Fbi Tries to Unmask Owner of Archive.is

Isn't the whole thing a request? The FBI has no power in Canada unless they go through Canadian legal channels, no? If I received a subpoena from a foreign sovereign I would just use it as toilet paper.

Well Tucows is Canadian so the FBI can take their “request” somewhere else.

They probably cannot require this. They may be able to get you on interfering with their investigation if you disclosed with the intent of interfering. Probably adding this notice helps them prove you were aware of the potential to cause interference, at least. IANAL.

> Canada should never collaborate with any US authorities!

Cross-border collaboration is a good thing. Our agencies regularly collaborate to bring people who feel insulted and emboldened to account for their crimes. This works both ways.

As someone who has dealt with media of me as a minor (~around 11/yo) from Omegle being shared across the internet, the role archivers play in keeping illegal content “alive” isn’t well recognized. Thankfully, the Internet Archive has a matured process to purge pages that host illegal content.

We do not know what the investigation is for. All is up to speculation. Not all investigations are bad.

Here is an example on archive.is. I submitted multiple complaints to NCMEC but didn’t get results. Germany, though, was able to get the archives purged.

https://archive.is/https://ezgif.com/maker/*

On the page, you will see:

> In response to a request we received from 'jugendschutz.net' the page is not currently available.

That page held many, many images of minors. It is good that it is gone.

August 12, 2025 - Canadian Man Sentenced to 188 Months for Attempted Online Enticement of a Minor and Possessing Child Pornography [1]

August 21, 2024 - Canadian National Extradited To The United States Pleads Guilty To Production Of Child Sex Abuse Material And Enticement Of Minors

December 20, 2024 - Extradited Canadian National Sentenced To Life In Federal Prison for producing child sexual abuse material and enticement of a minor [3]

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/canadian-man-sentenced-...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/canadian-national-extra...

[3] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/extradited-canadian-nat...

Something new I found - go to any link (news article) on commondreams.org in Firefox. Now use the Reader View button in your address bar - they've figured out how to hack Reader View to not show the content and only a beg screen for money.

I use Brave on iOS, it mostly works and blocks ads and cookie pop ups. (Sometimes it breaks some websites but it's trivial to disable the shields.)

Ublock Origin, disable javascript for that site, remember the decision. Problem solved.

Tor was created by the US Navy.

> unless you are a high profile gov target, Tor protects you well.

How do you really know that? I understand the theory, but do you have evidence? Have you tested it or read research that has tested it?

I would hesitate to give advice to people when they could get hurt.

Government can exploit Firefox, more at 11.

How often do we read articles about authorities attempting to unmask suspected criminals? That the FBI is trying to identify this person seems to be noteworthy to the point that there are many people here commenting on the story, and the fact that they are trying and have not yet seems to indicate that it is not a forgone conclusion.

I don't think it's even that abstract anymore. The AI companies donated to help Trump build a ballroom. archive.is didn't.

IMO it is a false dichotomy to equate piracy with theft like that.

I think 90-99% of anything pirated (or accessed by bypassing paywalls etc) would just never be bought/paid-for if there was no alternative.

Information has existed long before the invention of money, and will outlive it.

Are there no ads on the site?

If you are OK with getting your information from one or two sources - why not. You can also subscribe to a newspaper. But surely internet can do (and did until relatively recently!) better than that.

Paywall epidemic is a recent phenomenon, internet media managed to exist before that.

Big corporations aren't humans.

While it's true people are upset at AI companies profiting off of artist creations with no compensation, I know a lot of people are also reacting to how the recent AI companies have been scraping the web. The reason folks are using Anubis and other methods is because unlike Google which did have archiving of sites for a long time (which was actually a great service), these new companies do not respect robots.txt, do not crawl at a reasonable rate (for us, thousands of hits a minute from their botnets - usually baidu/tencent, but also plenty of US IPs), hit the same resource repeatedly, ignoring headers intended to give cache hints, stupidly hitting thousands of variations of a page when crawling search results with no detection that they are getting basically the same thing... And when you ban them, they then switch to residential ranges. It really is malicious.

A lot of the outrage isn't at scraping, it is at the disruptive techniques used to do so. Like web-scraping whole websites that already provide convenient images of their content for download.

This is a false equivalency I'm surprised no one else has brought up. An archive of a site preserves attribution inherently, the scraping and training are not.

There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.

Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".

That's a bad take, just like open source code is available to all, it's not the case you can always resell it or repackage it for your own profit.

Information can be made available to all, and at the same time, we can make it so others cannot resell or repackage it for profit like what AI companies are doing.

This seems like an incredible disingenuous take. There's a marked difference between collecting information to freely share with the rest of humanity, and collecting information to feed into algorithms under the guise of "artificial intelligence" with the pretense of enriching their finances and putting others out of work.

I don't care that they scrape my website.

I DO care that nearly 2M different IPs are used to try to pull 42k commits out of a git repo one by one when they could just git clone it ...

Copyright exists to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

Anything which does that should be legal, and anything that stifles those advances should not.

Well, as long as they pursue a "copyright for me but not for thee" regime, you can.

Hot take here, I know, but some of us believe the law should treat large corporations differently than it treats individuals when it comes to their rights and privileges.

> But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.

I'm only angry with them when they pay hush money to IP extortionists.

It's not that they're scraping the internet, it's that they're scraping the internet, profiting off the data they take, and still using the copyright regime to go after others who do unto them.

One thing is not the other. A corporation is not a human (and no I don't care what Citizens United says). A corporation has no inherent rights.

I heard stories of incriminating stuff for higher-ups disappearing from archive.org.

The difference is that we know who's running archive.org. We don't know who's running archive.is. That's perfectly fine for private use but unacceptable for a site like Wikipedia.

It's not that difficult.

Where did you check this? While neither are listed on WP:RSP, I know many cites are changed into web.archive.org links once they go down.

> Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys.

Or they're worried about the paywall by-passing functionality (which is probably what a good portion of people use it for) and copyright claims against archive.today potentially having it taken down and thus breaking a lot of links.