The news sites are trying to have it both ways. Serving the news articles to visitors and then covering them up with a paywall with browser tricks.
FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Infamous Archive.is Site
Submitted 4 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to-unmask-owner-of-infamous-archive-is-site/
Comments
dan1101@lemmy.world 4 months ago
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This article isn’t behind a paywall, you just have to make an account.
silence7@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
I’m a bit sympathetic to them — they do need to get paid to keep operating, and ads don’t cover the cost of providing news anymore
Doomsider@lemmy.world 4 months ago
So you feel sorry for the fact they are legacy industry that refuses to adapt?
ITGuyLevi@programming.dev 4 months ago
I would put that more on the ad networks, if the ads were related to the article, it may generate a few more clicks. The ads are completely random and built off a profile they assume would contain relevant info about me… but it doesn’t really seem to be accurate (this is kind of by my own choosing though).
Instead articles about rebuilding cars should have ads related to perhaps rebuilding cars and not some fucking nutritional supplement or some other unrelated thing.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
“Infamous”? More like wonderfully useful.
conorab@lemmy.conorab.com 4 months ago
It occasionally catches things that archive.org misses too. Also really nice to have an alternative.
It’d be nice to have a way of doing decentralised archiving while still keeping the trust. If you’re trying to prove that a site really said something at a certain date to another person, pointing to your own archive is kinda useless.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
I get around paywalls by disabling JavaScript when I read the news
Gonzako@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I use the mozilla reader mode
Wiz@midwest.social 4 months ago
Holy crap, I’d never thought of that. Does it work pretty reliably?
punkibas@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
I have JavaScript disabled by default on all pages, I only activate it if I need to, as per the privacyguides recommendations, but on this site at least, it still won’t load the article. If I want to read it I’d have to either register or use the archive.
girlthing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
The owner should release the source code before things escalate further. I’m sure there’d be people willing to host instances. It’d suck for all that work to go down the drain.
If you agree and you have Tumblr, would you consider asking them anonymously?
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The archive runs Apache Hadoop and Apache Accumulo. All data is stored on HDFS, textual content is duplicated 3 times among servers in 2 datacenters and images are duplicated 2 times. Both datacenters are in Europe, with OVH hosting at least one of them.
To avoid detection, archive.today runs via a botnet that cycles through countless IP addresses, making it quite difficult for grumpy webmasters to stop their sites getting scraped. Access to paywalled sites is through logins secured via unclear means, which need to be replenished constantly: here’s the creator asking for Instagram credentials. Finally, the serving of the website is also subject to a perpetual game of cat and mouse: “I can only predict that there will be approximately one trouble with domains per year and each fifth trouble will result in domain loss.” As of today, archive.today still works, but users are redirected to archive.md.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
here’s the creator asking…
Where?
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 4 months ago
deathbird@mander.xyz 4 months ago
No for real, why? Why are they persuing this?
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
It’s hard to rewrite the past if someone’s keeping receipts
frongt@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
eah@programming.dev 4 months ago
The administration didn’t threaten to take down the IA or investigate it or anything like that, so it’s not similar at all.
It’s conspiratorial to think the FBI is doing this to censor or hide something. archive.is is primarily used to get around paywalls. The most likely explanation is news sites complained to the FBI that their copyrights are being violated (which is true), so the FBI is investigating. They’ve had a problem with falling revenue for a decade or more at this point as everything went online and people expected to get instance access for free in contrast to print media.
deathbird@mander.xyz 4 months ago
I suspect they’re going after .is because they are more resistant to taking things down. But that’s speculation on my part. And even if I’m right, what is it that they actually are trying to remove?
rekabis@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
The FBI is probably going nuts here because someone inadvertently archived the Epstein files and everyone at HQ is panicking. They need to purge it for the Internet before someone discovers that archived content, and so they’re using CP as an excuse.
RVGamer06@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
One domain is already blocked here in Italy for CP
uss_entrepreneur@startrek.website 4 months ago
In fairness, if they are hosting those files, there is a very good chance there is cp
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s more than famous, it’s infamous!
desmosthenes@lemmy.world 4 months ago
let’s hope the canadian company just ignores this
Maeve@kbin.earth 4 months ago
.ca gov is toeing the line so far.
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
As a Canadian I believe we should build a wall, not just a physical wall but a digital wall.
It’s just to provide a layer of fuck you to the Americans.
treadful@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Maybe like a Great Firewall. Seems like a great idea.
Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 4 months ago
Why are we building walls? why aren’t we building bridges?
The crooks in control today are built on a house of cards. One elderly figurehead won’t last long. The current media organizations are controlled by a bunch of billionaires pushing propaganda to keep the crooks in that are letting them earn a shitload of money while taxes are low before they lose their grasp on power.
Pitting nations against each other is just another political tool. We’re fighting when we should be planning together to build a strategy to fix the problems and putting it into action.
Silos create exactly what we have today. Xenophobia is not the answer.
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
“just suck it up till he’s gone”
Fuck that shit, trump proved the Americans can’t be trusted and never really could be as the system is designed purely to benifit them.
MOARbid1@piefed.social 4 months ago
Well said.
MOARbid1@piefed.social 4 months ago
Yeah, we get it. Canadian’s hate American’s now. That’s fine.
themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Or…
But they are the same mob so why is the suffix different? ph, vn, is, md, today are interchangeable.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Redundancy, in case of loss of a domain.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Softest paywall ever - they do such good work, they can have an anonymous email of mine no problem
Magic link’s so annoying though, just wanna password (they’re journalists not techies though is the long and short of it)
tja@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
AI stealing our work. The collapse of social networks. The need to pay journalists to produce impactful journalism. Here is why we are asking for your email address to read 404 Media.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 months ago
So basically you need to spam me. Because a donation plea every so often . . .doesn’t get enough addresses to sell?
I’m saying it’s a flawed implementation is all.
NotSteve_@piefed.ca 4 months ago
Meta
Broadfern@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That would explain why adguard’s public DNS started blocking it (labeled vaguely as “legal request”).
mierdabird@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Guess I’ll be getting around to starting my own pihole after all
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 4 months ago
You can also use NextDNS as alternative
Balldowern@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Why isn’t the FBI doing anything about Epstein island list ? That’s more important than some archive website.
wewbull@feddit.uk 4 months ago
They probably are. They’re trying to make sure it hasn’t leaked onto archive.is.
NABDad@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Because the victims of the rape of children in the Epstein case don’t have the money. The perpetrators do.
Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Because the archive site points out their deceptions, lies and cruelty
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
They don’t need to, they already have it all.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 4 months ago
Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
Technically they are funded by taxes, so it’s rather “whatcha gonna do, declare war on me?”.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Question: how does this site differ in function to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine?
kazerniel@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Wayback Machine lets you select snapshots in a calendar without thumbnails, which is better for navigating among a large number of snapshots, while Archive.today shows a chronological dump of thumbnails, which is better for noticing visible changes.
Archive.today is better at getting through paywalls, the Wayback Machine doesn’t really do this.
And while not a functional difference, but imho quite important: The Wayback Machine is ran by a 100+ employee non-profit registered in the USA, which lends it quite a bit of legal and financial stabilitym but also subjects it to official oversight/censorship, while Archive.today is ran by a single mysterious dude who carefully hides his identity and we know nothing about what money the site is financed from. Both financial security and resistance to censorship can be useful attributes to an online archive, but I have more trust in the Wayback Machine being online in 10 or 20 years, than Archive.today.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If I had to guess this guy is something like a Bitcoin millionaire or something. But that’s just based on the vibes of his speech with no concrete basis.
silence7@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
They dont let sites opt-out, and they do a much more seamless job of enabling people to archive paywalled content
foodandart@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
You can access pages that are still actively behind any given site’s paywall.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
When are we going to start talking about abolishing the FBI?
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
The last president to talk about that got a magic bullet for his troubles.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
I assume you mean JFK, was he talking about this?
But I mean we as in the people of the US. Our leaders have very different incentives than we do.
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 4 months ago
totally unrelated to your comment, but did you know you can still buy bullets in bulk? nothing to do with the conversation at hand, of course, just idle chatter.
PKscope@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Tackling the problems that really matter. Good job, FBI.
Fucking clowns.
BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
Well don’t you know?
All they value is money.
a_person@piefed.social 4 months ago
Damn, I was wondering why it was down. I hope it goes back up soon, its such a useful tool.
NGC2346@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
If it’s someone operating from Russia, they can beat it and get lost, because it won’t disappear.
snoons@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Friends of tech Bros Incorporated.
Regulatory capture is complete in the states.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
You can just go fuck a duck. Archive is super useful. Leave it alone.
tonytins@pawb.social 4 months ago
Seems like another attempt to stifle the flow of information.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Shouldn’t they focus on the no. 1 law breaker and court ignorer in the country?