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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

> which is, of course, ridiculous.

Why? in the world of web scrapping this is pretty common.

Because it works too reliably. Imagine what that would entail. Managing thousands of accounts. You would need to ensure to strip the account details form archived peages perfectly. Every time the website changes its code even slightly you are at risk of losing one of your accounts. It would constantly break and would be an absolute nightmare to maintain. I've personally never encountered such a failure on a paywalled news article. archive.today managed to give me a non-paywalled clean version every single time.

Maybe they use accounts for some special sites. But there is definetly some automated generic magic happening that manages to bypass paywalls of news outlets. Probably something Googlebot related, because those websites usually give Google their news pages without a paywall, probably for SEO reasons.

Using two or more accounts could help you automatically strip account details.

That's actually a really neat idea.

Do you know where the doxxed info ultimately originates from? It turns out that the archives leaked account names. Try Googling what happened to volth on Github.

I could be wrong, but I think I've seen it fail on more obscure sites. But yeah it seems unlikely they're maintaining so many premium accounts. On the other hand they could simply be state-backed. Let's say there are 1000 likely paywalled sites, 20 accounts for each = 20k accounts, $10/month => $200k/month = $2.4m a year. If I were an intelligence agency I'd happily drop that plus costs to own half the archived content on the internet.

Surely it wouldn't be too hard to test. Just set up an unlisted dummy paywall site, archive it a few times and see what the requests looks like.

Interesting theory. It would also be a good way to subtly undermine the viability of news outlets, not to mention the insidious potential of altering snapshots at will. OTOH, I'd expect a state-sponsored effort to be more professional in terms of not threatening and smearing some blogger who questioned them.

If I were an intelligence agency wanting to throw people off my scent, maybe I'd set up or pay off a blogger to track down my site's "owner" and then do some immature shit in response to absolutely confirm forever that the blogger was right.

Not saying this is true, just saying it could be

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