Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

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...

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.

>> 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.

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