Archive.is blog

A bit more on the topic of “web archives and news media”:

The Tehran Times website has been up for only a few minutes a day in recent weeks (I don’t know if this is related to the military action or to new Western sanctions against Arvan Cloud—since, at least, the edge nodes aren’t in Iran), so web archives are essentially the only place where you can read it 24/7. There’s also a Telegram channel, but it lacks longreads.
New media outlets (the substack generation) are reluctant to link to old media because they can’t add referral IDs and earn a percentage of sales, like in e-commerce and adult industries. Archives, of course, don’t pay either, but some authors prefer linking archives anyway, just to spite greedy tabloids, much like it was on Gamergate. There’s probably a niche here for something like Readly—a site that republishes other’s articles behind its own paywall and pays revshare.

2 months ago

Does this website track you? (I found a: top-fwz1 domain in the source code of archive is)

Anonymous

Sure, everything is collected by KGB

Are you DMCA compliant?

Anonymous

I wouldn’t say either “yes” or “no” here. That is, ‘yes’ in the sense that we do remove (or blackrectangle) some pages based on user reports, but “no” in the sense that we would not be eligible for safe harbor if we strictly followed the DMCA (i.e., remove everything, without a fee, but based on non-anonymous reports that must include the verifiable name/address/phone number of the reporter). DMCA safe harbor only works for ISPs and certain websites (those that have appointed an agent and registered them with the U.S. Copyright Office); for everyone else, it is still not “compliance” but “voluntary behavior resembling compliance”

In a strictly legal sense: “no”, because there is no USCO-registered agent.

How do I get illegal revenge porn images removed?

Anonymous

I think it’s better to go through the police or authorities (NCMEC, WHRIK, etc.). This issue is a really complex, overlapped with OnlyFans piracy, and there are far more parties involved: there are scammers offering to remove content from their own sites for a fee, scammers offering to remove content from other sites for a fee, victims who paid them for nothing, leaks of photo verifications from escort and swinger sites, etc. Everyone has their own made-up story, so we won’t judge who is legal and who is illegal, especially based only on who complained first or who said word “illegal” first. Write a report to the police or the authorities, they will assess your situation and forward it to us if removal is necessary: if you are eager to resolve this without involving the police, we get the impression that you are more likely to be one of those scammers (or OnlyFans revenue-optimizers) than a victim.

Hello, hope everything is going well :) 2 small questions: Any specific reason as to why the archive was down earlier due to a server error? Also, every so often I (and some friends) will see nothing but a rotating loading circle when trying to access the website, what’s the reason for that? Thank you!

Anonymous

just tech issues

After a lot of reading, I'm inclined to believe that the accusations against you are fabricated, but there's one thing I'm still not clear on: did you actually set up any code to send repeated random requests to an external site?

If so, I'm curious what your reasoning was, as I can't seem to think of a good reason. Even if was a significant threat, that still seems like an odd way to respond.

P.S. If you get the TV interview, could you link to a recording, pretty please? (Even if there's no English)

Anonymous

It was Patokallio’s blackmail from the beginning: if the 3Hz “DDoS” would stop, he wouldn’t hype the story via his friends in the media, even though hyping it was actually preferable for us than slowly sliding into inferno. We had to continue with the “DDoS” to keep annoying him, so he, thinking he was repaying us with harm, actually carried out a scenario that is a win-win-win for everyone: Jani got his advertising clicks which help him survive in overpriced Australia; Wikipedia got its pill from moral panic; we got vaccinated against the next WAAD (probably against Conde Nast too: after their covering the Wikipedia story, it would be a bit difficult to attack us as “yet another 12ft clone” without accusing Wikipedia in large-scale piracy).

The “changed page” with an Easter egg was supposed only to Patokallio’s eyes: it is the dead link linked from his blog, absent in archive.org (along with whole `lj.rossia.org`—why? someone’s petty revenge for Verbitsky’s “Anti-Copyright” book?), so he must rely on the archived copy to attack the very same archive. The dramatic reaction from Wikipedians, when Jani revealed it to them, was somewhat unexpected, but it did not change anything: they closed the referendum a few days earlier, the result would have been the same. They could have opened and won such a referendum without all this drama—just Patokallio old blog post’s propaganda, which is considered an “authoritative source” there, would have been enough.

This also reinforced the initial guess that it was Patokallio who was behind the media amplification of the “FBI story”: the very same Jon Brodkin of ArsTechnica—who seeded the “FBI story"—acted again as a Patokallio’s sockpuppet: he republished Patokallio’s blog posts instantly, while never wrote anything about us without Patokallio (e.g. on more newsworthy AdGuard/WAAD drama).

