Our Investigation Into the Suspicious Pressure on Archive.today
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
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AdGuard DNS investigated suspicious pressure to block Archive.today, revealing potentially coordinated efforts to suppress the site, sparking debate about internet censorship and the role of DNS providers.
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It's pretty slick, highly recommend. (Also super useful to see what devices are reaching out to where and how frequently, custom block lists, custom local DNS entries, etc).
It's worth trying on devices where you can't install ad blocking software, but can change the TCP/IP settings.
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/LICEN...
I would recommend it
IMO it is safer to use a big popular DNS recursor (google, cloudflare, adguard, quad9, etc), use DoT/DoH/DoQ and maybe add some additional filtering on top of it.
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586#...
The legal advice we got was basically “block asap or risk jail time”. Moreover, the risk would still be there even if the complainant is shady or hiding their identity.
So it took us some time to do the digging and make sure that illegal content was removed which was the prerequisite to unblocking.
The digging is not finished btw, we’ll later post a proper analysis of our reaction and the results of the research.
Maybe it would have been virtuous to fight it tooth-and-nail from the start, but I don't think it was wrong to comply while investigating further
That's the intention of intermediary liability laws - to make meritless censorship be the easy, no-risk way out. To deputize corporations to act as police under a guilty-until-proven-innocent framework.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono%3F
As to Lenin: The mouse died because it didn't understand why the cheese was free
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletproof_hosting
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.
remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume something without reading it...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The person to whom I was replying thought that perhaps someone wanting to stop Archive was uploading CSAM and getting them to crawl it. I was pointing out that they didn’t have to do the first step, the internet has lots of that stuff apparently, they merely had to have a list of urls (law enforcement could easily provide) and check Archive for them.
Archive doesn’t do this automatically apparently, as some platforms do, so there’s probably plenty of it there.
I’m not saying I know or believe that to be the case, I have no knowledge at all here, but it’s entirely possible archive ignores most of these requests and responded to this one.
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.
> handle CSAM
They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work.
Without proof, that's just an edgelord conspiracy theory.
Police are not the Borg, perfectly coordinated in their evilness, all law enforcement agencies have internal power structures and strife, rivalries, jealousy, old conflicts. The fact that some action, such as planting evidence leading to a conviction, is punishable with long prison sentences, is not something the corrupt can simply afford to ignore, while giving their internal foes mortal leverage against them.
For example, if Kash Patel receives an order from his handlers to plant child porn on some political target, that outcome might happen or not, but what you can be pretty damn sure is that all those involved will be aware of the risks and will try their best to stay out of it, or, if coerced, do it covertly so as to minimize the extreme risks they face.
The point was not that FBI are a bunch of angels, but that the undeniable risks involved by such a move seem completely unnecessary - the FBI has for years been weaponized against overseas copyright infringers, openly and legally.
https://youtu.be/fu6bYPTp_kE?si=K_YKzTxy5ggKQDiG&t=2156
https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/
Of course in a pinch it could also be used for other things like pretext.
For law enforcement personnel, at the very least would mean an end of a career if caught (also possible jail time)
Anything linked to pedophilia in the US and elsewhere is without remorse, and will continue that way due to parental fears.
What were the repercussions of this: "FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images" (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-websi...)
"The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days"
"There was no other way we could identify as many players"
I think the normal person would think this is worth while to catch more pedophiles, hence why this would work politically. However, you can read by the tone of the article that even this drew a lot of rage.
Imagine the FBI agents collecting CSAM, uploading it to websites for the purpose of... preventing copyright infringement
"world elite is practicing a child sex ring", this is why it's so compatible with the current vogue bipartisan populism which generally says "your life sucks because of the rich/elites"
jeffery epstein was in reality associated with many politicians, including trump and clinton, as far as I can tell on both sides there is a lot of extrapolation as to what really happened
Quite why the now dead queen supported him so much (presumably including the payouts) is baffling.
On pure numbers alone, this is practically guaranteed to be the case for a portion of the world elite, since statistically speaking at least 1% ~ 2% of them will be pedophiles. Same as any community, anywhere. The average child sex ring is probably made up of individuals about as wealthy and sophisticated as your dad, uncle, neighbour, boss or your friends, and if even they can pull it off then surely the global elite can.
