In my personal experience, the priorities of the FBI are typically highly politically motivated. The exceptions are if you’re doing something seriously icky, or doing fraud that deceives people.
For those interested in what’s reported and what actually happens, I’ve made some comments on my case and my experience here: https://prison.josh.mn
Really nice. It also builds some credibility currency, the reputation economy is not as punitive in your case as I thought it would be.
Here's your actual account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567
edit: apparently also here: https://prison.josh.mn/self
The wording of the landing page makes it sound (at least to me!) like the content is no longer there.
Crusade came from the West. Roman Empire, or what the last vestiges of, fizzled in the East.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-it-wrong-to-confu...
Search for “Americans are spending like never before: Retail sales are booming — up 5% over last year, far outpacing inflation — as Americans spend in record amounts.” [1]
The phrase “up 5%” links directly to archive.ph.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/09/the-economy-is-b...
There have been periods of weeks/months when they don't have paid access to those Finnish sites. Tried it just now on a hs.fi paid article from today and it didn't work, but for example paid articles from just a week ago seem to have been captured as a premium user.
It is curious how they have time to do it and I wonder if news sites of other smaller languages get similar treatment.
NO! I do not want your newsletter! I wouldn't even have an email address if it wasn't absolutely required to operate in society today. The less email I get, the better!
Email is becoming like fax machines: An old, dated technology that refuses to die.
Rhetorical I'm sure, but actually yes! The popup that tries to get you to switch to the app when you are actively trying to give the offender money! eBay is a notable offender here (it pops up when I search for stuff to buy; why would you interrupt that?)
I'd give you an award but you've hit your maximum number of free things this month. Make an account, pay for a subscription, and sign up for needless spam then we'll let you have it along with some ads for good measure.
Here I speak about this site, but everyday we have new cases of that. Like "new tax on anything that starts to be popular" for France, or Google trying to kill our privacy and F-Droid by requiring all app devs to have attestation from them.
If there is a block it is very timid.
I just wish it automagically expanded Wikipedia headers.
One of the agents named in the subpoena appears to have previously worked on child exploitation cases years ago:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-6039/245948/202...
1. Put up CSAM on your unlisted domain briefly.
2. Archive page and delete site.
3. Send people archive link.
Have dealt with content from when I was ~11 on Omegle appearing across the internet for years at this point (NCMEC is an amazing resource).
Archive sites are regularly abused by bad actors.
Here is real example on archive.is:
https://archive.is/https://ezgif.com/maker/*
I submitted multiple complaints to NCMEC but didn’t get results. Germany, though, was able to get the archives purged.
On the page, you will see the text:
> In response to a request we received from 'jugendschutz.net' the page is not currently available.
UPD Found this by googling "site:blog.archive.today abuse":
https://blog.archive.today/post/117011183286/yesterday-i-did... (2015)
If the (Western) internet were to turn into a monoculture of Western-domiciled big corporations, that kind of censorship would be *effective*. Our systems aren't robust against bad-faith actors attacking the free flow of information. (And the root cause of the planet-spanning censorship cascade in that example was, unambigiously, bad actors. A crime syndicate based in India).
The fact the internet is global and freely connects to legal jurisdictions and cultures very different from the West's, is to the West's benefit: it creates an escape-hatch for things that fall between the cracks of our nascent totalitarian technologies.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39065981#39065996 ("A Judge in India Prevented Americans from Seeing a Blockbuster Report")
We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge).
Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.)
Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.
Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.
Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.
You're never going to get a system with a clandestine domestic service running ethically for long, esp. not with qualified immunity. It's simply too attractive to dumb psychopaths with delusions of grandeur and concurrently not of interest to people with a strong sense of community or morals.
Hard to measure, isn't it. In the eyes of the millions of americans who have at some point in their life been victims or related to or friends of victims of some kind of serious crime, the FBI has often times been helpful and/or the prospect of being caught has been a deterrent for crimes.
You contrast that with all the bad that has come from there, of which there is surely plenty, but how come you claim thay the bad obviously must outweigh the good?
If you ask me, I'd trade the good for enduring the bad.
My shortcut is admittedly a sloppy heuristic (because what else do you have for unknowns like this); for the unmeasurable effects, my bet is that they skew roughly the same as the measurables. For every serial killer who thought twice, there have probably been many political activists who have also thought twice. The deterrent effect cuts both ways if your actions cut both ways. We also know about enough falsely accused / imprisoned that we can assume we ain't figured them all out. For every family that feels safer with the FBI around, there are families that feel less safe, because people "like them" have been framed, murdered, snooped on, suppressed, and criminalized.
