
Ask HN: Who owns archive.is, and why are they trustworthy? - ev1
I understand the need for anonymity when you&#x27;re doing this due to the sheer amount of abuse reports, fake and real DMCAs, etc.<p>But why do people trust it? How do you know the pages you&#x27;re archiving haven&#x27;t been tampered with selectively to change history? This is just out of sheer curiosity, and I am not saying they do this.<p>This is made further interesting because of the following:<p>- Analytics from various Russian providers, instead of self-hosted (FYI: I consider GA to be equally privacy-violating as Metrika or Mail.ru)<p>- Large amounts of reverse proxies off questionable or bulletproof hosting providers<p>- Indefinitely doing this can&#x27;t necessarily be cheap either at scale, who is paying for this?<p>- Demanding tracking or else blocking your access to the site, blocking any resolver that doesn&#x27;t send the first 3 octets of your IP to them (edns-client-subnet)<p>- Explicitly tracking you in odd ways: they repeatedly load pixels&#x2F;do DNS preconnect&#x2F;preload from wildcard subdomains containing a cookied number, IP, country, tracking IDs. View any archived page and ^F &quot;pixel.archive.is&quot;
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adventured
Archive.is isn't very important yet. I don't believe they warrant much concern
re such questions. It doesn't yet matter very much if they're super
trustworthy or not.

At their present scale, going through and manually changing (tampering with)
saved content for propaganda (or similar) purposes, would have very little
impact. More realistically, it probably has close to zero potential
consequential impact. It'd be quite the chore for very little return.

If they become important some day, with dramatically greater scale of usage,
then getting answers to these questions might be important.

If they eventually betray trust, they're trivial to replace. Other competing
variations of archive.is exist now. It's a relatively easy service to create.
Someone should probably challenge them just on the basis of how bad their ui &
ux are.

At scale, if they begin abusing their position, it would become well known,
they would get a reputation and it'd kill their service. The barrier to
competition extremely low.

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ulucs
Why would you trust them? If you are trying to archive something, make sure to
use multiple (separately owned) services so that you don't need to trust them.

~~~
alexknvl
Which services would you recommend? Last time I searched for free general-
purpose website archival sites (for personal bitrot prevention), I could find
only archive.is and archive.org.

~~~
notadog
Some alternatives that may be what you are looking for are archive.st,
Webrecorder.io, FreezePage, and ArchiveBox. There is also perma.cc, which is a
project of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab intended for academic usage.

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bscphil
> This is made further interesting because of the following:

An additional concern: they've shown signs in the past of being capricious, or
at least, easily annoyed by (subjectively) insignificant slights. They
continue to block Cloudflare DNS users, last I checked. The "reason" is that
Cloudflare doesn't send along the eDNS client subnet, as a way of protecting
their users' privacy. [1]

I would argue this means archive.today / is can't be trusted to have the best
interests of the community at heart. It's not a public service in the way that
archive.org is.

[1] This bad behavior is actually mentioned in their Wikipedia article, along
with the additional uncited claim that they throttle users to 20 MB of data
per day, upon which they apparently ban your IP address. I haven't verified
the latter claim.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Worldwide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Worldwide)

~~~
Darmody
I didn't know about the Cloudflare DNS users being blocked. I started using
Cloudflare's DNS two days ago, I just checked and it looks like I can't use
the site anymore.

I can use it with Tor after more than a dozen different reCaptcha requests.

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colejohnson66
Also, why do people use archive.is over web.archive.org? One (web.archive.org)
is an actual library and gets all the legal protections that entails, while
the other doesn’t.

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TechBro8615
I share most of these concerns, especially since it’s primarily used in the
“alt-right” sphere and could easily become a vector to sow discord, either by
tampering with content or simply by mapping the communities of users visiting
it.

Worth noting, it’s probably not _that_ expensive to run. Most of the hosting
services they use would be offering “unmetered” bandwidth, so the cost is
probably fixed per month, likely under $1000.

