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Comment by bstsb | Hacker News Reader

this won't actually change anything right?

> the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment [...] orders Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents

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Aren't they widely believed to be Russian? They've been running for long enough that they're almost certainly in a non-extradition jurisdiction and know to stay there.

They already removed the files when the lawsuit was filed.

Obviously, they're not paying the $322 million. The amount doesn't matter because they're not paying anything. What it does enable is seizing their domain names and any other resources that are hosted by companies in the US jurisdiction.

That's the funny thing of course. I don't understand who this show really is for

Probably the people involved getting paid hefty fees for the whole thing.

I imagine the record companies and shareholders.

It would look bad if they did nothing, so a few 100k on legal theatre is worth it for them. Now they can say it's the US courts that are powerless.

Slightly OT: How is it possible that the operators are unidentified? Surely someone must own the domain and pay upkeep for that? Wouldn't that expose at least one of them?

Yes your honor, we've identified one Big Bird of 123 Sesame St as being affiliated with the operators of the site based on the registration data.

The only reason you have to tell the truth is if you want to reduce the risk of arbitrarily losing control of the domain, such as having a chance to contest any abuse reports that might be filed against you.

It’s well established if the US wants to they can find them and crypto can be traced.

Same question though how are they paying for the domain, assuming this is on the plaintiff to trace

What does "finding them" even means in this context? There are many hacker organizations located in Russia that are much worse than Anna's Archive. From my understanding those also operate websites / platforms to offer services.

Well clearly that’s false? Not all crypto transactions are traceable for example. And since they haven’t found them, that seems to disprove your statement doesn’t it?

Not really this is civil case not the full weight of a state behind it

> crypto can be traced

Anna's Archive exclusively uses Monero, which can't be by design

there are ways to buy domains using crypto and being completely anonymous.

This is presumably the real target of the lawsuit: the domain operators. There will likely be injunctions taking down the domains.

Some of the Anna domains have been taken down a few weeks ago.

Several domains previously used by Anna have been lost.

I assume that they may have been seized as a consequence of this trial.

ultimately it will depend on their opsec. i do think it shows that opsec strategies and tech can have a use case that is not morally bad (at least not in a straightforward way). so the good research done in this field is actually justified

"the operators of the site remain unidentified." I laughed at this quite a bit.

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