FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Infamous Archive.is Site
8 months ago by silence7 to c/technology
Why isn't the FBI doing anything about Epstein island list ? That's more important than some archive website.
Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.
Technically they are funded by taxes, so it's rather "whatcha gonna do, declare war on me?".
They don't need to, they already have it all.
You can just go fuck a duck. Archive is super useful. Leave it alone.
Poor human. Those corkscrews are not to be fucked with.
Ducks are used to it, female ducks developed curled vaginal canals to deter forceful reproduction but male ducks simply evolved corkscrewed dicks so now ducks never reproduce without inflicting great agony.
I doubt the fascist pin pricks can hurt them.
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.
In fairness, if they are hosting those files, there is a very good chance there is cp
Sign in to read, no thank you:
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.
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.
Purely anecdotal but they're the only news site that I've ever given my email to and I actually enjoy seeing their emails. They send entire (interesting) articles that can be read with no CSS/tracking images enabled and their monetisation is a small text ad that breaks a single couple of paragraphs.
I've never gotten an email from them that was begging for money or anything like that, just basically an RSS feed of interesting articles
The idea that forcing a signup (building a web of information about a user through the use of cookies and other browser metadata) to protect against AI (that is gonna use tooling, mirrors, proxies and any number of fully working methodologies) is ludicrous.
They just want to track who you are, what you do, and then sell that data which should never have been gathered in the first place as part of their advertising revenue.
Normally I would agree with you, but given how much they care about privacy (as indicated by what they write about and talk about on their podcast), I don’t think tracking is what they’re after in this specific case.
And they know that the signup won’t completely block AI, but it does help.
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)
Or...
But they are the same mob so why is the suffix folder different? ph, vn, is, md, today are interchangeable.
Redundancy, in case of loss of a domain.
Sorry, "Suffixes" was a confusing expression on my part because then I went on to list the TLD's.
I wasn't talking about different domains. I was talking about different folders. What we have here is two copies of the same folder in the same domain.
Other person gave
https://archive.ph/TFqAx
I gave
https://archive.is/5QFkF
So
https://archive.is/TFqAx
and
https://archive.ph/5QFkF
work too.
Either 5QFkF or TFqAx should exist, not both. That is how it normally works.
They are captures of the same page at different times .
https://archive.is/5QFkF is the snapshot taken 7 Nov 2025 01:40 and
https://archive.is/TFqAx is the one taken 6 Nov 2024 17:08
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.
"Infamous"? More like wonderfully useful.
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.
Blockchain?
It would help! It would establish that an archive was made no later than the date it was recorded on a blockchain (assuming the archiver isn’t also the one the made the original content in which case they can upload it after making the “archive”). You would still need to prove the trustworthiness of the archived data and at the moment the only thing we have for that is just trusting the archiver.
You could do something like have multiple archivers archive the same site in s stripped down for like plain text (so that differences caused by time or day, ads, etc don’t change the hash) and that way you can say that X amount of archivers agree that the site looked like that at that time.
Different archive, same principle.
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 instant access for free in contrast to print media.
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?
The owner should release the source code / configuration, in whatever state it's in, before things escalate further. It'd suck for all their work to go down the drain. I'm sure there'd be people willing to adopt the project and host instances.
If you agree and you have Tumblr, would you consider asking them anonymously?
Guess I'll be getting around to starting my own pihole after all
You can also use NextDNS as alternative
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
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.
Better ad targeting does make ads more valuable...but because only Google and Facebook have the visibility and ML to do it effectively, they wound up with all the ad revenue. Everybody else ended up with a few pennies
Owners win.
If I have a plot of land with some cherry trees on it, I can get a landless person to pick most of them for free.
I make an offer "for every 100 pounds/kilos of cherries you pick for me, I'll let you keep 1". If the person who receives such an offer has no land of their own, they have to agree to avoid starvation.
That's why our system needs a huge class of the landless, resourceless, and assetless people. Then for the priveledge of touching a privatized resource you have accept the privateer's conditions.
Fencing off resources and protecting the fence by the threat of death is how this scam works.
And it is impossible to fix this societal problem by simply trading more and better as an individual. The ruleset of the game is tuned for mass free energy extraction from the assetless class at the macro level.
This article isn’t behind a paywall, you just have to make an account.
@a_person@piefed.social @silence7@slrpnk.net @technology@lemmy.world
Same when I tried to access the archived version of the linked article of this thread. I was faced by a TLS error I never saw before (SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT), so I thought the Archive Today was facing server-side issues, until I decided to try accessing through the smartphone, and no error happened there.
I only managed to access Archive Today through my computer after disabling several security things, which seems quite suspicious, as if the Archive Today were being hijacked by a MitM (possibly the FBI themselves? They're famous for setting up honeypots) who were trying to push malicious code/tracking to whomever access it.
I would be further worried if I were USian or a citizen from Global North (as I'm Brazilian and from Global South, I can tell the FBI to go pound sand, lol).
To USians, my suggestion is caution accessing Archive Today (at least the current IP address being pointed at by mainstream DNS resolvers) for a while, as the server, while seemingly Archive Today, may be actually some kind of FBI honeypot in disguise. It goes without saying how ICANN and IANA are US entities, prone to interference from three-lettered US agencies. There are alternatives to Archive Today, such as Ghost Archive and 12ft.
