[HN Gopher] Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Ar...
___________________________________________________________________
Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
Author : immibis
Score : 1729 points
Date : 2025-11-15 10:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (adguard-dns.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (adguard-dns.io)
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| 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.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Yes kudo. The pressure could simply be inferred as due to the
| arrogant trend one can observe, the editing of history.
| diebillionaires wrote:
| yes, major respect to adguard.
| econ wrote:
| Their DNS is great. Removing websites without a good reason
| would quickly ruin everything for them.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| I'm not well-versed in this: is AdGuard roughly equivalent to
| Pi-hole?
| danek_szy wrote:
| Their self-hosted product (AdGuard Home) is. ;)
| GeekyBear wrote:
| 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.
| nasduia wrote:
| yes, and it will happily run on a reasonable OpenWRT system
| such as a GL.iNet Flint 2.
| brewtide wrote:
| 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).
| dizhn wrote:
| Their pihole alternative is great too. Single go binary.
| Fantastic software.
| ksynwa wrote:
| Is it open source?
| vin047 wrote:
| It is - GPLv3
|
| https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/LI
| CEN...
| dizhn wrote:
| Oh yeah
| workfromspace wrote:
| How would they compare to NextDNS?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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
| alickz wrote:
| I use their app on Android and it blocks ads system wide
|
| I would recommend it
| like_any_other wrote:
| > 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.
| luke727 wrote:
| 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
| encroach wrote:
| Thanks for the context - it changes the light of the parent
| article.
| vin047 wrote:
| 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)
| ameshkov wrote:
| 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.
| tkel wrote:
| 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#.
| ..
| ameshkov wrote:
| 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.
| alickz wrote:
| 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
| nikanj wrote:
| archive.is is frequently used to bypass paywalls, I wonder if
| this is motivated by that somehow
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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...
| pimlottc wrote:
| 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
| trevithick wrote:
| They're referencing this:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HlZhPuDYqbU
| _blk wrote:
| 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
| pogue wrote:
| 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.
| pimlottc wrote:
| What obscure methods are they using?
| pogue wrote:
| 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
| stef25 wrote:
| 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.
| input_sh wrote:
| You could easily test your hypothesis yourself. It's not
| gonna work very well.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| 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.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| 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.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| attila-lendvai wrote:
| they removed it promptly.
|
| remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume
| something without reading it...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > 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
| ikamm wrote:
| There are very few guidelines listed there that this
| community actually follows
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| cornholio wrote:
| 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.
| jordanb wrote:
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| 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.
| cornholio wrote:
| > 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Andrew Bustamante has stated that the CIA "supplies" people
| with such material.
|
| https://youtu.be/fu6bYPTp_kE?si=K_YKzTxy5ggKQDiG&t=2156
| iamnothere wrote:
| This is probably the realm of intelligence agencies, who have
| less accountability and many reasons to eliminate public
| archives (primarily perception management).
| amarcheschi wrote:
| 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)
| breppp wrote:
| 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)
| mchanson wrote:
| 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.
| breppp wrote:
| 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.
| user982 wrote:
| _> 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...)
| breppp wrote:
| _" 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
| fentanyl_peyotl wrote:
| 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").
| hobs wrote:
| 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"
| breppp wrote:
| And that and other pedophile linked conspiracy theories
| (pizzagate) had huge ramifications in these elections
| hobs wrote:
| pizzagate = not real, what I just said is not a
| conspiracy theory.
| breppp wrote:
| 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
| lostlogin wrote:
| 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.
| latentsea wrote:
| > "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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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".
| AstralStorm wrote:
| 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.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| 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
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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.
| clort wrote:
| Can you provide link at least? I am not sure what
| railroading a person involves..
| phyzome wrote:
| They're referring to the Karen Read case.
| math-ias wrote:
| 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
| tolerance wrote:
| The amount of evidence described in the Wikipedia entry
| that relies on mobile data is both fascinating and
| jarring; step counts, battery temperature, _auto_ mobile
| software, Ring cameras...wow.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| 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.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| The current federal government in the USA actively encourages
| federal agents to use illegal and unethical methods, and
| promised them protection and immunity.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The current federal government of France? Of the EU? The
| article is not about the USA.
| hulitu wrote:
| > 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).