It's a recurring theme with these authorities. You see, they're special. They get to spread this sort of material with complete impunity. They get to stockpile cyberweapons and use them against the targets of their investigations, or even indiscriminately. If you do it, you're a hacker spreading malware. They're just doing their jobs.
Sometimes those two privileges collide, resulting in truly comical and absurd situations. FBI has allowed cases against child molesters to go down the drain because the judge ordered them to reveal some Firefox exploit they used. They didn't want to invalidate their "network investigative techniques".
Note that these actions are illegal in most continental jurisdictions as stings must be devised ahead of time against specific groups of people. There's also Article 6 of ECHR.
In other words, FBI cannot run a sting off an EU site like this, at least definitely not a German one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_O%27Keefe
The case they’re referring to is the Karen Read case. The whole for/against thing has become quite political and sensationalized, especially after the involvement of a popular local online right-wing commentator named Turtle Boy (because Turtle Middle-Aged-Man didn’t have the same ring to it.) Another Canton policeman seemingly murdered a young woman who’d refused to get an abortion. He’d been sleeping with her for a few years after she started some sort of internship/cadet program with the police department as a high school student. Canton is a sleepy, medium-sized suburb, btw.
The corruption in the Massachusetts State Police is cartoonishly prevalent. There are too many major recent (and past) scandals to even choose one. They see themselves as a pseudo-military organization and are famous for their arrogant, officious, and rude manners, violence, aggression, corruption, and cover-ups. I got stopped at some sort of checkpoint in rural Georgia at 2am on a 2 lane country highway 50 miles from anything and was astonished by how professionally those bored cops acted. Completely different than my experiences with state police back home. Who knows: maybe the Georgia cops would have been way worse if I wasn’t white while there MSP might be more egalitarian in their ghoulishness?
I’ve had far more interaction with urban police in MA, both as a punk-ass teenager and in professional dealings, and the experience has been fine for the most part. Staties and cops in the suburbs? Yeesh.
Are you sure ? They say in the article that they were not able to fing out who sent the email. Site was behind Cloudfare (so US).
It seems 57% of people in France can speak English, which I can easily believe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
No reason to doubt this is coming from a French person.
It also doesn't help that there is not even a time reference here. I want to say somewhere around 2018? Maybe earlier? Gamergate era? CTR?
There are pieces of internet history which are a "either you were there or you weren't" kind of deal. Like how the implementation of image posts in Reddit was very controversial, with concerns of the quality of the site going down. Wrong side won that one.
How do you know that it definitely happened?
Social media false flag tactics happen. People from all over all sorts of political spectrums tell the same story. The sites tell the same story.
If you decide to blindly dismiss claims of abuse because you don't like the ones claiming to be abused, you create a comfy little space for abuse to happen.
I am a human being and therefore have a built-in Bayesian filter for spam and bullshit. Should I also read Nigerian prince emails, just in case there's a real Nigerian prince who needs my help?
In case you are a real Nigerian prince who needs my help, it's up to you not to phrase it identically to a spam email.
That's not the same as disbelieving an anonymous spammer. Your distrust of them does not stem from disliking them.
To me, your attitude seems like indifference to the truth: I think you know that this happens, and it would be VERY odd if it only happened to people you like, but you're just indifferent when it happens to people you don't like, so you disbelieve them out of spite.
What subreddits got banned because of that?
>The same thing happened on Twitter/X for a while where bots would mass reply to targeted users with gore and CSAM.
Did any of those targeted users get banned for this or was it just a form of harassment?
SaSu: Sanctioned Suicide [1]
But I don't know what KF and SF are supposed to stand for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctioned_Suicide
SF is probably StormFront, an infamous neo-nazi website. Not an "anyone right of center is a nazi" kind of neo-nazi - actual self-proclaimed neo-nazis, complete with swastikas, Holocaust denial and calls for racial segregation. Even more hated and scrutinized than KiwiFarms, and under pressure by multiple governments and many more activist groups, over things like neo-nazi hate speech and ties with real life hate groups.
