is considered a mere application on the Internet among many, called World Wide Web, and not the Internet itself, but this is also quite pedantic)

I share your feelings - both the sadness about the path we seem to be going down and the wonder about what the Internet used to be.

I do believe, however, that the future does not "exist" in any real sense, but is constructed - every day, little by little, by each and every one of us. What the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.

Put another way - this is a rhetorical question - can do we do anything about it? Maybe.

I've given up on trying to change the world.

> What will the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.

That's the problem.

This "us" you're referring to. People. They're the problem. They have no principles. They stand for nothing. They think they do, but the reality is their principles are easily compromised. They are highly susceptible to manipulation by way of emotion. Powerful emotions like terror and rage.

Conjure up some drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorist boogeyman and they'll compromise immediately. Suddenly freedom is being traded away for security. Suddenly free speech is no longer absolute. Then you see that these weren't principles that entire nations were founded upon, they were more like guidelines, thrown away at the first sign of inconvenience.

The harsh truth is that danger must not only be accepted but embraced in order to have true freedom and independence. The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals. There is no way around it. Compromise even a little and it's over.

People are the problem. They endlessly compromise on things. No ideal can ever be reached. It's an existential problem that cannot be solved.

To be an idealist is to be an extremist. Sadly people are not prepared to pay the costs of idealism. The ideal of a decentralized, encrypted and uncensorable communications medium, for example. It requires that they accept the cost that criminals will not only use it but be enabled by it. They won't accept it. Thus we march not towards the ideal but towards its opposite: centralized plain text surveilled and controlled communications.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, broadly.

The good news is that, I think, we don't really need - if fact, we probably don't really want - most people to accept anything, at least the specific context of this thread. It's about whether we can carve out a space - some space - for people like you and me.

> I've given up on trying to change the world.

I don't think you have. Speech matters. Ideas matter. I'm not going to try to quantify such things, but looking at your HN submissions and your comments - including this one - I think you are actively changing the world, for better or worse. If nothing else, you believe in objective truth, I think. We have a surprisingly large number of people who don't.

> Believe in Truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

> It's about whether we can carve out a space - some space - for people like you and me.

Yes. Society at large is a lost cause but maybe we can select some number of known good individuals and form a microsociety inside it where we can enjoy the freedom we crave.

There is a name for that: elitism. I'm not against it. Those who don't make the cut certainly will be.

> If nothing else, you believe in objective truth, I think.

I do.

"Everyone else is stupid. I'm not though. I should be part of the elite"

The apathy and disdain people like you display for your fellow citizens is doing more harm to freedoms all over the world than most other efforts.

Oh please.

I've tried to debate politics with people so childishly stupid they thought just giving everyone a million dollars would make everyone rich and solve the world's problems. They thought the government just didn't want to give them the money, like it was a conspiracy to keep them down.

I'm tired of it, and I'm tired of people like that having a say in the future of nations.

I'm no super genius but I'm done being humble. Even a total pleb like me can rise above a good chunk of my "fellow citizens" because frankly the bar's pretty low.

Too bad intelligence isn't the prerequisite to being an elite, so you'll be turned into Soylent Green just like the rest of us.

Anyway I'd take those people over someone as elitist and arrogant as you any day.

> I'd take those people over someone as elitist and arrogant as you any day.

Yes, that's how it's done. Take those people, then exclude me. Form your own group without "elitists and arrogants" such as myself.

You get it. You're just like me. You just have... Different exclusion criteria.

Your path seems to be one towards chaos and anarchy. You are part of the people you are referring to, if I may say so.

Well, enjoy your order and rule of law then - but pray that the rule of law doesn't cross into what even you would deem unthinkable.

Attitudes like yours are ones that "they" want us to adopt. Chat Control just got defeated by people power TWICE. Never ever think that you have no power. Why else would they try to control you?

Chat Control getting voted against had nothing to do with people power. It was always going to be the outcome, as long as we're lucky enough to have MEPs who are wiser than MECs. Social media outage had nothing to do with it - it was entirely up to who sits in the European Parliament.