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| Does Cloudflare only allow US customers?
| user_7832 wrote:
| 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.)
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| This article is specifically an article about an
| investigation by the FBI- US federal agents.
| shkkmo wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| A French organization with an English name, writing in
| English? J'en doute.
| immibis wrote:
| Very many European citizens speak English and it's the
| lingua franca* of the Internet.
| axiolite wrote:
| 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_Englis
| h-s...
|
| No reason to doubt this is coming from a French person.
| umanwizard wrote:
| France doesn't have a federal government, as it's not a
| federation.
| qingcharles wrote:
| State governments too. I heard a state judge once say "Of
| course police are permitted to break the law if they are
| investigating criminals."
| phyzome wrote:
| Law enforcement has already done such things and I've never
| heard of consequences for it.
| dude187 wrote:
| It's the same technique that people on Reddit use to take down
| subreddits that don't agree with the carefully curated "hive
| mind".
| iamnothere wrote:
| 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.
| j-bos wrote:
| 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.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Interesting, this may suppress reach of the video through
| something in the YT algorithm.
| cocainemonster wrote:
| 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
| rolph wrote:
| 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.
| Levitz wrote:
| 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.
| iamnothere wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| > 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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
| ACCount37 wrote:
| 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.
| AlikoDangote wrote:
| SF could be suicideforum
| phyzome wrote:
| KF would be KiwiFarms
| vintermann wrote:
| They're under a CSAM flood/reporting attack themselves,
| according to their admin.
| jm4 wrote:
| 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.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| 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.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Great point. I guess one is just a better anti-privacy
| boogeyman.
| asmor wrote:
| 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...
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| archive.today already takes down all reported CSAM? They
| explicitly don't want to archive it.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > 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.
| Lammy wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| 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?
| constantcrying wrote:
| 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....
| zahlman wrote:
| I understand the value of providing evidence here, but I
| _think_ KF links get your post auto-killed...
| cyberdick wrote:
| this sort of stuff happened on reddit too but by a different
| moderator and his goons
| https://www.markdownpaste.com/document/bardfinn-method
| msp26 wrote:
| 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.
| sirreal14 wrote:
| 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/Brie
| f/B... [1] https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-
| media/blog/2025/tor-... [2]
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-
| netwo...
| soniclettuce wrote:
| 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.
| _--__--__ wrote:
| 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.
| hulitu wrote:
| > 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.
| ricksunny wrote:
| 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...
| zahlman wrote:
| > gets archive.is to crawl it
|
| Does archive.is actually do any crawling? I thought they only
| archived pages on request.
| cocainemonster wrote:
| archiving on request is still crawling, even if active, not
| passive
| fsagx wrote:
| KF/SaSu/SF ?
| efreak wrote:
| Check other comments, this was explained here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937453
| Longlius wrote:
| 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.
| Sabinus wrote:
| KF being Kiwifarms the harassment site? Interesting, did it
| start happening after any particular event? Have the site
| admins posted about it publicly?
| master_crab wrote:
| 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.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I think they're well crafted laws because I think that's their
| intended purpose.
| trollbridge wrote:
| "The purpose of a system is what it does."
| robocat wrote:
| POSIWID - not really:
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-
| purpo...
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| 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.
| trollbridge wrote:
| 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".
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| fact
| attila-lendvai wrote:
| ...or their goal is simply not what they advertise.
| marcosscriven wrote:
| 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.
| phyzome wrote:
| Well, as the post indicates, it likely _isn 't_ from a
| government body.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| I thought they were suggesting it was a government body (an
| FBI operation)
| phyzome wrote:
| 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.)
