Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today

Yeah, that's a postal box to host compagnies.

From the article, the penalty for a false report:

> ...shall be punished by one year’s imprisonment and a fine of €15,000.

Side note, would anybody know how "easily" do political elites get off the hook in France?

Smells like freedom fries to me (am American myself)

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586#...

I would recommend it

The reason you believe that you're reading something on news.ycombinator.com right now is not the path by which the bytes were copied from one interface to the next before getting to you, but the certificate and signature that confirms you have a valid HTTPS connection.

But what does care about local storage in this brave new gaslit world is my own sanity, for one.

I also find the "we don't want to leak a requester's IP" explanation for blocking EDNS to be suspect. The way DNS works is that you ask for the IP address for a domain name, you get the IP, and then you connect to it. With Cloudflare's DNS, the server doesn't know your IP when you do the DNS lookup, but that doesn't matter because you're connecting to the server anyway so they'll still get your IP. Even if you're worried about other people sniffing network traffic, the hostname you're visiting still gets revealed in plaintext during the SNI handshake. What Cloudflare blocking EDNS does do is make it much harder for competing CDNs to efficiently serve content using DNS based routing. They have to use Anycast instead, which has a higher barrier to entry.

I speculate it's due to archive.today wanting granular (not overly broad) legal censorship compliance. Which is somewhat related to this post.

WAAD seems to be reading along here. Wonder if your archive.org link now makes archive.org one of their targets.

Some good ones: - United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster - United States v. 11 1/4 Dozen Packages of Articles Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat's Shoo-Fly Powders for Drunkenness - South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_legal_systems...

It might not be possible to do something like that in France (though I assume there are other mechanisms available in that case).

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/isp-sued-by-reco...

But the point stands I think, as I’d expect legal demands to be measured and to the point.

Things get a bit uncomfortable for various high profile figures, political leaders and royalty if prosecutions start happening.

The meta conspiracy theory in all of this would be that this is an actual CSAM producer trying to take down evidence that could be used against them.

[0] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/SECU/Brief/B... [1] https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-netwo...

Still shitty, but more obviously a technical mistake than a deliberate ploy.

SF is probably StormFront, an infamous neo-nazi website. Not an "anyone right of center is a nazi" kind of neo-nazi - actual self-proclaimed neo-nazis, complete with swastikas, Holocaust denial and calls for racial segregation. Even more hated and scrutinized than KiwiFarms, and under pressure by multiple governments and many more activist groups, over things like neo-nazi hate speech and ties with real life hate groups.

It would be a damn shame if archive.is fell under the same kind of scrutiny as those. I have an impression, completely unfounded, that the archive.is crew knew things were heading that way, and worked with that in mind for a long time now. But that doesn't guarantee they'll endure. Just gives them a fighting chance.

remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume something without reading it...

> handle CSAM

They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work.

https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/

Of course in a pinch it could also be used for other things like pretext.

I do believe, however, that the future does not "exist" in any real sense, but is constructed - every day, little by little, by each and every one of us. What the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.

Put another way - this is a rhetorical question - can do we do anything about it? Maybe.

The internet was just ignored for a long time because it was at first a) too small and then b) too beneficial with the current architecture to try to tame.

However we're in stage c) it's too big and too dangerous for countries so it needs to be placed back in the country box.

Kind of like the history of oil, which was at first a) about individuals (Rockefeller), then about b) companies (Standard Oil), and finally, about c) countries (most big oil companies are either fully state owned or so tied at the hip with the government that they're basically state owned).

It's complicated, but ultimately, utopia doesn't exist. Most people don't really want open borders (and those that do, haven't fully thought things through), and countries in our current configuration, are still a good thing in most places. So yeah, we were always bound to reach some sort of "national internet" stage.

> I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.

I'm old enough to have been around for the whole thing. I used to kind of share this view, but I don't anymore.

I think it's impossible to reconcile this point of view with the obvious observation that huge aspects of life have gotten really dramatically worse thanks to the internet and its related and successor technologies.

It has made people more addicted, more anxious, more divided, or confused. It has created massive concentrations of wealth and power that have a very damaging effect on society, and it is drastically reducing the ability of people to make decisions about how they want to live and how they want their society to be structured.