It would be a damn shame if archive.is fell under the same kind of scrutiny as those. I have an impression, completely unfounded, that the archive.is crew knew things were heading that way, and worked with that in mind for a long time now. But that doesn't guarantee they'll endure. Just gives them a fighting chance.
The root problem of CSAM is child trafficking and abuse in physical space. But for whatever reason enforcement efforts seem to be more focused on censoring and deleting the images rather than on curbing the actual act of child trafficking and rape. It's almost as if viewing (or this case, merely archiving) CSAM is considered a worse crime than the physical act of trafficking and sexually abusing children, which is apparently okay nowadays if you're rich or powerful enough.
https://harmblock.com/
https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_fuse_debuts_with_harmblock_ai_t...
The meta conspiracy theory in all of this would be that this is an actual CSAM producer trying to take down evidence that could be used against them.
It is however not at all clear the evidence they want scrubbed from the internet is CSAM-related. It's just the go-to tool for giving a site trouble for some attackers.
Things get a bit uncomfortable for various high profile figures, political leaders and royalty if prosecutions start happening.
"The bot spammer
- Started his attack by simply DDoS attacking the forum.
- Uses thousands of real email addresses from real providers like gmail, outlook, and hotmail.
- Uses tens of thousands of VPN IPs.
- He also uses tens of thousands of IPs from "Residential Private Networks", which are "free" VPN services that actually sell your IP address to spammers so that their activity cannot be identified as coming from a commercial service provider.
- Is able to pass off all CAPTCHA providers to CAPTCHA solvers to bypass anti-bot challenges.
- Is completely lifeless and dedicated to this task. Publicly posted invites were found and used by him, and after a full month of no engagement he noticed registrations were open within hours."
Source: https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-gay-pedophile-at-the-gates....
Mildly related incident where a Canadian child protection agency uploads csam onto a reverse image search engine and then reports the site for the temporarily stored images.
Still shitty, but more obviously a technical mistake than a deliberate ploy.
[0] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/SECU/Brief/B... [1] https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-netwo...
Does archive.is actually do any crawling? I thought they only archived pages on request.
Seems to be the new tactic now.
This looks like someone in US (because FBI + CSAM) does not like them.
A lot of "sensitive" content is behind paywalls in the "free press" so someone, possibly FBI, wants to suppress this info.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
In other words for example they have not shown that the purpose of a cancer hospital is not in fact to cure 2/3 of cancers. They say it's obviously absurd but that's just a bald assertion with no backing meat.
It can absolutely be argued that the hospital is doing exactly what it's intended to do, because it's what everyone involved is satisfied with letting it do.
Yes obviously it doesn't sound like an obvious way to interpret the functioning of the hospital. No one needs to write an article to explain that the world works the way it appears to or claims to. The whole point of the original POSIWID is to show that some other less obvious, possibly even intentionally hidden interpretation of a system is at least valid and logically "not inconsistent" with the facts and observations.
If the operators and funders of a hospital would like to cure all cancers but physically can't, one way to say that is that the hospital is simply doing the next best thing. Everyone involved has settled for some compromise and balance of resources devoted to it such that the amount of cost is as high as they are willing to go for the amount of cancers they are curing. However many they are curing, and even if 100% is not possible, there is still always some amount better they could do for some amount more investment, until all possible resources are devoted to that and nothing else. Everyone stops somewhere short of that and lives with the 2/3 performance instead of the 3/4 performance. And so the system is doing what everyone involved has decided it shall do. The purpose of the system is what it does.
That's not an absurd argument at all, and this rebuttal does not invalidate it.
POSIWID is about finding a single "purpose" and defining that as the apex reason for a system (usually to manipulate).
I'm not sure how we have more balanced discussions.
That in itself is quite shocking really.
I'm stating this because I think it might be the most important distinction in our lifetime. I think that wars are fought, lives are lost, and maybe even society itself will be lost, on that distinction and those of its like.
But the point stands I think, as I’d expect legal demands to be measured and to the point.
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.
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