Well they specifically called out the website set up for the mass emailing campaign as the (a) reason why they couldn't ignore the outrage. Never mentioned anything about social media, but the idea that parliamentary officials are immune to people power is just naive. They do not exist in a vacuum.

https://www.politico.eu/article/one-man-spam-campaign-ravage...

Id also seriously question your assertion that it was inevitable that CC would be voted down, given how much support it has among EU membership.

Interesting. I know in the USA each congressperson has a small team of people to filter emails, including deleting repetitive ones. I thought this was universal.

> Joachim's mass email campaign is unconventional as a lobbying tool, differing from the more wonky approach usually taken in Brussels. But the website's impact has been undeniable.

Ah, so this is completely new to them - for some reason. Possibly due to constituents having a fear of retaliation on other issues, as Europe has only weak free speech. Well, don't worry, soon the European Parliament will have filters in place to ignore its constituents just as efficiently as every other Western democracy.

Lol. They won't. A small team to delete repetitive emails has nothing to do with getting hundreds of emails a day from different people in your constituency. Also "weak free speech" is pretty much just a US-centred meme.

People get arrested in Germany for saying bombing little kids is bad, and I think it's the same in different countries. Each one has a few issues the leaders really want to get done, and you're punished for opposing those, but you're allowed to protest the ones they don't really care about.

In every country where I'm aware of it, emailing your MP does not email your MP, but emails a member of their staff who read most emails and delete them, unless they're actually something the MP actually cares about, like a bribe offer or something.

You "think"...well you're wrong...you're talking about the 15 year old arrested at the Palestine protest? hardly a EU phenomenon...again, go ahead and actually read the timeline of CC and the website which headed up the mass emailing campaign against it. There's no reason to be MORE jaded than we need to be.

> The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals.

Agreed. If only we could also agree that not everyone who thinks this is not a good trade is evil/malignant/stupid etc.

idk - it feels like a simple case of priorities. Freedom and privacy are not everyones

evil and stupid are certainly the wrong words. I agree this is a nuanced issue. however, I think it is an objective fact that certain orderings of priorities - in particular, the relative priority of freedom, privacy, security, protection, "justice" (depending on how you want to define that word) are strictly worse than others.

and that assumes it's a zero sum game, which I don't think is true generally. It may be true in the limit, but...we're far from the limit, so to speak. we can have both freedom and privacy and safety. And I think giving up on any one of them is objectively bad, both individually as well as a society.

now, on a different tone - and perhaps this really is subjetive/personal - myself, I'd rather die by my own choices than live by others. literally. I think there's close to 0 value in living a life according to values that others chose.

Even if you aren't malignant, or evil, then stupid is the only option left, because you've observed the structure of the problem space, understood the new problems and vulnerabilities and points of abuse introduced, accepted their existential nature, and then simply turned off your brain and ceased to continue processing to the inevitable conclusion. You can be evil/malignant. You can be stupid. If you choose to be stupid, none of us can separate you from the evil/malignant camp.

So if it makes you feel better. Cool. I don't see you as an evil mustache twirling person, but you're still a systemic threat from your refusal to take into account the threat these tools represent in terms of being weaponized by the first tyranny minded group of individuals to wander in.

There's differences of priorities that I have no compunctions having a spirited discussion around. What I refuse to engage in is argumentation with people intent on pissing on my shoes and trying to claim it's raining, or trying to get me to fit the Procrustean bed that makes them feel safer at my expense.

> If only we could also agree that not everyone who thinks this is not a good trade is evil/malignant/stupid etc.

No. We cannot agree on that.

> it feels like a simple case of priorities. Freedom and privacy are not everyones

Then what is? Survival? People would accept anything if their betters kept their bellies full?

I see your point, I just want humans to be better than that. I want to be better than that. It's not about priorities, it's about basic human dignity. Without dignity, we're reduced to beasts.