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| I understood that they suspect a lone unknown criminal, and
| that they filed a police report based on that suspicion.
| permo-w wrote:
| 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
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| 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.
| marcosscriven wrote:
| 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.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| 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.
| lsihgsligh99 wrote:
| 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.
| rarkins wrote:
| 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".
| rossant wrote:
| That doesn't seem totally implausible.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| 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.
| hopelite wrote:
| 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.
| demarq wrote:
| Finally someone does some digging
| orbital-decay wrote:
| 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.
| rs186 wrote:
| 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?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Presumably they have failed to do the latter and are just
| reaching at this point.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| 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.
| chrneu wrote:
| 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.
| cocainemonster wrote:
| aren't we all just glorified atoms
| codedokode wrote:
| 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...
| pards wrote:
| >> 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| 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...
| rkagerer wrote:
| 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.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| 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.
| mojosam wrote:
| > 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).
| madeforhnyo wrote:
| 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.
| stef25 wrote:
| 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| >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.
| PinkSheep wrote:
| 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
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| 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.
| PinkSheep wrote:
| 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).
| codedokode wrote:
| > 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.
| M0r13n wrote:
| 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
| snthd wrote:
| 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.
| Buge wrote:
| 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.
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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.
| chrneu wrote:
| Cloudflare tends to default to "It's for the security of
| our users" when it often times isn't.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| > 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).
| pabs3 wrote:
| 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.
| andronikos wrote:
| 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...
| M0r13n wrote:
| Thanks for clearing that up! :)
| archon810 wrote:
| I love HN.
| A_Venom_Roll wrote:
| 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.
| Plasmoid2000ad wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| They probably just set user agent (and reverse DNS name) to
| Google or some other company that can bypass the firewall.
| Worksheet wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| Maybe they also use Google Cloud to look more convincing.
| nervysnail wrote:
| For example, similar to mondediplo.com
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| https://archive.is/Nirff
| Havoc wrote:
| 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.
| andy99 wrote:
| Don't forget cloudflare
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| 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.
| verisimi wrote:
| Just one of many protection rackets
| Buge wrote:
| Are you saying that cloudflare conducts or promotes DDoS?
| gruez wrote:
| 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.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > 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.
| pigggg wrote:
| Most of the ddos as a service booter/stresser websites
| and front doors are on cloudflare.
| sph wrote:
| 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.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yes. Alas my list was far from exhaustive :(
| salawat wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Not the entire internet, these developments are just about
| the WWW.
| chongli wrote:
| 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
| betaby wrote:
| > these developments are just about the WWW.
|
| The article is literally about DNS.
| cluckindan wrote:
| And? It is literally a service for looking up Internet
| Protocol addresses.
| numpad0 wrote:
| (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)
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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_
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| squigz wrote:
| "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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| ericfr11 wrote:
| 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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 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.
| throaway1975 wrote:
| 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?
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| throaway1975 wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| throaway1975 wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| Ntrails wrote:
| > 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
| alansammarone wrote:
| 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.
| salawat wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| mistercheph wrote:
| 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
| azalemeth wrote:
| 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.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| 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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| You are mistaking a realization of a random process for
| the random process itself.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| I don't understand but I am interested, would you give a
| bit more explanation?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Sure!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realization_(probability)
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| 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?
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| 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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 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.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| 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."
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 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/2ttgx3flngktuelcswh86
| 1hm...
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| [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.
| cedws wrote:
| 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.
| CPLX wrote:
| > 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.
| throaway1975 wrote:
| 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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 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.
| throaway1975 wrote:
| What? The issue with the internet is that it's now
| designed to be an addictive rectangle in your pocket.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| CPLX wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| beefnugs wrote:
| 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
| txrx0000 wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Different question, but what are realistic use cases of
| archive.today that could be interesting for average person?
| j-bos wrote:
| 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.
| betaby wrote:
| News agencies edit the history all the time.
| BoppreH wrote:
| 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?
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| 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.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| 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.
| superkuh wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| > What stops them from forcing Chrome
|
| Amount of money and influence Alphabet has?
| octagons wrote:
| 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.
| mkagenius wrote:
| It was a little weird that they didnt suspect phishing from the
| get go.
| codedokode wrote:
| 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...
| betaby wrote:
| 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.
| user_7832 wrote:
| 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 EUR15,000.
|
| Side note, would anybody know how "easily" do political
| elites get off the hook in France?
| rgj wrote:
| 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?
| betaby wrote:
| Because they went to the unrelated DNS provider and not
| the archive itself.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| 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.
