I don't think they appreciate this article, not quite doxxing but publishing the results of a hunt for the person's name and location when it can already be assumed they don't want that known if they have never published it despite being quite high-profile.
The nixos link was edited and removed by the author 3 hours after this submission was posted to HN.
Checking who wrote this blog, the About starts with:
> Jani Patokallio was first bitten by the travel bug at the age of 8 months and hasn't managed to shake it yet. Halfway through racking up 650,000 flight miles
sounds like a nice person (next, they'll tell us how much plastic they bought in a lifetime!), but that aspect aside, I'm not seeing any motive for why archive's personalia should need to be dug into...
I think that's code for some Google Analytics-like service (from googling for "top-fwz1.mail.ru/counter"), I mean mail.ru is not only email, but a Yandex/Google-like conglomerate of various web services.
I've also been intrigued about the owner of archive.is and have looked in to it a couple of times but what I managed to find is pretty much all the same stuff as mentioned here.
One interesting thing I'd like to mention are these tweets[1] by archive.is when he was supposedly questioned for something at the finnish - russian border and as a result he blocked the entire site in Finland, although later he lifted the block. I also couldn't find any information about the "Russia vs. http://archive.org case" he mentions in the tweet.
Well, formally, there is a prosecutor office or court decision behind every new block of Russian Censorship Agency, which then merely implements it (and demands the services to remove information or get blocked), but even they stopped pretending they are not in control of rubber-stamping the papers.
You can see the fine collection of everything from The Anarchist Cookbook to le ironic nasheed remixes, and from exposures of Astral Jews to Alex Jones there:
> Donations these days are via Liberapay, an obscure French non-profit organization, and YC-backed startup BuyMeACoffee.
I am not sure why Liberapay is qualified as 'obscure'. Their website's "legal" page [0] clearly identifies the organization and its legal representative, while providing contact details. The status of the non-profit organization can be verified in the French government's website [1].
The idea that every good project should be a full scale financially stable enterprise with a proper administrative team and dedicated supportive fan club is severely limiting (and is indirectly telling you to know your place in existing chains of power made that specific way). More often than not, services like those are made not by underground kingpins, but by common people who happened to be at the right place in the right time. For example, torrents.ru was once just one of the many regional and global torrent trackers, sometimes run by literal teenagers (albeit that one had the best domain name). Look at it today.
Also, «Маша» (Masha) and «Мойша» (Moishe/Moshe) are completely different names, and I've never ever seen anyone using the former for the latter. Either the author stretches it a bit too much, or the author knows something that should not be publicly revealed in the manner they chose (and the whole post is just an intimidating leak).
Anyway, if the author(s) have successful illegal business, as implied, they shouldn't have any difficulties in acquiring enough spare identities to burn. As a side note, it's quite ironic that “security” is such an idol today that common people need to go out of their way to evade tracking, while even petty internet criminals buy virtual identities in bulk, and have special instrumented browsers to load fake system data with one click.
In less than 24h all of these except one does not work. Numerous HN commenters have an affinity for archive.is, dropping links on countless submissions. These do not work for everyone.
Interesting read. I've thought about this for a while.
My woes with the site is that my connection to any of the clearnet domains seem to get black holed, or completely blocked by Cloudflare while using Tor. The onion site works fine for viewing, but to archive pages I need to complete the extremely difficult Cloudflare CAPTCHA.
The captcha page looks like cloudflare, but I don't think they're using cloudflare, haha. They use recaptcha (not sure if that's possible with cloudflare), the `server` header doesn't == 'cloudflare', accessing by direct ip gives "hello world" instead of the "Direct IP access not allowed" cloudflare message, /cdn-cgi/trace isn't accessible.
Not sure why they do that. Is it just because it looks decent, or is it poking fun, maybe because of their issue with 1.1.1.1?
>The captcha page looks like cloudflare, but I don't think they're using cloudflare, haha.
That's amazing, I never bothered to take a look once I saw that page but I did just now, and you're right. Google reCAPTCHA skinned as Cloudflare, hysteric.
That'd be the way that you read it, if they were another Alexandra Elbakyan (or Joanna Rutkowska, or Stephanie Wehner, or ... ) then they clearly wouldn't be a King among Men.
> The obvious denispetrov.com ... programmer ... a New Yorker ... end of a 25-year career and the blog dries up entirely in 2011, so it doesn’t match the place or time
What also worries me a bit is that Wikipedia started to use them in their references, to archive paywalled references.
Generally I enjoy archive.today very much, but it seems to be a labour of love which can go away any moment (despite its apparent resiliency), rather than something for the ages...
Wikipedia does not require that references be free to access. Most books, journals and physical newspapers fall into this category. So editors are perfectly entitled to reference paywalled articles. The fact that you can access some of these through Archive.today is really just a nice bonus. I am a bit concerned about the possibility that the service might just vanish someday, but I don't think that's a reason not to use it.
The problem is more that a lot of references will just disappear. It just so happened that earlier today I opened 4 or 5 references for an event that happened around 2009-2012. They all gave either a 404s or just redirected me to the homepage.
This is why I consider these types of archives important: not so much to bypass paywalls, but to ensure content is still available in a decade, or two decades.
The original URLs can go away just as easily as the archive.today mirrors of them, which is why Wikipedia (or any website of record) should contain links to both, IMHO.
It's strange to hear the author isn't a fan of cryptocurrency. There are a lot of dubious use-cases for crypto, but facilitating donations for sketchy services is an obvious one.
For a while now, I've had infrequently occurring arcane cert/SSL issues connecting to archive.ph and its siblings, but trying a couple of links from the article I find I can't get past an endless cycle of "one more step" captcha protection - tried clearing all cookies and revisiting an old url, but to no avail.
Archive.* sabotages their DNS records when Cloudflare queries for them. They don't like that Cloudflare doesn't do EDNS forwarding so they broke their service for people using 1.1.1.1.
That said, I have the same problem. Even hard coding the IP address I resolved through Google doesn't seem to work. I'm guessing their sabotage may have backfired and is causing issues beyond their intentional scope?
This just helped me realize why I couldn't get to archive.today anymore -- however, for me, both Google DNS (8.8.8.8) and CloudFlare DNS (1.1.1.1) resulted in either infinite captcha loop or timeout.
I had to switch back to my ISP DNS to have connection successful.
I did not realize that choice of DNS resolver could effect access to a website like this. I thought DNS was boring stable technology. The error conditions weren't even DNS failure (which I would also find surprising from Google or Cloudflare), but that server timeout, or weirder infinite captcha loop.
if you can't trust your isp than either find someone that you can trust (by verification) or run your own resolver.
there was a recent move from the eu to have an eu-centric public resolver which brought up the question if/how the big players address country specific filtering requirements which in turn might have shed some light on the fact that gog/cf didn't care; until now.
The nixos link was edited and removed by the author 3 hours after this submission was posted to HN.
Checking who wrote this blog, the About starts with:
> Jani Patokallio was first bitten by the travel bug at the age of 8 months and hasn't managed to shake it yet. Halfway through racking up 650,000 flight miles
sounds like a nice person (next, they'll tell us how much plastic they bought in a lifetime!), but that aspect aside, I'm not seeing any motive for why archive's personalia should need to be dug into...