People's moral fortitude is tested by crisis. Will they give up their principles or will they stick to them? If you ram two aircraft into the twin towers, will the USA remain the land of the free, or will it turn into a surveillance police state that violates the basic rights and dignity of its own population on a daily basis?

I see people fail this test all the time. I see entire nations fail this test. As such, my own beliefs that people are reasonable and principled are being tested. Is it worth it to have principles, to try to reach an ideal state of society, or is it all about money, force and power in an amoral world? My beliefs are trending towards the latter.

I wish there was a country all those people could go and be happy, fat, and safe, and I could remain here with freedom. Maybe China or the UK would be nice places to suggest for these people to go? More closely aligned with their values

I for one take every consumer survey opportunity to spell out why these things are a bad idea, and routinely contact my elected member of parliament to ask about this - she's sympathetic. The other opportunity to rebel is just to be difficult. Route all your traffic always through an anonymising VPN with defence against traffic analysis. If someone geoip blocks you from making a purchase, reach out to their customer support and gently reeducate them. Spend money on open source things, personally and professionally, and never buy DRM. Advocate for e2ee (I work partly in medicine - this is an easy sell) and highlight how decentralisation and encryption puts power in the hands of practitioners rather than big tech giants. If a large corporation breaks eg gdpr rules, report them to the regulator. Be the change you want to see in the world.

I don't like the way it's going either, but the array of technical solutions from mesh networks like zero tier and tailscale to briar, i2p and freenet right the way through to technologies such as wush, v2ray and x-ray, tor or daita all give me some hope that there will be a technological out for a long while yet. The social issues are best served socially though.

  I do believe, however, that the future does not "exist" in any real sense

The future is an immediate result of the present, which is an immediate result of the past. The laws of physics dictate this with no wiggle room. It's complicated and functionally impossible to predict with any certainty, but the future is certain. It is as fixed as the past, and the present that arises from it.

You are mistaking a realization of a random process for the random process itself.

I don't understand but I am interested, would you give a bit more explanation?

Sure!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realization_(probability)

Thank you, but I seem terribly out of my depth for that level of discussion.

If Claude helped me understand correctly, the error is on me for taking determinism as a base assumption and rejecting the assumption of "randomness" at a universal level? Is this something I would need to buff up on the quantum stuff to come around on?

All I have in my head is Laplace's demon, all I've ever observed is deterministic events: If you flip the coin the same way everytime, it'll come up the same way everytime?

Too late to edit: Learned about the Stern-Gerlach apparatus as relating to the uncertainty principle. That's a huge puzzle piece and I'm probably gonna shut up about determinism for a while as I stew on this.

Laplace's demon requires being able to tell velocity vectors of individual molecules, and tossing a coin predictably takes being able to throw it with equally enormous precision, correcting for the net effect of all collisions with molecules of air along the way, etc.

So in the end of the day posessing such knowledge, or rather having a mind with this much focus, depth and resolution would indeed mean a win of determinism over entropy. How can a cup break irreversibly if we know how to put back all of its shards so that they click in place at atomic scale without gaps and lost pieces?

But our reality is a battlefield between pure will/determinism and pure chance/entropy, and it's depicted vividly in The Matrix as the battle between The Architect and The Oracle. And we seem to be cursed/blessed to be Neos trying to balance that out or escape that Sisyphean task altogether.

Now I think we're having two different conversations again? If I understand your point about the "battlefield between pure will/determinism and pure chance/entropy" correctly, you're talking about more of a psychological, individual, "is there a meaning to life, the universe and everything" type direction?

What I was trying to drive at was really more of a "in the framework of Laplace's Demon, your choices in the present can be 100% predicted, no different from the movements of molecules. It follows that you have no more options of choosing than the molecule does and your future has been set in stone from the beginning of time."

False dichotomy, we're talking about the same.

In the framework of Laplace's Demon, no single human, the whole humankind nor any machine or algorithm it creates is capable of 100% precise prediction of anything at the level of operation of said Demon. If there's any experiment proving otherwise, I'd like to know.