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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/
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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).
| codedokode wrote:
| I assume people who do this also do other illegal things
| and know how to anonymize themselves.
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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)
| vintermann wrote:
| Uploading illegal material of some sort to a site with
| user-contributed content, and then immediately reporting
| it, is a common abuse tactic.
| e2le wrote:
| >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.
| asmor wrote:
| 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.
| SSLy wrote:
| The fake abuse reports coming to IP addresses hosting TOR
| relays (not exits) might be same group trying to pollute
| the commons.
| PinkSheep wrote:
| 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.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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?
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| 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.
| h33t-l4x0r wrote:
| > 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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).
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| 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.
| evilDagmar wrote:
| 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| > 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.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| 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
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| In some countries money will get you out of jail unless
| someone with more money wants you in jail.
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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)
| freakynit wrote:
| 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 Crequi, 69006 Lyon 6 in the
| Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region, specifically in the Rhone
| department.
|
| Publication number: 20250011, announcement number 1688
| codedokode wrote:
| The article mentioned that this might be a mass registration
| address, and it seems that in France details of association
| founders are not published.
| freakynit wrote:
| 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.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| My thoughts exactly - in which case archive.is might have
| the IP address(es) of the perpetrators in their logs.
| Worth checking out.
| Reventlov wrote:
| >131 rue de Crequi, 69006 Lyon 6
|
| Yeah, that's a postal box to host compagnies.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| 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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 1960s: FBI/CIA invents the term "conspiracy theorist"
|
| 2020s: FBI/CIA invents the term "radical archivist"
| nikisweeting wrote:
| 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
| e2le wrote:
| Out of curiosity, does ArchiveBox integrate some way of
| verifying the contents of the archived page(s) are legitimate
| and unmodified?
| nikisweeting wrote:
| 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...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| _blk wrote:
| Kudos to adguard dns for [planing to] filing a counter-claim
| against potential abuse of power.
| amelius wrote:
| 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?
| morkalork wrote:
| What are you saying, that governments should consider long term
| success over immediate corporate wants? That sounds like commie
| talk!
| neuroelectron wrote:
| I bet its mirrors of their own honeypot websites they submitted
| themself to remove records of websites they rather have memory-
| holed.
| op00to wrote:
| Wouldn't the people making the complaint also be subject to
| prosecution for accessing illegal materials?
| avazhi wrote:
| 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.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 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....
| ngriffiths wrote:
| > 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...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Typically long-winded patio11 article that basically says:
| Banks are suspicious of crypto.
| salawat wrote:
| 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.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| 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.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 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.
| unwise-exe wrote:
| Who cares about local storage? You could have just made up
| whatever you're claiming to have saved.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| 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.
| sedatk wrote:
| 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.
| jMyles wrote:
| 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.
| blumomo wrote:
| Had exactly the same thoughts. Thanks for saving me from
| posting this.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| Wasn't there a post today saying GPU, memory, and storage price
| all skyrocketed due to AI pressures?
| Jerry2 wrote:
| _"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the
| present controls the past." -- George Orwell, 1984_
| AstralStorm wrote:
| 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.
| valicord wrote:
| If you can sue shark fins, why not a website?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...
| xandrius wrote:
| Holy crap, 30'000 sharks kills for a bloody soup. Insane and
| that wasn't even their only journey.