So yeah, it is hard to measure - but not impossible to come to a conclusion, as far as I'm concerned.
Another way to look at it is this; if you're going to hand the mandate of violence and skullduggery to an institution, you should be damn sure that they have standards and practices that solidly enforce competence and ethics - and even considering the good, we know pretty conclusively that they have failed in this regard. I don't want to play russian roulette with law enforcement - they should get it right almost all of the time or step aside so someone who knows what they're doing can handle it.
If they're canvassing for witnesses, are they going to charge through your yard and shoot your dog? If they're investigating someone else, how likely are they to try to come up with something unreasonable to charge you with for leverage and then make you plead it down to a penalty that still isn't zero in exchange for giving them information you might not even have and would then be forced to choose between fabricating to get the deal and "not cooperating" and getting a serious prison sentence?
If someone is attempting to SWAT you, how likely are they to ascertain the situation instead of shooting first and asking questions later?
If their investigation has led them to you for some reason even though you're innocent, do you expect them to care about the truth or just railroad you?
If you hear the name of a particular law enforcement agency unexpectedly when you don't have any reason to think you've done anything wrong and your instinct still has to be "oh fuck" then they're bad at their jobs.
Depending on how you expect the reader to answer all your questions, we could still be in full agreement, but my sense is that you're asking them rhetorically?
And then in terms of literal sentiment, most people aren't familiar with any given local law enforcement agency because there are so many of them, so they wouldn't know what to think, and some of them are quite bad. But the knowledge of the average person it isn't really the point.
Suppose you actually were familiar with the record of whatever specific agency just showed up. If you would still have to think "oh fuck" then they suck.
The FBI's anticorruption work is good and necessary.
Despite topping the world with incarcerations and arrests and law enforcement funding, the US is not a particularly safe place, so obviously US law enforcement isn't focused on safety and justice, which leaves the monetary factor.
If you arrest someone for a drug crime and get a plea deal out of them they get jail fees, processing fees, court minimum fees plus any additional court costs, probation costs and fees, multiple "X state specialty tax fee", plus kickbacks from the mandatory court ordered drug/anger/traffic class, cost of drug test fees, etc. If you arrest someone from murder and imprison them for life, sure you can claim to charge them those fees, but they will never be free of prison to ever pay them. So it should be no surprise that cops are incentivized to go for easy drug charges from non-dangerous citizens that puts money in their pockets over actual dangerous criminals who will only reduce department revenue.
Whatever the US problem is, it's not net negative cops (or guns, for that matter).
un-nuanced and intellectually lazy.
i could absolutely be wrong since your post was kinda vague, so forgive me if i’m wrong, but are you implying we shouldn’t attempt mitigation of bad things because other bad things are happening elsewhere?
That chain was in response to:
>> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here
> Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.
Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.
The pushback, by other chap & me, is about quantifying this particular misdeed as "evil", showing a remarkable lack of acknowledgement about the many, many, many other things the FBI has done (from its inception as a personal blackmailing operation by Hoover against US politicians - ring any bells?) and is doing, which are far, far worse than this "bad thing".
(all this, over what was mostly a tongue in cheek response anyway ...)
Most often it happens with China since they spend a lot of propganda to present themselves as the true inventor of everything.
People can't even agree what goes on today. To what degree history is fiction I have no idea but it's probably worse.
Since you apparently have none of these things, you go get em tiger.
True, but I disagree with the conclusion. When I try to map it back to reality and it doesn't make sense, it is indeed an indictment of the analogy. But the fact I have to abuse the analogy to make that mapping coherent is not my problem; it's not my analogy.
However, within the context of the analogy, and if one can imagine that absolutely insane scenario, the logic holds.
http://archive.today/2023.11.30-020758/https://www.theverge....
IMO the natural right is for humans to share what they've learned up to and including verbatim reproductions of works by others. I also think that abridging this right to grant some exclusivity for artists (the broader "art" meaning scientists/writers/authors/musicians/coders/etc) is suitable. Copyright is/was a good idea. Its fair use clause is a good idea. The duration of exclusivity under current laws, however, seems excessive and beyond mere encouraging art.
Many rights holders would very much like us to forget this.
But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.
Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".