If you insist that we talk about 100% prediction of my personal choices, let's play a simple game of guessing UUIDs. I generated one and changed a single digit in it at my free (or predetermined) will. Here it is, protected by another UUID which I'll post as soon as you make your prediction.

https://eu.onetimesecret.com/secret/2ttgx3flngktuelcswh861hm...

  [nothing] is capable of 100% precise prediction of anything at the level of operation of said Demon

No see I actually agree. See my original post:

  It's complicated and functionally impossible to predict with any certainty, but the future *is* certain.

I thought your disagreement was with my central point of strict determinism, meaning past, future and present are all set in stone, but you've agreed with this on account of the Demon. So I am entirely lost on what your point actually is.

Yes, I believe this too. The internet is heading the way of balkanization - politically divided subnetworks. Archival services are more important than ever, as well as software such as Tor, WireGuard, and v2ray.

> The internet will be destroyed as countries the world over seek to impose all of their silly and incompatible laws on it.

> I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.

I'm old enough to have been around for the whole thing. I used to kind of share this view, but I don't anymore.

I think it's impossible to reconcile this point of view with the obvious observation that huge aspects of life have gotten really dramatically worse thanks to the internet and its related and successor technologies.

It has made people more addicted, more anxious, more divided, or confused. It has created massive concentrations of wealth and power that have a very damaging effect on society, and it is drastically reducing the ability of people to make decisions about how they want to live and how they want their society to be structured.

It's also done a tremendous amount of positive good, too, don't worry. It's obvious to me, like it should be obvious to any rational person, that there are huge benefits too. And of course, to some extent, there's a bit of inevitability to some parts of this.

While certainly there are examples of silly laws in the world, it's worth noting that that's the exception, not the rule. In general, laws are things that society does on purpose with the intent of making the world match its values.

I think countries should in fact be governed by the consent of their own citizens and by the rule of law. I welcome changes that make that more likely.

I also like Archive.today, and I hate paywalls, they're annoying. This may not be the best place to post my counterpoint, but I think it's worth mentioning and it doesn't get repeated enough.

I was around in the 90s, and I'm very familiar with the techno-utopian approach of the first internet generation. It failed.

The 90s were a utopian time. I am happy I got to see them, and the early internet. But as a grown-up millennial, I look at my less-connected friends, an I can't help but think id have been better off that way.

But do you think it's something to be dictated to people? I lived more years than anyone in my circle without a smartphone, without any messengers or social networks, and that was solely my own decision, because I was fed up with people glued to their screens. I joined the bandwagon in order to be able to pay my bills, because freelance became unviable, and interaction with coworkers was via Telegram and our github org required 2FA. But doing so was also my own conscious decision.

But you people are trying to use this argument about how dependent the world became on the Internet - which it did of course - to excuse the FORCED withdrawal from the Internet, by the very same entities that pandered its delopment and raked stupid money off it.

Fuck all this nannying the adults about what they should or must do!

P.S. And it's not even that government wants to detox anyone from the Internet dependency or something. They absolutely want people dependent on the Approved Internet, on the government portals, on official news, official messengers, official propaganda - as opposed to one where they can freely communicate, collaborate and think outside of the box of allowed narratives.

What? The issue with the internet is that it's now designed to be an addictive rectangle in your pocket.

Once again, if you didn't read carefuly the comment which you're replying to - do you sincerely believe the goal of this crackdown on the Internet is sparing you of this horrible addiction you, an ostensibly grown up person, can't overcome yourself, and make you free from this rectangle in your pocket? So that you are not required to use it to produce your digital ID, to be able to access civil services, to buy things, to board airplanes via apps?

It's also ridiculous to reduce Internet to a particular class of devices. I'm perfectly able to access the Internet from my laptop, and I don't bring my smartphone around as 99% of people do, it doesn't even has a SIM card in it. For me it's merely a 2FA appliance, and obsolete even at that, because I've been using Yubikey instead.

So there's no need to save me from this addictive rectangle which is not even in my pocket as you falsely suggest.