It is up. This very article for instance: https://archive.is/5QFkF
or
https://archive.today/5QFkF
or
https://archive.md/5QFkF
etc
Interesting, my experience with reader mode to get around paywalls is just about the opposite - it works may 20% of the time. Probably different sites that we're visiting.
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.
Bypass Paywalls Clean is still around.
Bypass Paywalls Clean for Firefox
Extension: https://gitflic.ru/...
Support only: https://github.com/...
Bypass Paywalls Clean for Chrome
Extension: https://gitflic.ru/...
Support only: https://github.com/...
Updating
For Firefox at least, if you pin the extension to the browser toolbar (or whatever the space next to the address bar is called) you will see a little yellow triangle badge whenever there is an update. Click the extension icon to update.
For Firefox mobile and forks, you may get a notification that there is an update but I haven't found a one click solution so I just go to the repo, download the xpi and install. To install from file on mobile you need to go to Settings > About Firefox > Tap the logo several times until you see Debug enabled > Go back to main Settings > Under Advanced look for Install extension from file.
uBlock Origin filter: https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/blob/?file=bpc-paywall-filter.txt&branch=main
Does this work as an alternative to the extensions?
Thank you.
Question: how does this site differ in function to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine?
You can access pages that are still actively behind any given site's paywall.
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 stability, 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 don't know where the most of the site's finances come from. (Edit: In one of the posts copied below he mentioned that he has some donations and ad revenue, but as of 2021 this covered less than 1/3 of the running costs.)
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.
Edit The archive.today owner has a few blog posts mentioning these kind of things:
anonymous:
Not respecting people's privacy, copyright laws, or the veracity of content on your website... Please tell us more about how this archive isn't being well managed and is doomed to die at any moment!archive-is:
Of course, it is doomed to die at any moment (you should not have any illusions, as well as about the “veracity of content” on the Internet). The only idea is to hold back a little something that is doomed to die a little earlier. I hope that it is obvious after all the deplatforming dramas of the last months (disappearance of @realDonaldTrump, etc)
anonymous:
You said that before you die of old age you would implement a download zip of your whole site. That's fine but links to archived pages will still be broken if you die if you don't have someone to follow in your footsteps to maintain the site because the site will go offline or somebody will buy your expired domain name using it for another purpose. Do you have plans for someone to take over your site? I have thousands of archived pages, don't want that work to go to waste.archive-is:
I do not think there are many people willing to maintain such a project, which is also unprofitable. All 4½ projects over there - (IA, Archive.today, Megalodon.jp, half-suspensed WebCite, and paid Pinboard.in) look running on energy and money of a single person each and likely will be greatly changed or shutdown by the heirs.I could only advise to save everything locally to sync your documents with your own lifespan. Do not rely on clouds.
daveymames:
You don’t need many people mate, just a small amount of people is all that’s required. I for example would be willing to accept a passing of the torch. I would fund it with my own money and allow people to donate. I’m planning a site similar to Archive.org of my own that allows uploading via torrents so you can upload big files which is hard to do on archive.org and it bans people who don’t keep 1TB of stuff permanently seeded. This way I don’t need to waste money on storage.How much does hosting cost you per month at the moment?
archive-is:
about ~$2600/mo of pure expenses on servers/domains, not counting “work time”, “buying laptop/furniture”, etc. ($100…300/mo covered by donations + $300…500 by ads)I’d suggest starting with pdf/djvu archive:
It is of demand: people here often ask about archiving pdf/djvu and are particularly interested in archiving from another website rather than uploading (for some vague legal reasons).
Unlike archive.is, it is more a blob storage and fit to “store me a terabyte” model: there is no need to develop and support own file formats and its renderers.
There is a ready-made dataset to rescue and get some press attention on: Sci-Hub.
The mission is more about “save forever“ than our “keep a page online after the original took down or altered“.
archive-is:
Also, https://docs.softwareheritage.org/ is a storage-heavy initiative which would need extra mirrors and crawlers. I need it as a user, especially immutable weekly snapshots of whole language repositories (such as maven.apache.org, npmjs.com, crates.io, …)
anonymous:
Do you have anything prepared for the fate of the archive in the event of your death?archive-is:
It is an overly optimistic assumption that there will be no risks before I die. Many projects (including at least two in this area: peeep.us and webcitation.org) stopped working long before the death of the people behind them. Many projects pivoted following the money. In addition, there are many critical points (e.g., domains) that I have no control over.
If I had to guess this guy (or girl) is a Bitcoin millionaire or something. But that's just based on the vibes of his speech with no concrete basis.
When are we going to start talking about abolishing the FBI?
The last president to talk about that got a magic bullet for his troubles.
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.
They’ll get rid of shady sourced websites right after they bring that criminal BitTorrent to justice
Or any other sovereign country. The FBI can't just mega kidnap someone from another country for hosting and archive upload site.
The FBI could just ask the locals to arrest them. It worked for Kim Dotcom.
It's more than famous, it's infamous!
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.
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.
"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.
let’s hope the canadian company just ignores this
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Tackling the problems that really matter. Good job, FBI.
Fucking clowns.
save