Why can't you just be happy for those few who are lucky enough to be able to violate copyright with no consequences? Yes, I know you'd want everyone to be able to violate copyright, but we're not there yet.
AI is not an attack on copyright, it is an attempt to replace it with something worse.
I'd love to see copyright slowly become irrelevant, but even with that goal we should expect to see large corpos being the last to stop respecting it.
There are violations of copyright which are ethically fine, i.e. pirating an old movie to watch.
Then there are violations of copyright which are ethically problematic, i.e. pirating an old movie to sell.
When a big company violates copyright the nature of the violation is always much closer to the latter.
Are they?
Knowledge is shared among humanity at a rapid speed. Everyone benefits.
It’s mind boggling how anyone could be opposed to that.
Also Google respects robots.txt. Every site that Google surfaces chose to be in the index.
While not all the companies in question may or may not be profiting from these things some of them are, and most if not all of their employees certainly are as well.
I DO care that nearly 2M different IPs are used to try to pull 42k commits out of a git repo one by one when they could just git clone it ...
To deny people access to things is one thing, wanting to do it by impossible means is quite something else. Who even has time to scavage the universe looking for possible infringement on their works and also the money to deal with it?
I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions.
Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures.
I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.
And arguably I used to think it was the Internet Archive.
It does make this case seem problematic now that I know the details.
Anything which does that should be legal, and anything that stifles those advances should not.
Where US law applies varies by which law it is; there are US laws that apply only outside of the US [0], as well as US laws which have application both inside and outside the US.
[0] e.g., the federal torture statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2340A(a), “Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”
I'm only angry with them when they pay hush money to IP extortionists.
This is true knowledge socialism.
- ChatGPT is in the "bait" phase of "bait and switch" plan. It is trying to make us dependent on it, so that it can extract maximum profit later.
Information can be made available to all, and at the same time, we can make it so others cannot resell or repackage it for profit like what AI companies are doing.
It's not up to us to tell the FBI what to do, that's a fatal misunderstanding about how power works. You can demand to see the FBI's manager, but I doubt it will get you anywhere. You can choose between two candidates offered by the privately owned and run political parties for whom the FBI works, but I don't think that will help either.
> Knowledge itself should become a human right.
Human rights are created by legislation. Unless you own a legislator (or rather, many legislators), you will not be involved in this. The people who own (and parcel out) knowledge itself, however, will be involved.
It would be better if we stopped making pronouncements about what people more powerful than us should be doing. It's like prisoners talking about what the jail should be doing. You should talk about what you should be doing. And don't mistake demanding for doing, or walking in the street with your friends for activism (unless you're violating curfew and are prepared to defend yourselves.)
Be brave. Put forward a program that might fail. Ask people to help you with it, ask them to follow you, tell them where to show up. Join someone else and help with their program. Don't demand, then whine when they say "of course not." The FBI is not your daddy, and the people running it are not running it on your behalf.
I don't mean to be personal, but this type of talk is empty. The way how to do things is decided is through power; and the way weak people exercise power is collectively, through discussion and coordinated action. Anybody can talk about what they would do if they were dictator of the world.
How do you suggest we fund the difficult work needed to investigate, research, and produce such data?
Remember that facts are not copyrightable, and as such, can't be restricted by copyright. Creative expression of those facts, on the other hand, can be.
For you. I'm sure they love data as long as only they can access it.
Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys. Of course, they still have archive.org sources everywhere, so the objection is not actually to archiving page content.
Tons of claims also seem to be sourced ultimately to thinly-disguised promotional material (e.g. claims of the prevalence of a problem backed up by the sites of companies offering products to combat the problem) and opinion pieces that happen to mention an objective (but not verified) claim in passing.
What do you mean by this? Wikipedia actively encourages people to use archive.is links in citations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Archiving_a_source#Archiv...
It's not that difficult.
The idea that the permanent record of the internet could hinge on the ethics of one stranger behind a server rack is deeply unsettling.
Knowing the current owner of archive.is doesn't help; we need more full, independent Internet mirrors that can be compared against each other.
https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...
If this is truly a concern then the answer is to have more than one publicly-accessible independent archive service. Archivebro has never taken any steps towards securing a monopoly on archiving things. The FBI are the only ones doing that.
Also not everybody in Russia is on the FSB payroll. News media always stops investigating as soon as there is credible information that somebody or their server is located in Russia because if they learn too much then it becomes difficult to discredit them as "possibly being linked to the kremlin". If you used any other nationality to imply that somebody is acting in bad faith on behalf of a hostile foreign government without additional evidence those same journos would call you a racist and try to get you canceled.