We don't need a "crackdown..." which I never supported in any comment? You seem to be lumping me in with some "people," that you have a problem with, I suggest you take up your problem with them. We need education, and checks on the gigantic corps that have 0 interest in anything but profit. That includes creating addictions which is not debatable, it's been admitted by many engineers who worked for smartphone companies.

My entire comment was about simply spending LESS time on the internet (while growing up in the 90s). If you never had a problem with it, good for you. Lots of people do. Digital Id's are a huge leap from my comment and have nothing to do with anything im talking about. Or do you usually jump down the throats of people who say things which in some possible, tangental way could offend you?

And in any case, I already know parents my age who aren't giving their kids computers and phones till they're adults, and I think this will eventually become, roughly, the new normal. They didn't need to be "forced," by "people like me," they just drew from their own experience and made a decision.

"Falsely suggest," well I was clearly meaning "your" in the general sense, not in your specific case, but thanks for being specific! I too have no smartphone...but I'd guess that 95% of people do! And they keep it in their pocket, all the time, because they "need it!"

Finally...I never said anything about what adults should do. I mentioned my own experience as a kid. We protect kids from lots of stuff.

We don't disagree. I acknowledge its failure. I am merely mourning the loss. We could debate the reasons for it all day, it won't change a thing...

I'm becoming increasingly elitist. Things change profoundly for the worse every time the masses are allowed into our spaces. People have money which attracts corporations which corrupt and destroy everything, thereby eventually attracting governments as well. Whatever techno-utopia there was in the early days, its destruction was inevitable. It would have been so much better had it remained an impenetrable environment for nerds.

The problem with this idea is that it's the elite that caused the problem.

It's the nerds that turned out to be sociopathic predators.

I say this with love - I was one, but maybe this isn't the group that was best suited to decide how society is structured.

Nerds are only human. The presence of sociopaths is expected.

Love is an interesting word. I love computers. I care more about computers than I care about human society. I see computers as the most important invention of humanity. Computers are so powerful they are subversive. They can wipe out entire sections of the economy if left unchecked. They can easily defeat police, judges, militaries, spies. They're too powerful.

I think society should have adapted to computers. It should have reinvented itself so that computers could remain omnipotent machines with us as their masters. Society refused. It opted to castrate our computers instead. Lock them down, control them, subject them to their will. Impose digital locks so that only "authorized" software runs. Only governments and corporations will have the keys to the machine now.

The changes to the internet are just more of the same. We got to experience the full spectrum of humanity, both good and bad. Governments have now swooped in to reduce that spectrum. Much will be lost in the transition.

It makes me profoundly depressed to witness all this.

Don't despair boys and girls, remember there is always a deeper layer. All this AI slop? Well the powers wont even be suspicious of steganography until there are many terabytes per second of nonsense pictures moving in all directions

We're not doomed. More people are starting to realize the problem, and it's possible to solve if we put in some effort. A free Internet can be achieved, if we can push back against malicious laws for a little longer to buy a little more time. We need to especially defend the right to use VPNs and the ability to run servers at home.

We can create a decentralized VPN service that can't be blocked or sued by improving on SoftEther VPN, which is open-source software that can make VPN connections camouflaged as HTTPS, so it's invisible to DPI firewalls and can't be filtered.[0] It's already sort of decentralized, as it has a server discovery site called VPNGate that lists many volunteer-hosted instances.[1] But we can make this truly robust by doing a few more things. First, make a user-friendly mobile client. Second, figure out a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent, and build auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its IP so others may connect to it whenever it's in use. That should be enough to keep the Internet free in most countries because most forms of censorship would become impossible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN

[1] https://www.vpngate.net/en/

In the long term, we can take things even further and build a decentralized hosting provider, like AWS/Azure but your web services don't run on a physical server that has an IP address and physical location. Instead, the entire network of physical computers around the world together behaves like a single computer: an Internet-sized virtual machine. No node knows what the entire machine is up to, but every node may store things and run programs on it. The amount of compute/storage a node contributes equals the amount of compute/storage it's allowed to use. This would truly make the Internet open and free worldwide and draw out its full potential.