It's also done a tremendous amount of positive good, too, don't worry. It's obvious to me, like it should be obvious to any rational person, that there are huge benefits too. And of course, to some extent, there's a bit of inevitability to some parts of this.

While certainly there are examples of silly laws in the world, it's worth noting that that's the exception, not the rule. In general, laws are things that society does on purpose with the intent of making the world match its values.

I think countries should in fact be governed by the consent of their own citizens and by the rule of law. I welcome changes that make that more likely.

I also like Archive.today, and I hate paywalls, they're annoying. This may not be the best place to post my counterpoint, but I think it's worth mentioning and it doesn't get repeated enough.

I was around in the 90s, and I'm very familiar with the techno-utopian approach of the first internet generation. It failed.

We can create a decentralized VPN service that can't be blocked or sued by improving on SoftEther VPN, which is open-source software that can make VPN connections camouflaged as HTTPS, so it's invisible to DPI firewalls and can't be filtered.[0] It's already sort of decentralized, as it has a server discovery site called VPNGate that lists many volunteer-hosted instances.[1] But we can make this truly robust by doing a few more things. First, make a user-friendly mobile client. Second, figure out a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent, and build auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its IP so others may connect to it whenever it's in use. That should be enough to keep the Internet free in most countries because most forms of censorship would become impossible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN

[1] https://www.vpngate.net/en/

In the long term, we can take things even further and build a decentralized hosting provider, like AWS/Azure but your web services don't run on a physical server that has an IP address and physical location. Instead, the entire network of physical computers around the world together behaves like a single computer: an Internet-sized virtual machine. No node knows what the entire machine is up to, but every node may store things and run programs on it. The amount of compute/storage a node contributes equals the amount of compute/storage it's allowed to use. This would truly make the Internet open and free worldwide and draw out its full potential.

For the short-term goals, there's already concrete progress. The long-term goal needs more theory work but the missing ideas are probably buried in existing literature.

I don't see those cloudflare pages much these days, but something about it in those early days always gave me protection money vibes. Cloudflare seemed to come out of nowhere during a wave of DDoS attacks across the internet in the late 2000s and found their way into every site. They had some incredible timing.

I assume the way is to just shake handcuffs before him, so it wasn't a long search. Durov is not a hero type.

The Telegram dude is still pushing Ruzzian propaganda and is interfering in other countries elections for proRuzzian forces. So from the facts I can say Telegram and it's boss are a KGB asset, not sure what France managed to get from the guy or it was all a KGB propaganda operation to make idiots think Telegram is not controlled by KGB.

That’s not the case. I don’t have a NYT subscription, I just Googled for an old obscure article from 1989 on pork bellies I thought would be unlikely for archive.today to have cached, and sure enough when I asked to retrieve that article, it didn’t have it and began the caching process. A few minutes later, it came up with the webpage, which if you visit on archive.is, you can see it was first cached just a few minutes ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/01/business/futures-options-...

My assumption has been that the NYT is letting them around the paywall, much like the unrelated Wayback Machine. How else could this be working? Only way I could think it could work is that either they have access to a NYT account and are caching using that — something I suspect the NYT would notice and shutdown — or there is a documented hole in the paywall they are exploiting (but not the Wayback Machine, since the caching process shows they are pulling direct from the NYT).

[1] https://github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page/blob/main/Firefox/ba...

2020s: FBI/CIA invents the term "radical archivist"

There is only 1 reasonable approach that I know of as of today: https://tlsnotary.org/docs/intro, and it still involves trusting a third party with reputation (though it cleverly uses a zk algorithm so that the third party doesn't have to see the cleartext). Anyone claiming to provide "verifyable" web archives is likely lying or overstating it unless they are using TLSNotary or a similar approach. I've seen far to many companies make impossible claims about "signed" or "verified" web archives over the last decade, be very critial any time you see someone claiming that unless they talk explicitly about the "TLS Non-Repudiation Problem" and how they solve it: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/103645/does-ssl...

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono%3F

As to Lenin: The mouse died because it didn't understand why the cheese was free