My main use for archive.is is for sites that somehow cannot be archived (a message will show up mentioning this site cannot be archive or something along these lines).
archive.is is generally pretty good in forcibly attempting to get an archive, if the HTML doesn't work, the screenshot will work fine. Although archive.is doesn't seem to handle gifs/videos.
They respected exclusion requests after they stopped to respect robots.txt. I don't know their policy for new exclusion requests.
Or they're worried about the paywall by-passing functionality (which is probably what a good portion of people use it for) and copyright claims against archive.today potentially having it taken down and thus breaking a lot of links.
Interesting tagline, but probably has far too many side effects.
If it were me, I would try to boil this down to some negative right, those usually have less side effects, and even then I would be very careful.
It should become part of an entity that is very difficult to kill, and will exist for a long time.
Although I guess that's a function of culture, and I think respect for libraries is rapidly declining.
I'm all for archiving open webpages though. And I'm honestly surprised the Internet Archive is still standing. Their decision to opening up their book library was a dangerous mistake.
Look up the article "Who Archives the Archivist?" (it's difficult to find. Use quotes. Don't link it; the site is banned here).
IMO what you really mean is "I should be free to sit and surf the web secure in my belief others are acting properly, while subsisting on externalized labor that props up my biology".
Asimov and countless others highlight this difference between being a passive reader of others ideas as orthogonal to knowledge acquisition. If you aren't conducting the experiments you acquired nothing but memory of someone else telling a story.
4% in the US hunt now. So to get people living rather than acquiescing, all you office drones are going to have to learn your way out of helplessness. Go acquire knowledge of how to grow a potato.
You won't because you don't want to acquire knowledge. You want the world to gift you knowledge and experience through as little effort of your own as possible. Typical American capitalist. 8 billion across the globe aren't that impressed by 300 millions obvious grift.
I'm not going to simp for the FBI here, but come on: do you have a human right to preserve my private photos leaked by a stalker or a hacker? Because archive.is is famously unwilling to play nice here.
I don't know if this case is about that, or about pirated content, or about the administration trying to scrub something embarrassing off the internet. But the fact that archive.is cheerfully enables all three "use cases" should probably give you a pause.
It's a delicate line to walk because takedown processes can be abused to do things we don't like. But "lol, tough luck, information wants to be free" is not a sensible blanket response in a polite society.
They of course don't have to, but having something like Anna's Archive but for website history would be great.
- even higher costs associated with seeding archives (egress traffic, storage iops capacity required etc)
- chances of finding a 3rd-party seed for arbitrary file would be pretty slim, which means seeding on your own most of the time, which would make this hardly any better than offering files over HTTP only.
Anna's Archive, after all, is only an index.
I read there was a US government investigation tracking Ukranian children abducted by Russian forces, but supposedly there weren't enough resources [0] to sustain that.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5333328/trump-admin-cut...
The president’s pardons are not popular with the FBI and law enforcement. The FBI is not happy about doing all of the work to prosecute people only to have the president override it for political reasons.
It convinces others that you're willing to pardon them too in exchange for money and convincing other people is the definition of politics.
> Politics (from Ancient Greek πολιτικά (politiká) 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.
I don't know how much more obvious I can make this for you. Bribery is political.
Bribery is political. But it's not taken to be a usual part of politics in the West. (Similar to how the Roman word for ambush was the same as their word for treason. Treason isn't taken to be a usual part of politics. Ambush, for them, not a usual part of warfare.)
Basically, you're both right because what is and isn't political is itself a political question.
The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’ meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’
First at rec.humor.funny on October 11, 1992
Who has Trump pardoned that wasn't a supporter of his?
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-donald-trump-pardons-seco...
The specific political agenda was to get support from libertarians, who lean conservative, but don't like Trump much - because he rejects libertarianism.
That's as political as you can possibly get. It wasn't a behind the scenes thing. It was literally announced at a political convention.
Op means to say this type of pardon is not to meant to win votes or satisfy the demands of constituents, Like with convicted cops or people with weed related crimes etc or pardoning draft dodgers after Vietnam or civil war and so on .
While money is involved deeply in politics and financial corruption is there , occasionally idealogical (political) actions without direct financial benefits also happen.
