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Comment by eyya | Hacker News Reader

But this might be the reason: to make the archive unexciting for AI scrapers

I am open to chat about any of this. Threat modeling is complex.

But, injecting malware to scuttle their own incredibly popular network would benefit them how?

Its incredible popularity has long since led to the emergence of virtually unsolvable CAPTCHAs, designed to reduce this level.

So far, the only benefits of this popularity are the AI crawlers which cause the site to run intermittently (same issue this year with archive.org and commoncrawl) plus Finnish doxxers and fake child-porn fighters trying to shut it down.

OK, but what if they track all of who watches what. Isn't that the entire Facebook model? Metadata is extremely valuable. That's just facts, right? And, they are literally doing that.

Next, IIRC, one DNS provider stopped working with them for insane privacy reasons? [0]

Now, tinfoil hat time: what about the AI labs using them for training data, and it getting steered one way or another now that we know for a fact that archive is not reliable?

[0] It is Cloudflare due to EDNS Client Subnet (ECS) privacy, right?

You have to hang out on Epstein Island to find buyers for metadata. Have you heard of any small indie projects with this kind of business model? Maybe PirateBay, Sci-Hub, Flibusta? I haven't. That's why I'm sure CloudFlare is selling your metadata (and not just that), but the archive isn't. Simply because it doesn’t fly that high. Banners, pop-unders, pop-ups—what people here like to call “malware”—yes, that’s it. Just a normal pirate website with too many too cheap visitors and an unpassable captcha and a pop-under as the result.

What makes you think that archive.today is any kind of indie project?

Isn't just the scale of cost indicative that is not aligned with anything close to indie?

comparable to the 3 websites mentioned

Is it really? Archive.today is like archive.org. Archive.org is around 30M/year at least, we know those costs and the funding is open. Does that sound indie on the .today side? Who is funding that?

You are really defending .today, and you mentioned Flibusta.

Well, now we now who. Сердечный приве. I look forward to our eventual reunion my Slavic brothers and sisters. We all left our imperialist moron leaders behind, so will you. I cannot wait for the peace and prosperity to come.

30 million is on the scale of Pirate Bay, slightly less than Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload (150M), and 3–4 orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook. So yes, by my definition, archive.org is a small, indie project as well still operating out of someone’s garage.

How could running TPB come close to approaching even 1M per year, much less 30M? My estimate for TPB is far below 100k/year. That's an indie project. 30M per year is real money that requires constant investment. Investors like ROI.

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

This information came to light thanks to the Swedish judicial system: TPB’s revenue was $4–5 million per year, plus something on Bitcoin's grow as they were early adopters. Thus, archive.org falls somewhere between TPB and Megaupload. I agree that archive.today is perhaps just a little smaller than archive.org, but in any case, it’s in the same “indie league”, not Facebook.

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