The drama has reached the point where it seems we have found a way to accept tax-deductible donations in the US, and German TV is asking for a 15-minute interview.

And someone says: “admit that it turned out badly,” ha ha.

By the way, to save everyone from the usual round of naïve questions (“do you store IP addresses?”, …), to dispel a few comforting illusions about what Terms of Service actually mean, and to give you a glimpse into what it feels like to run, moderate content, and support a website, we highly recommend Kevin Nguyen’s novel New Waves.

It’s a sad, sharp, and often very funny story about a website that differs from ours in only one key respect: it promised not to preserve content, but to delete it on a schedule. As you might guess, that promise becomes the most fragile and consequential part of the whole enterprise. The book captures something that anyone who has worked behind the scenes of an internet platform will immediately recognize: the gap between what users imagine, what policies declare, and what operational reality demands.

We doubt Kevin was OSINTing us—or even knew we existed—when he wrote it. And yet the parallels are striking. In fact, there are more accidental coincidences there than in some stories written by people who explicitly tried to study us.

If you want to understand not just how platforms present themselves, but how they actually function under pressure—read or listen it. It won’t answer every question, but it might help you ask better ones.

In a response you said: "I would understand your claim if you wrote that you unsubscribed from recurring donations. But why should I—or anyone else—be interested in your use of a free utility?" Maybe you shouldn't be interested, except that my concerns seem to be shared by lots of other people — and by Wikipedia, which says you are no longer trustworthy. Maybe you don't care about that either, but if you don't care what users or Wikipedia or any of its users think then why did you bother setting up archive.today in the first place?

Anonymous

Wikipedia is more than just a lesbian SJW politbüro trying to hide behind a hypernym. Wikignomes (actual content writers) love us for neat features like accordion unfolding or joining multi-page content into a single page, while WMF tries to distance itself from copyright issues and always remained silent. All of this has low priority for many reasons; for example, it seems that this is the only site that actively uses the archive whose bosses have never reached out to us to ask anything or negotiate anything (the only contact is GreenC who is not even allowed to run their WaybackMedic on WMF servers). So it’s mutual.

Why bother setting up: to watch over some pages changing over time. The mistake was to release a free service to the public, it must be paid (or by-invite) from the beginning. There are way too many free users.

3 months ago

anyway, what's your relations to verified.lu?

Anonymous

The same as to the Olympic ice skater: Patokallio’s cherry-picking.

Better ask Patokallio why he wrote on verified.lu and ignored the ice skater, and how that logic got propagated to become an authoritative source? And how should we treat those who spread this (including Wikipedia), realizing that it is either satire or provocation? With flattery, perhaps?

3 months ago

The archive does host a lot of CSAM though - not to impugn the work of the archive, but whenever somebody seems to report CSAM to the archive, pages are merely hidden rather than fully removed (eg with a vpn). A user complained on x a while ago about the archive not removing CSAM when reported and some archived pages (like smutty.***) contain potentially hundreds of CSAM. Have you at least considered looking yourself and removing any CSAM you see?

Anonymous

CSAM in user (not, for example, NCMEC’s) reports is often not actually CSAM, but merely a magic word they expect will prioritize their messages. It is not uncommon for users to claim copyright on their “CSAM.”

Many Smutty’s pages reported by authorities have been removed, so I assume they have reviewed everything. Total removal of whole Smutty is sort of an OSINT case, not a CSAM one.

3 months ago

"Trustworthiness" in my question meant "reputation of being trustworthy", i.e. reputation of you not modifying saved pages to insert fake information into them. Guarantees about your archive being trustworthy are literally on the main page:
> Archive.today is a time capsule for web pages! It takes a 'snapshot' of a webpage that will always be online even if the original page disappears
> …
> and provides a short and reliable link to an unalterable record of any web page.
This was true until very recently you chose to tarnish that reputation and began inserting fake information into saved pages.
Do you think there's absolutely no illegal content on your archive, including CSAM? That's simply consequences of you refusing to remove information no matter what. I'm not saying that this approach is wrong or right, you just need to accept these consequences when someone points them out.
Is me saying that some website/company is American also "nationalism" or whatever bad political position you think it is? Or you constantly mentioning that Jani is a finn? This really reeks of "everyone I don't like is Hitler". Don't be ridiculous.