It is hard to say whether this pardon of Silk Road founder was motivated by libertarian, or crypto community pressure or by financial donations to the party etc both are possible even at the same time but they are different considerations
“Government exists for the personal benefit of the leader” (or simply “for my personal benefit as the leader”, with even less generalization beyond that) is an ideology, actually.
It’s not one that is popular to embrace publicly, but, that's hardly unique along real ideologies.
This is an unverified blanket statement. We don't know what percentage of the FBI and law enforcement agree or disagree on anything.
The FBI does what Trump tells them to do, that's it.
Well if they don't like it I'm sure he would be happy to start a bidding war.
1: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/stealing-bitcoin...
Their priorities are highly political.
Roughly it seemed to be suggesting that:
* It's easier to deceive someone if they first solicit for help on a forum
* You can trick someone into revealing sensitive info like which infrastructure provider is used by nerdsniping them: "My mate thinks you should just enable health checking on AWS ELB", and then they reply "Well actually I use Hetzner". Except I'm guessing it was more elaborate than that.
I guess I wasn't the target audience of the article though.
joshmn, what did you think of the article?
Do you find it difficult to trust random commenters online now?
I see you mentioned you can't discuss technical details, but if/whenever that expires (?), that'd be great to hear.
I also found it underwhelming, though I'd like to think I’m the most scrutinizing of the subject matter. There's some nuance between my take on my behavior and the profiler's, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt—they only had my Reddit posts to go on and had to package that for investigators.
I still tend to trust by default and make witty comments or jabs that sometimes land flat, so the article was accurate in that sense.
As for talking to the undercover, I made a point of keeping no secrets about my site's technical implementation. Between me and some "competitors," I was usually the first to respond to upstream provider changes—I'd even share my findings without expecting anything in return. Anyone could’ve asked about my issues, and I would've told them.
Trust is the most valued currency in the piracy world, and I worked hard to earn it with both peers and customers. Acting otherwise would've gone against that—and against my own morals. My being neurodivergent may also be worth noting in my willingness (or unwillingness from a free-will perspective) to trust others.
Technically speaking, the site worked by reverse-engineering the league's official streaming services—a few curl requests, careful observation of responses, and adapting them to my needs. There's more to it, of course, but my 2016 MVP was barely 50 lines of Ruby and a plain HTML file. TorrentFreak got some of the details right.
The root problem is the IP laws that congress passed. There will always be large pressure on law enforcement from the industry if you give them that leash.
not if their top priority is to erase memory
Not for any ideological reason.
A few years ago there was an organized effort to capture key roles in the Libertarian party and focus the organization more on property rights and capitalism, with less emphasis on personal freedoms and constitutional limitations on government. This effectively split the Libertarian party, neutering it as electoral factor.
Now, the Libertarian party never mustered a large share of the vote, but many electoral contests are won at the margins. They managed to get ~3% of the vote in 2016, but lost >80% of that over the following 2 elections.
https://www.the-pechko-perspective.com/political-commentary/...
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/libertarian-pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Libertar...
Because they are not like independents. Democrats have moved so far left that it's not even a question of who libertarians will vote for. The candidate just needs to show them a little attention so they remember to register and vote.
As a libertarian voter, the pardon for Ross was the only thing Trump did that actually brought me pause. To the point, I felt immensely guilty for not voting for him when I voted (L) because I knew[thought] I was damning Ross to a jail cell. It weighed on my conscious for a long time after the vote, an it wasn't until Trump won I felt somewhat absolved of the guilt.
Oh please. Ross was no saint by any stretch and it does look like he may have made a very dark decision at one point, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. There's a mountain of details and nuance around that case, including a whole host of law enforcement abuses that many people would find distasteful if not sickening if they actually got the whole story.
very vague. care to expound?
Two agents went to prison over this. Those same agents have a history of fraud and abuse.
The basic claim being that the salacious murder-for-hire bit was 1) never tried or proven, and 2) was allegedly instigated in part by federal agents (operating out of unrelated offices) and a "mentor" of Ulbricht's. In reaction to one of the federal agents himself stealing $800,000 from the criminal enterprise for himself in the course of his investigation. Or something like that.
I'm not clear how that squares with Ulbricht going on to order five more imaginary executions, but the whole thing seems awfully sordid from every angle.
[0] (Sarah Jeong for Forbes' contributor network thing) https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/04/17/could-the...
[1] (Andy Greenberg for Wired Magazine) https://archive.is/BvuQr
[2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-federal-agent... and https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-dea-agent-sen...