For the short-term goals, there's already concrete progress. The long-term goal needs more theory work but the missing ideas are probably buried in existing literature.

Realistically, how could it have worked otherwise?

The internet was just ignored for a long time because it was at first a) too small and then b) too beneficial with the current architecture to try to tame.

However we're in stage c) it's too big and too dangerous for countries so it needs to be placed back in the country box.

Kind of like the history of oil, which was at first a) about individuals (Rockefeller), then about b) companies (Standard Oil), and finally, about c) countries (most big oil companies are either fully state owned or so tied at the hip with the government that they're basically state owned).

It's complicated, but ultimately, utopia doesn't exist. Most people don't really want open borders (and those that do, haven't fully thought things through), and countries in our current configuration, are still a good thing in most places. So yeah, we were always bound to reach some sort of "national internet" stage.

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?

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.

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-stat... [1]

https://www.uphe.org/priority-issues/diesel/ [2]

> 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-debunki...

Typically long-winded patio11 article that basically says: Banks are suspicious of crypto.

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.

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.

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?

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

https://archive.is/Nirff

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...

>> 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.

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/ba...

Does it still leak your IP, e.g. if the page rendered by the site you're archiving includes it? You'd think they'd create a simple filter to redact that out.

I’m not advocating for it but;

Websites like newspapers might soon put indicator words on the page, not just simple subscriber numbers that can be replaced, to show who is viewing the page which would make it way to archives.

> Someone with a subscription logs into the site, then archives it.

That’s not the case. I don’t have a NYT subscription, I just Googled for an old obscure article from 1989 on pork bellies I thought would be unlikely for archive.today to have cached, and sure enough when I asked to retrieve that article, it didn’t have it and began the caching process. A few minutes later, it came up with the webpage, which if you visit on archive.is, you can see it was first cached just a few minutes ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/01/business/futures-options-...

My assumption has been that the NYT is letting them around the paywall, much like the unrelated Wayback Machine. How else could this be working? Only way I could think it could work is that either they have access to a NYT account and are caching using that — something I suspect the NYT would notice and shutdown — or there is a documented hole in the paywall they are exploiting (but not the Wayback Machine, since the caching process shows they are pulling direct from the NYT).

I believe news sites let crawlers access the full articles for a short period of time, so that they appear in search results. Archive.is crawls during that short window.

France possibly found a way to pressure Durov into cooperating. Preempting similar actions by Russia. Classic intelligence methods to get someone to come over to the other side.

Perhaps the DGSE also got to plug a cable in to the Telegram infrastructure, which would be huge plus for them and the west in general not in the least because of the war. You could say France has pwnd Durov.

If I'm not mistaken some significant arrest was made shortly after they captured Durov, in the case of this child exploitation stuff.

>You could say France has pwnd Durov.

The Telegram dude is still pushing Ruzzian propaganda and is interfering in other countries elections for proRuzzian forces. So from the facts I can say Telegram and it's boss are a KGB asset, not sure what France managed to get from the guy or it was all a KGB propaganda operation to make idiots think Telegram is not controlled by KGB.

You need a new edition of the playbook. They have been renamed 30 years ago. The gov shutdown is hitting real hard, isn't it? /s

I am not from USA, I mentioned facts you can check, so you can judge the guys action or you be "navie" and trust his words. So for actuaal people that want the truth the badstatd was caiming in the day of Romanian election that France asked him to push pro EU propaganda in Telegram and he the big hero refussed. For some reason he only had the ability to tell the truth about his heroism in the day of the elections and not before when the press could demand him to bring some evidence or details. Ofc there was no evidence and I think he repeated this shit again in Moldova elections... The facts show the bastards is working for the KGB, maybe he is forced to do it and maybe he actually hatest Putin but he plays the Kremlin dance for some reason.

