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Comment by Jordan-117 | Hacker News Reader

Did you not read the article? They not only directed a DDOS against a blogger who crossed them, but altered their own archived snapshots to amplify a smear against them. That completely destroys their trustworthiness and credibility as a source of truth.

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Sure I read it. But I don't believe everything I read on the internet.

The proof is right there for you to see. Denying it is rather wacky.

Altered snapshots = hide Nora name?

ArsTechica just did the same - removed Nora from older articles. How can you trust ArsTechica after that?

They didn't just remove her name, but replaced it with the target's name.

I don't know what you're talking about re: Ars removing her name from old articles.

Follow-up: maybe you're confusing Ars Technica with Wikipedia, whose admins did redact Nora's last name from discussions? If so, that's a weird equivalence to draw, since the change was disclosed and done to protect personal information, not attack someone else in the process. (Also, "Nora [redacted]" itself seems to be a name lifted from an unrelated person who had merely contacted Archive.today with a takedown request.)

1. I can't post links (I've already tried), my comments with links are getting shadowbanned. Check out Jon Brodkin's article on Ars about AT, not today's, but the previous one, 6 days ago. Nora's name was there, but now it's silently gone.

2. We learned about Nora's involvement from Patokallio. We learned about Nora's non-involvement... also from Patokallio. They could have reached a settlement with AT that includes hiding Nora's name.

3. Regardless of who Nora is, it is interesting to see the extent of this censorship: so far only gyrovague.com and arstechnica.com, but not tomshardware.com and not tech.yahoo.com. This shows which sites are working closely with the AT defamation campaign, and which are simply copywriting the news feed.

Silently? It tells you right there in the article: "Nora [last name redacted]". Maybe they could add a more fulsome explanation in an editor's note but it seems pretty obvious in context.

If AT is appropriating some random person's name as an alias, it seems helpful to report on that publicly in order to expose the practice and help clear up the misinformation.

Silently. Last article. Not today's.

One with title 'Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site'

I'll try to add the link with comment edit:

This has Nora's name https://web.archive.org/web/20260210195502/https://arstechni...

The current version has not

Even if they did, so what? There's nothing wrong with a news article removing personal information as a precaution. It's light-years away from altering the content of an archival snapshot in order to target someone else.

Well, that's the only name they removed, even though it didn't stand out among the other names in the investigation. Secondly, it's ironic to do so in an article tagged "Streisand Effect" so perhaps we're witnessing part of the performance. And thirdly, it's strange to blame AT for removing... the same name, and not blame Ars. Immediately accusing... AT of double standards and hypocrisy.

I am lost here. It is definitively an organized defamation campaign.

“You are guilty simply because I am hungry”

Seems more like Ars trying to avoid piling more attention on the name of a person that isn't actually involved.

And again, the accusation against Archive.today isn't just that they removed their "Nora" alias from a snapshot, but that they replaced it with the name of the blogger they were quarreling with. There's no defensible reason to do that outside of petty revenge (which tracks with the emails and public statements from the Archive.today maintainer).

> Ars trying to avoid piling more attention on the name of a person that isn't actually involved.

Oh, yes, by removing the name in the context of "Streisand Effect".

> petty revenge

How does it "revenge"? Was it a porn page? Or something bad?

It is likely to be just a funny placeholder name of the same length to come in mind.

We could find good and bad motives for both AT and Ars.

The bias against AT was here apriori. Paywall-story for CondeNast, russophobia for the rest.

They apparently did a find + replace across their database to change the Nora alias to the blogger's name. So any archives of content referencing her would instead point to him, muddying the waters and blaming him for anything she was accused of. Like I said, petty.

The porn smear threats came later, via email.

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