[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-evidence-of-government-c...
But archive.is ... that people use to read and be informed about the world around them, better get that guy.
In this day and age, MAANG, lacking integrity and values, bet on flattery and bribery as business expenses to ensure favorable treats instead of being punished.
IMO the president should, at best, be an additional appeals round. (But probably just not involved in the Judicial because separation of powers is good)
As the co-creator of a censorship-resistant publishing platform, I really wish we would migrate to a peer-to-peer technology. We could develop network effects on a decentralized platform with a cryptographically-provable network of trust. Most people don't realize it is possible to handle media distribution in a robust way.
I'm not just trying to shill my solution! I wish there were more competitors using these techniques to try and save the web.
Plus, the vast majority of people will just use the web frontend, with a peer on the server. Most peers can be hosted by content creators and tech-savvy friends+family.
we know for absolute fact they’ll remove or alter data to entirely change answers. we _know_ they’ll do this.
I have subscribed to news sites and still use something like archive.is because it is faster than my paid experience.
But unless you are a high profile gov target, Tor protects you well.
How do you really know that? I understand the theory, but do you have evidence? Have you tested it or read research that has tested it?
I would hesitate to give advice to people when they could get hurt.
Well it is of course not possible to 100% prove that Tor protects your privacy.
But the lack of evidence is also evidence. While we have evidence that the gov was able to identify indiviuals using Tor e.g. hosting drug portals, there has been no reports that individuals or companies are able to de-anonymize Tor users.
If the WHOIS records are falsified they'll start looking at payment information.
A quick web search suggests Denis Petrov is not at all a unique name. Just because on of them wrote a somewhat feminist thought on a blog in 2004 and another forked a... let's call it "satirically feminist" project on GitHub does not in any way suggest they are the same person.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE...
Pretty much anyone who has made any kind of commit to an open source project has that badge.
edit: it's incredibly naive of them to immediately trust the WHOIS results. i can say from experience that these are never checked
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...
In broad strokes, it's true to say that the Internet was created as a surveillance and control tool. But this was not a big design up front with those goals as built-in capabilities. There's nothing in TCP/IP you can point to and say, "yes, this is the surveillance bit", or "yes, this is the government control bit". "Down to the chip level" is just plain wrong. Yes, you could argue that the Internet was enabling those things, but that's true of all communications technology, if not just the basic concept of human socialization[0].
And, in practice, if the US had actually intended for the Internet to be a surveillance and control tool, it was sure as shit really fucking bad at making use of it. The only country that actually realized it needed to censor the Internet to maintain cultural/social hegemony was China, which is why they got into network censorship early. By the time America realized it wanted that level of control it had to outsource the wetwork to creative industry and advertising companies.
[0] Most neurotypical people fail to recognize this.
I'd even argue against that, unless you got some strong evidence supporting such a claim. The mere presence of potentially traceable (IP) addresses is a technical necessity of point-to-point data transfer as contrasted to broadcast.
-Upton Sinclair
I've also seen Cloudflare similarly in the loop, and they have similar cross-site tracking data.
Lesson: The same third-party tech surveillance companies to which you sell out all your visitors, can also violate you.
Helping Google to collect records of my reading habits is also unappealing.
The internet is bigger than you and me, and it's bigger than computers. It is an evolutionary force. It is not going to be stopped, and certainly not by states whose popularity and authority are waning so rapidly.
Moreover, the internet keeps as its core function the proclivity to copy and store bytes, and from this very simple mechanism emerges a large set of tools and norms that supplant nearly all of the ways that nation states perpetuate power.
What we desperately need are the elder statesmen and women to stand up and soberly see the writing on the wall, and gracefully deprecate the systems of which they will soon lose control, starting with nuclear weapons.
I don't believe this has to end in violence or acrimony of any kind. But we have run out of time to act like petulant children, crying that somebody took our empire away.
Very soon (ie, in the next couple centuries, maybe sooner), a few small nation states will adopt frameworks of zero IP, allowing all the content of the internet to be housed there, and from there, accessed by the entire planet.
Some other nation states may attempt some kind of embargo or sanctions, but these will obviously fail, just as the attempts by Russia and China to censor the internet within their borders have failed (and are failing with greater volume with each passing day). And before you cry that adoption in China is too low to support this conclusion, consider that the work to resist the GFW has begat some of the best networking tools in the world, with rapidity of evolution increasing, not decreasing. Even if fear and violence can stem adoption for a few decades or even centuries, the toolchain continues to grow and will tip the scales over sufficiently long time scales.
