Since archive[.]today is using some very obscure hosting methods with multiple international mirrors, it makes it incredibly difficult for law enforcement to go after.
There was quite a good article posted here on HN about someone trying to figure out those questions, but I can't seem to find it.
(in an unlikely case someone is curious what about is that article, it is a fictional comparison of life of a finctional character in Springfield, USA and Chusovoy, USSR in 80s and I cannot even understand why it was banned in Russia)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250418160713/https://habr.com/...
I first heard of this technique on a discussion on Lowendtalk from a hoster discussing how pressure campaigns were orchestrated.
The host used to host VMs for a customer that was not well liked but otherwise within the bounds of free speech in the US (I guess something on the order of KF/SaSu/SF), so a given user would upload CSAM on the forum, then report the same CSAM to the hoster. They used to use the same IP address for their entire operation. When the host and the customer compared notes, they'd find about these details.
Honestly at the time I thought the story was bunk, in the age of residential proxies and VPNs and whatnot, surely whoever did this wouldn't just upload said CSAM from their own IP, but one possible explanation would be that the forum probably just blocked datacenter IPs wholesale and the person orchestrating the campaign wasn't willing to risk the legal fallout of uploading CSAM out of some regular citizen's infected device.
In this case, I assume law enforcement just sets up a website with said CSAM, gets archive.is to crawl it, and then pressurize DNS providers about it.
Sentences like this make me sincerely believe that not everyone has a soul.
remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume something without reading it...
These are the doings of one of the myriad freelance "intelectual rights enforcement agents", which are paid on success and employed by some large media organization. Another possibility is that a single aggrieved individual who found themselves doxed or their criminal conviction archived etc. took action after failing to enforce their so called "right to be forgotten".
Unfortunately, archive.is operating model is uniquely vulnerable to such false flag attacks.
https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/
Of course in a pinch it could also be used for other things like pretext.
> handle CSAM
They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work.
For law enforcement personnel, at the very least would mean an end of a career if caught (also possible jail time)
That in itself is quite shocking really.
It is even more interesting the US government is coming after archive.today at the same time, or maybe that is just a coincidence, and this is just a tech-savvy philanderer trying to hide something from his wife.
Also the site is pretty advanced, it can handle complicated sites and even social networks.
> But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls
How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper?
> Unfortunately, we couldn’t dig any deeper about who exactly is behind WAAD.
That's a red flag. Why would an NGO doing work for the public hide its founder(s) and information about itself? Using NGOs to suggest/promote/lobby certain decisions is a well known trick in authoritarian countries to pretend the idea is coming from "the people", not from the government. I hope nobody falls for such tricks today.
Furthermore, they seem to have no way to donate them money. That's even the redder flag.
Also France doesn't have a good reputation in relation to the observing rule of law. For example, they arrested Russian agent^w enterpreneur Durov, owner of Telegram, claiming they have lot of evidence against him involved in drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering [1], but a year later let him free (supposedly after he did what they wanted). France also bars popular unwanted candidates from elections. Both these cases strongly resemble what Russia does.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
> How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper?
Someone with a subscription logs into the site, then archives it. Archive.is uses the current user's session and can therefore see the paywalled content.
One I saw suggested they've a set of subscriptions to the paywalled sites and some minimal custom work to hide the signed in account used - which seems plausible. That makes the defense most likely used to catch the account used and ban them - which would be a right pain.
Chat control, DNS as arbiter of whats allowed, walled gardens etc.
atomicfiredoll•1h ago
hirako2000•1h ago