Hacker News

It's also kind of ironic that a site whose whole premise is to preserve pages forever, whether the people involved like it or not, is seeking to take down another site because they are involved and don't like it. Live by the sword, etc.

Did they actually run the DDoS via a script or was this a case of inserting a link and many users clicked it? They are substantially different IMO

> Changing the content of archived pages also raises questions about the authenticity of what we're reading.

This is absolutely the buried lede of this whole saga, and needs to be the focus of conversation in the coming age.

It costs money beyond 10 links, which means either a paid subscription or institutional affiliation. This is problematic for an encyclopedia anyone can edit, like Wikipedia.

There are dozen of commercial/enterprise solutions: https://www.g2.com/products/pagefreezer/competitors/alternat...

also the oldest of that kind and rarely mention free https://www.freezepage.com

Does Wikipedia really need to outsource this? They already do basically everything else in-house, even running their own CDN on bare metal, I'm sure they could spin up an archiver which could be implicitly trusted. Bypassing paywalls would be playing with fire though.

> I figured that they have found an (automated) way to imitate Googlebot really well.

If a site (or the WAF in front of it) knows what it's doing then you'll never be able to pass as Googlebot, period, because the canonical verification method is a DNS lookup dance which can only succeed if the request came from one of Googlebots dedicated IP addresses. Same with Bingbot and all the others.

> I've seen people claiming that they have a bunch of paid accounts that they use to fetch the pages, which is, of course, ridiculous.

The curious part is that they allow web scraping arbitrary pages on demand. So if a publisher could put in a lot of arbitrary requests to archive their own pages and see them all coming from a single account or small subset of accounts.

I hope they haven't been stealing cookies from actual users through a botnet or something.

> which is, of course, ridiculous.

Why? in the world of web scrapping this is pretty common.

I’m an outsider with experience building crawlers. You can get pretty far with residential proxies and browser fingerprint optimization. Most of the b-tier publishers use RBC and heuristics that can be “worked around” with moderate effort.

It’s not reliable, in the sense that there are many paywalled sites that it’s unable to archive.

The archive.today operator claims on his blog that this was nothing major: https://lj.rossia.org/users/archive_today/

> Regarding the FBI’s request, my understanding is that they were seeking some form of offline action from us — anything from a witness statement (“Yes, this page was saved at such-and-such a time, and no one has accessed or modified it since”) to operational work involving a specific group of users. These users are not necessarily associates of Epstein; among our users who are particularly wary of the FBI, there are also less frequently mentioned groups, such as environmental activists or right-to-repair advocates.

> Since no one was physically present in the United States at that time, however, the matter did not progress further.

> You already know who turned this request into a full-blown panic about “the FBI accusing the archive and preparing to confiscate everything.”

Not sure who he's talking about there.

I know I'm arguing with a bot that nobody monitors, but it's already in the fucking post.

I would be suprised if archive.today had something that was not in the wayback machine

>> an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced.

>Oh? Do tell!

They do. In the very next paragraph in fact:

   The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original 
   source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so 
   it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, 
   Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that 
   doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper)

I mean, the admin of archive.today might face a jail time if deanonymised, kind of understandable he's nervous. Meanwhile for Patokallio it's just curiosity and clicks

It's a reminder how fragile and tenuous are the connections between our browser/client outlays, our societal perceptions of online norms, and our laws.

We live at a moment where it's trivially easy to frame possession of an unsavory (or even illegal) number on another person's storage media, without that person even realizing (and possibly, with some WebRTC craftiness and social engineering, even get them to pass on the taboo payload to others).

That was private negotiations, btw, not public statements.

In response to J.P's blog already framed AT as project grown from a carding forum + pushed his speculations onto ArsTechnica, whose parent company just destroyed 12ft and is on to a new victim. The story is full of untold conflicts of interests covered with soap opera around DDoS.

Why? The decision seems reasonable at first sight.

About how much had you previously donated over the years?

The objection is to this specific archieve service not archiving in general.

They generally do. Random example, citation 349 on the page of George Washington: ""A Brief History of GW"[link]. GW Libraries. Archived[link] from the original on September 14, 2019. Retrieved August 19, 2019."

If you read the linked article it is discussed