Let's not let this become a world information war. Let's install peace now while it's still easy to do. Let's dispense with IP and live in a world of joyous open access to information.
For real someone needs to make legit business of archiving the web where you would have timestamped hashes of your archived web pages and "unlimited" storage for archiving ofc only if you pay for the "unlimited" storage.
That seems ludicrous, given that after a DNS lookup, the next thing anybody does is to send an HTTP request, which obviously reveals that same IP address to the archive servers.
So it's an obvious and blatant lie by Cloudflare, and I wonder what their real reason is.
Mirror https://github.com/nikolqyy/bypass-paywalls-chrome
Let's build and share more and better tools to help ensure poor kids are allowed to learn.
Information, knowledge, and education do not belong only to those with money.
https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean
see also esp:
Either the jurisdiction of a nation extend over its physical borders as long as there is a connection in digital space or it does not.
If the former, EU regulations do apply to American companies and they have to comply or leave the market and make sure that their offerings are not available here.
"who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"
To be clear I have no reason to believe specific instances of these sites are malicious, but I would be shocked if black hats weren't trying to get into this space in general.
The fact that the FBI is involved, and given the insane amount of IP protection racket stuff going on, I think it's pretty highly likely this is all about copyright. I think the powerful interests care more about copyright than they do about most other things.
The FBI could be investigating them for archive.today, they could be investigated because of that apparent botnet, they could be investigating them because some billionaire media mogul friend of the current POTUS is outraged at the loss of revenue. To the best of my knowledge, the reasons aren't public.
Still, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be asking questions or expressing concern over this.
Archive.today uses Tor exit nodes when all of its main server IPs are blocked, so I believe this to be a disingenuous claim.
IF I'm curious about a fact or story, it's chatgpt. if someone sends me a link , it's archive.is . When archive.is goes way, I'm never going to see a CNN, NYT, LAtimes/etc logo again.
Any pointers to what this "private investigation" is? The other linked blog pointing to Russia (or at least a Russian) seems pretty convincing:
https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...
It doesn't seem very convincing in its conclusions, but has some interesting information nonetheless. I searched for some info on this doc, and it seems that its author really did hire some private investigators, I even found gofundme for it and places where the author asked for help in the early stages of their investigation. It seems they were trying to find the website owner because he hadn’t responded to requests to delete some personal things archived by a prolific stalker.
This is "Satoshi Nakamoto is Satoshi Nakamoto" levels of stupid, and clueless on so many levels that I think we can pretty safely dismiss the entire theory.
> Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
> 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. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We’re aware of real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was part of the motivation for the privacy and security policies of 1.1.1.1.
That's long been my assumption.
What I haven't known was whether this was good Russian people (culturally valuing literature and intellect) wanting to be able to access articles that they can't afford.
Nor whether it was or could become something sketchier (e.g., feeding spy databases, or one nice Chrome zero-day and strategic timing away from compromising engineering workstations at most US tech companies where an employee reads HN).
But what actually bothers me about the misc `archive.*` sites is how HN routinely uses them, for US tech company workers to circumvent paywalls for struggling journalism organizations. This piracy practice seems to have the unofficial blessing of the US tech investor firm that runs and moderates HN. Besides whatever laws this is breaking, subjectively, it feels to me like crossing an ethical line, and also (economically) like punching down.
x402 solves this.
The internet is fundamentally different than print though—perhaps this fundamental change to journalism requires another way to pay the bills. (Advertising is the obvious one.)
Or maybe we, as a society (because of our internet ways) simply don't deserve these services any longer.
Perhaps the internet itself is the problem. What if instead that was the big mistake after all?
The subpoena, which was posted on X by archive.today on October 30, was sent by the FBI to Tucows, a popular Canadian domain registrar. It demands that Tucows give the FBI the “customer or subscriber name, address of service, and billing address” and other information about the “customer behind archive.today.”
“THE INFORMATION SOUGHT THROUGH THIS SUBPOENA RELATES TO A FEDERAL CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED BY THE FBI,” the subpoena says. “YOUR COMPANY IS REQUIRED TO FURNISH THIS INFORMATION. YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFINITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.”