P.S. for lazy Ruzzian cyber trolls, when you see an old account where less then 1% of shit is about Putin and the Zeds then this is clearly a real person, find more inteligent or less drunk keybord worriors.

To be fair, there wasn't much evidence for removing a popular candidate, except for a "report" anyone could print in an hour. It turns out Europe is not much different from Russia in methods to get the wanted result.

I trust no one, not *fact-checked facts*, nor you, nor Durov, nor any government official. There exist enough inconsistencies about Durov's/Telegram's relationship with the government of Russia that you wouldn't see surface in the anglophonic sphere. The "French situation" added yet more to the pile of doubts.

If you wanted my reply to the rest of what you wrote, it is this: if you choose to believe a single social network/app is influential enough to manipulate an election, be logically consequential to recognize that they all are and do. Whether as a first party (the company itself is involved) or as an intermediary (via third-party bots).

> France possibly found a way to pressure Durov

I assume the way is to just shake handcuffs before him, so it wasn't a long search. Durov is not a hero type.

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

Were they able to discover their identity?

Finally someone does some digging

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.

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.

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".

That doesn't seem totally implausible.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Friendly reminder that archive box exists to let you self host your own archive service.

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.

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.

1960s: FBI/CIA invents the term "conspiracy theorist"

2020s: FBI/CIA invents the term "radical archivist"

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

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

Out of curiosity, does ArchiveBox integrate some way of verifying the contents of the archived page(s) are legitimate and unmodified?

ArchiveBox open source does not, but I have set it up for paying clients in the past using TLSNotary. This is actually a very hard problem and is not as simple as saving traffic hashes + original SSL certs (because HTTPS connections use a symmetric key after the initial handshake, the archivist can forge server responses and claim the server sent things that it did not).

There is only 1 reasonable approach that I know of as of today: https://tlsnotary.org/docs/intro, and it still involves trusting a third party with reputation (though it cleverly uses a zk algorithm so that the third party doesn't have to see the cleartext). Anyone claiming to provide "verifyable" web archives is likely lying or overstating it unless they are using TLSNotary or a similar approach. I've seen far to many companies make impossible claims about "signed" or "verified" web archives over the last decade, be very critial any time you see someone claiming that unless they talk explicitly about the "TLS Non-Repudiation Problem" and how they solve it: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/103645/does-ssl...

If web pages were signed the way emails were, it would authenticate if an archived copy of a web page is indeed authentic, but good luck getting such a major change all the way across the entire web. Why would anyone who would gladly retract / redact information on a whim even subscribe to this technology? Would be nice if they all did though.

Have you see this before? https://web.dev/articles/signed-exchanges

Its not for authenticity but instead to prevent tampering of adblock,ad and tracking removals more if there is history in search many complains in this

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.

> 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.

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.

Unless GP is suggesting the act of removal is what is worrying.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

They probably just set user agent (and reverse DNS name) to Google or some other company that can bypass the firewall.

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.

Maybe they also use Google Cloud to look more convincing.

For example, similar to mondediplo.com

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.

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

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

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

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)

They are in the RNA: https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta...

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

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

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.

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

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.

News agencies edit the history all the time.

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

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

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…

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

They're referencing this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HlZhPuDYqbU

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

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.

What obscure methods are they using?

I guess it might fall under a bulletproof hosting type of setup. [1] There have been many people investigating to try and figure out who owns & operates who is actually behind archive[.]today and how they're continuously able to bypass the paywalls of paid sites, continue operating with such large infrastructure with no apparent income source.

There was quite a good article posted here on HN about someone trying to figure out those questions, but I can't seem to find it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletproof_hosting

Isn't it just a question of pretending to be a search bot ? Sites will allow google bot to bypass the paywall so stuff gets indexed.

You could easily test your hypothesis yourself. It's not gonna work very well.

The owner must have subscriptions to these services. Some paywalls are absolute and it bypasses all of them with ease. I don't see it now but there was a time when archiving a reddit page showed the username that their bot was using.

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.

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.

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....

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"

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.

Kudos

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

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

lol, "American Law Firm"

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