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| 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
| bogwog wrote:
| My favorite is United States v. One Solid Gold Object in
| Form of a Rooster.
|
| The Rooster won.
| robotnikman wrote:
| 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_Cons
| i...
| rkomorn wrote:
| "More or Less" maybe takes the cake for me.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| petalmind wrote:
| Fantastic. Each case is basically an SCP object.
| oblio wrote:
| 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).
| casefields wrote:
| Louisiana has a bunch of French law:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Louisiana
| oblio wrote:
| And your point of trivia is not applicable here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appe
| als... -> Louisiana isn't in the list for the court that
| handled that trial.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Lawmakers are gonna have to figure that out soon (years
| hopefully) since it's not unlikely that AGI will have the same
| issue.
| saturnite wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| It's still being done
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/isp-sued-by-
| reco...
| fragmede wrote:
| 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...
| mrtksn wrote:
| Interesting, so the US already has the tools to go after AI,
| self driving cars and robots.
| pwg wrote:
| > 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.
| otterley wrote:
| 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.
| otterley wrote:
| See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_subpoena
| mobeigi wrote:
| I wonder if there is a real person out there called John
| Doe who regularly received legal threats for a myriad of
| alleged crimes.
| econ wrote:
| One more reason for browsers to save all pages one visits.
| sans_souse wrote:
| 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"
| tarkin2 wrote:
| 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.
| ProofHouse wrote:
| Kudos
| ThouYS wrote:
| Another day, another attempt at destroying the archives.. Welp
| jayess wrote:
| lol, "American Law Firm"
| varenc wrote:
| 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.
| novemp wrote:
| > 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.
| chrneu wrote:
| 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?
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| 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.
| Ms-J wrote:
| 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.
| danielxt wrote:
| > 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?
| mzajc wrote:
| > 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
| PinkSheep wrote:
| 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| 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.?
| dpark wrote:
| > _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.
| noosphr wrote:
| The above post contains csam, Dang please delete it without
| reading. Thanks.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| axiolite wrote:
| > 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.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/knowingly
|
| You even quoted the word...
| Sporktacular wrote:
| 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.
| mwilliaams wrote:
| > Just how stupid do you think lawmakers, judges,
| prosecutors, and police are?
|
| Quite often pretty stupid, honestly. Or careless,
| ignorant, jaded, corrupt, etc etc
| bostik wrote:
| 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
| solumunus wrote:
| You have way too much faith. Almost endless examples of
| injustice can be observed.
| xzjis wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| > 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.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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.
| amy_petrik wrote:
| >(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
| aftbit wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| 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.
| vasco wrote:
| Nothing above links to anything suspicious mate, much less
| that.
| tremon wrote:
| 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.
| vasco wrote:
| You're engaging with my post so yours is also subversive
| ay lmao
| deinonychus wrote:
| 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.
| nervysnail wrote:
| God...
|
| Here from their official "presse" announcement:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251116002625/https://webabused...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| nervysnail wrote:
| The guy who "censored" the links should turn himself over
| to the police over carelessness IMO.
| mouse_ wrote:
| > 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.
| ksynwa wrote:
| 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| 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!
| cft wrote:
| Subpoena from the FBI to Tucows to disclose identity of
| archive.today(is) operator: https://pdflink.to/1e0e0ecd/
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Were they able to discover their identity?
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The accuser sure seems to value their own anonymity while trying
| to pierce someone else's.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| 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.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| 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.
| point999 wrote:
| > If you know of a crime and intentionally hide it, that seem
| illegal.
|
| Yet this is a standard way to become a wealthy lawyer.
| mcny wrote:
| 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.
| lacoolj wrote:
| Seems like there's an actual child/teenager running that
| "company"
| Vera_Wilde wrote:
| 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.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| 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...
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| It looks like WAAD has posted a response to this situation:
|
| https://webabusedefense.com/presse/Communiquer_presse_Aff-Ad...
| [pdf]
| squigz wrote:
| 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.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| > 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.
| Longlius wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| Unless GP is suggesting the act of removal is what is
| worrying.
| Quarrel wrote:
| 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.
| MrDresden wrote:
| 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.
| miellaby wrote:
| A simple way to debunk this fake French pretending non-profit
| complainer is to check it's present in the Repertoire national
| des associations (RNA)
| desmaraisp wrote:
| They are in the RNA: https://www.journal-
| officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta...
| ilitirit wrote:
| 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"
| greatgib wrote:
| 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.
| billy99k wrote:
| I would have liked the 'suspicious pressure' when Parler was
| shutdown by colluding tech companies and the US government.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-16 23:01 UTC)