The subpoena also requests “Local and long distance telephone connection records (examples include: incoming and outgoing calls, push-to-talk, and SMS/MMS connection records); Means and source of payment (including any credit card or bank account number); Records of session times and duration for Internet connectivity; Telephone or Instrument number (including IMEI, IMSI, UFMI, and ESN) and/or other customer/subscriber number(s) used to identify customer/subscriber, including any temporarily assigned network address (including Internet Protocol addresses); Types of service used (e.g. push-to-talk, text, three-way calling, email services, cloud computing, gaming services, etc.)”
-snip-
Read more: https://www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to-unmask-owner-of-infamou...
Is this actually a mere request, as in the receiver is _not_ required to avoid disclosure?
Separately—can't believe tucows is still around!
Cross-border collaboration is a good thing. Our agencies regularly collaborate to bring people who feel insulted and emboldened to account for their crimes. This works both ways.
As someone who has dealt with media of me as a minor (~around 11/yo) from Omegle being shared across the internet, the role archivers play in keeping illegal content “alive” isn’t well recognized. Thankfully, the Internet Archive has a matured process to purge pages that host illegal content.
We do not know what the investigation is for. All is up to speculation. Not all investigations are bad.
Here is an example on archive.is. I submitted multiple complaints to NCMEC but didn’t get results. Germany, though, was able to get the archives purged.
https://archive.is/https://ezgif.com/maker/*
On the page, you will see:
> In response to a request we received from 'jugendschutz.net' the page is not currently available.
That page held many, many images of minors. It is good that it is gone.
August 12, 2025 - Canadian Man Sentenced to 188 Months for Attempted Online Enticement of a Minor and Possessing Child Pornography [1]
August 21, 2024 - Canadian National Extradited To The United States Pleads Guilty To Production Of Child Sex Abuse Material And Enticement Of Minors
December 20, 2024 - Extradited Canadian National Sentenced To Life In Federal Prison for producing child sexual abuse material and enticement of a minor [3]
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/canadian-man-sentenced-...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/canadian-national-extra...
[3] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/extradited-canadian-nat...
IMO it's only a good thing when it's a good thing. There are plenty of reasons it could be a bad thing too. For example, Edward Snowden probably would have been hung by now if russia cross-border collaborated.
Felony contempt of business model.
Turns out, our very user, Saurik, came up with this term!
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaki...
Archive.today is very popular with HN commenters
Records of every URL submitted and accessed by a given IP address+browser fingerprint^1
1. Archive.today sites use a form of "pixel tracking" to collect IP addresses via popular graphical browsers, the ones that are required to be used to solve CAPTCHAs, that automatically request URLs in HTML tags with the "src" attribute, e.g., "img" tags
2. Archive.today sites serve CAPTCHAs to some users^3 which force them to enable Javascript and share browser information
3. For example, those users not using or appearing to use popular graphical browsers
This need to make IP-infringement sound ominous by invoking some ill-defined spy plot is a tired cliche.
> easily obscured with a VPN
I think we can expect that commercial VPNs are compromised, at least by intelligence services. Imagine you opened a bar and advertised, 'dissidents come here to drink in privacy'. I'm sure you'd attract others too to an obviously target-rich environment.
Perhaps the answer is they don't verify
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45835090
The FBI should investigate the "AI" companies and also the demise of Suchir Balaji, a copyright whistleblower who according to a sloppy local police investigation committed "suicide" hours after being seen cheerfully collecting a doordash delivery on CCTV.
I feel bad for the owner. He must be telling his friends "The FBI is out to get me" and they must think he's insane and they try to get him institutionalized...
The psychiatrist will note "Patient has delusions of grandeur; he thinks he is the owner of Wayback Machine and that the CIA is after him. Diagnosis: Paranoid Schizophrenia"
>Before 2019 - PhantomJS, after - ordinary (not headless) Chromium/80 with few small patches.
https://blog.archive.today/post/618635148292964352/what-scra... (2020)
>Archive.today launches real browsers (not even headless) and tries to load lazy images, unroll folded content, login into accounts if prompted with login form, remove “subscribe our maillist” modals
https://blog.archive.today/post/642952252228812800/people-of...
Publicly revealing everything they are doing would be a strategically bad idea, obviously.
It's not inconceivable that they actually pay for access to some of the sites; it wouldn't be surprising.
I think 90-99% of anything pirated (or accessed by bypassing paywalls etc) would just never be bought/paid-for if there was no alternative.
Paywall epidemic is a recent phenomenon, internet media managed to exist before that.