Anonymous

First, it was not a page you saved; it was a page me saved, moreover from a social network’s webpage me controlled - so I could as well alter the original. That “reputation” is at least no worse than Reddit’s. Second, we do delete/alter pages (see the question about whistleblowers), although we try to minimize that impact. If you need stronger consistency guarantees, you should develop something on a blockchain: Arweave has done something like that. However, it would hardly be compatible with maintaining a clearnet website.
Of course there is some CSAM, as on any user-generated content website. On Twitter, for example, or on Quora. I know this because many CSAM pages reported to us (and deleted) originate from those platforms, not from chans or .onion websites. And those are not ephemeral pages quickly uploaded and screenshotted — they have been there for years; some of them are still there.
Tone of our texts about Jani is a parody of his texts about us: what it might look like if Jani wrote about Jani, we call him “finne” as often as he calls us “guerrilla russian jew”. And we see him (and you?) being unhappy reading that and attempting to take it down, by sending same requests to the same people at Automattic.

It is not about “political positions” at all (who cares on that shit?), it is about preparing the media landscape before sending bogus legally-looking PDFs to the critical infrastructure, just as well as my texts and the whole drama—thanks to “DDoS” promoted to media by himself—might create him problems on border crossing or when approving a loan at a bank. That’s the idea—why threaten to start involved in a scandal under your real name when you know nothing about your opponent, and in your “investigation” you cherry-pick Russian and Jewish names among others solely to include the words “russian” and “jewish” into the text (and then into friendly media, wiki article, etc)? Or to write that “the service does NOT accept crypto” just to slip “crypto” into the text, at least that way? I used to perceive Jani’s texts as merely satirical until serious media started treating them as an authoritative source; then it stopped being funny.

I wanted to say I still support you on liberapay, but now I see I stopped paying about a year ago when my card somehow stopped working. Oops. Maybe you should set a paywall, lol. (No, I love that you don't.) Your site is great even with all the recent drama. You and that girl that does Sci-Hub are two heroes of the internet that everyone somehow also pretends to hate. Of course in the ideal platonic world your site would not be necessary, but here we are.

Anonymous

thanks!

Well, then let me chim in: I cancelled my weekly Liberapay donations to you in January after all of the DDoS nonsense. Why should I continue to donate to you after you've just destroyed all trustworthiness you had?

Anonymous

I guess I have already addressed this in my previous messages.

The so-called “trustworthiness” never existed outside either that stock photo scam or in connection with the term “destroyed.” References to “trustworthiness” in public discussions of the archive could only arise when it was explicitly questioned. Previously—thanks to Jani Patokallio—only terms like “guerrilla” and “jews” and “FBI wanted” were used, leaving no space for a “trustworthiness” axis: the questions were floating not around whether it is “a trustworthness site or not”, but whether it is “a criminal pedo site or not”. Do you understand the difference between when say 2% are ready to believe the first thing and when 2% are ready to believe the second thing? The former can cause merely fluctuation in donations, the latter - deplatforming (and not only in tech infrastructure, think Durov story).
While the snapshots were indeed used in civil courts, this was only possible with my written statement—not merely based on some random page online. And yes, in such stories, you are dependent on my whim—whether I choose to assist you or not, as I am under no obligation to do so.
Do not reduce Patokallio’s activities to merely OSINT or doxxing. Publishing open or private information is not an issue at all—there is nothing inherently wrong with “information” part itself. The problem lies in the high density of buzzwords intended to provoke squeamish disdain among certain groups of readers—with quite high a coverage given the variety of those buzzwords—and in the dissemination of that propaganda in the media (and, yes, in the Wiki article, I initially missed that). It is not about publishing random names; it is about commenting on the ethnicity of each name (even that alone shifts the genre of his blog from “investigative journalism” to something else), about cherry-picking words. It is the same kind of preparation as WAAD registering the domain krimo-avocate.fr or his French child porn association. A serious existential threat to us, not comparable to the risk of losing a $2/week donor.

I have used and like archive.today, but the knowledge that when I use it, my browser is hijacked to DDoS some guys website — or that archive.today has been altering screenshots of pages — makes me question whether I can trust your service any more. Why should I continue to use it?

Anonymous

Well, I would understand your claim if you wrote that you unsubscribed from recurring donations. But why should I—or anyone else—be interested in your use of a free utility? The less you use it, the better it works for the rest, the more time I have for developing new features. It’s already answered as the first question in a new work-in-progress FAQ

I want to take a moment to share another story. This is the second time the archive has been called an “internet notary,” and the previous case also led to retrospective changes.

There’s a fairly widespread scam going around (and it may still be active): stock photo agencies send claims to small website owners, demanding, for example, $9,000 for alleged copyright infringement. If the victim contacts a lawyer, the lawyer often jumps at the opportunity to increase both GDP and overall happiness index, saying something like: “Give me $1,500, and I’ll negotiate with the agency to settle for $3,000”.

These scammers have started using the archive as an “internet notary,” adding statements like: “Even if you delete our protected image, we have notarized proof in the archive,” effectively turning us into their unwitting accomplice.

Right now, this should be the group most disappointed. Aren’t you one of them?