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FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site
- duxup 10mo agoPeople who steal from Americans get pardons... archive.is gets the the Feds on them. The current administration would be a good joke if it wasn't real.
- walletdrainer 10mo agoFWIW circumventing various paywalls is probably the bad thing archive.is is being investigated for, not the archiving bit.
- dogma1138 10mo agoDo they actually do anything to circumvent paywalls or do websites just whitelist their crawlers?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- walletdrainer 10mo agoWebsites don’t whitelist their crawlers, they maintain custom bypasses for a wide variety of websites. If the websites were inclined to whitelist these crawlers, they’d also whitelist archive.org which is actually easy to whitelist. Archive.is is not
- rekabis 10mo agoAn AdGuard employee working their Reddit subreddit let slip that the legal order that forced them to block those domains (from their ad-blocking DNS) was a - claimed! - result of Archive.today having saved CP and refusing to delete it. Methinks someone accidentally archived the Epstein files, and the FBI is desperately trying to scrub the unredacted backups before the archive URL becomes well-known. That alone would align somewhat with the CP claim,
- black_13 10mo ago[dead]
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- ChrisArchitect 10mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836826
- walletdrainer 10mo ago> The subpoena is supposed to be secret Ars inventing their own colour here. This is simply not true.
- tw04 10mo ago>Ars inventing their own colour here. This is simply not true. What are you talking about? Right at the top of the subpoena it literally says in bold and all caps, and I quote: >YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFNITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.
- t0mas88 10mo agoThe "requested" part sounds like it's not mandatory, otherwise they would have used something like "you're not allowed to..." or similar language.
- namibj 10mo agoSounds like a notice that disclosure could result in outcomes that make the discloser liable of (the crime? of) interfering-with-an-investigation. And thus to avoid that risk, to think twice before disclosing. Disclosure would only be punished if the specific circumstances actually result in legally-considered-(unlawful-)interference.
- walletdrainer 10mo agoThere needs to be specific intent to obstruct, merely sharing the subpoena does not demonstrate this. “Hey, we got this subpoena. You better quickly wipe all your drives” probably would.
- AlienRobot 10mo agoThe "supposed" part as well.
- walletdrainer 10mo ago
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- dogma1138 10mo agoRegardless of this situation I actually think that websites like Archive and TWBM should be fully transparent. A very large partition of citations in Wikipedia for example relies on them. Most of the pages that cite archived copies do so because the live version is no longer available I would like to have some assurances that archive.is and the likes are not altering their content in any way over time. Unironically content sensitive hashing of archival pages might be one of the few use cases where something like a blockchain might actually be useful for.
- dpark 10mo agoWhy would the blockchain be useful here? You don’t need a blockchain to store a hash.
- Galanwe 10mo agoYou do need some kind of reliable, distributed storage though. The sequential nature of a blockchain also ensures that such stored content is held no matter what by any full node.
- AlienRobot 10mo agoIt's a hash.
- dogma1138 10mo agoYou both need to generate the hash at the point of archival correctly and store it in a way that cannot be modified later on. Doing that with a blockchain like tech is one of the few use cases where the tech itself actually adds value. Heck you might be able to store the entire pages on a blockchain or a blockchain linked storage. The problem with these sites is that we implicitly trust them and unlike a book or other handprint media where editing or destroying all unedited existing copies is effectively impossible if a shady actor can easily start editing archived news articles and other sites that are no longer publicly available.
- toast0 10mo agoThe subpoena is for archive.today. The .is TLD is run by ISNIC and they process registrations directly, and operating out of Iceland, it would be very strange if they took orders from the FBI.
- lschueller 10mo agoI would bet, even when the fbi is able to track down archive.today, it will be a matter of hours until the archive is shifted to another network and reinstated.. Even though if a certain amount of archived data might be lost, the core service will be rehosted quite fast somewhere else, i would think.