Fbi Tries to Unmask Owner of Archive.is
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Archive.isFbi InvestigationCopyrightInternet Freedom
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Archive.is
Fbi Investigation
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The FBI is attempting to unmask the owner of archive.is, a popular archiving site, sparking concerns about internet freedom and the preservation of online content.
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The subpoena, which was posted on X by archive.today on October 30, was sent by the FBI to Tucows, a popular Canadian domain registrar. It demands that Tucows give the FBI the “customer or subscriber name, address of service, and billing address” and other information about the “customer behind archive.today.”
“THE INFORMATION SOUGHT THROUGH THIS SUBPOENA RELATES TO A FEDERAL CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED BY THE FBI,” the subpoena says. “YOUR COMPANY IS REQUIRED TO FURNISH THIS INFORMATION. YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFINITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.”
The subpoena also requests “Local and long distance telephone connection records (examples include: incoming and outgoing calls, push-to-talk, and SMS/MMS connection records); Means and source of payment (including any credit card or bank account number); Records of session times and duration for Internet connectivity; Telephone or Instrument number (including IMEI, IMSI, UFMI, and ESN) and/or other customer/subscriber number(s) used to identify customer/subscriber, including any temporarily assigned network address (including Internet Protocol addresses); Types of service used (e.g. push-to-talk, text, three-way calling, email services, cloud computing, gaming services, etc.)”
-snip-
Read more: https://www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to-unmask-owner-of-infamou...
Is this actually a mere request, as in the receiver is _not_ required to avoid disclosure?
Separately—can't believe tucows is still around!
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...
IMO it's only a good thing when it's a good thing. There are plenty of reasons it could be a bad thing too. For example, Edward Snowden probably would have been hung by now if russia cross-border collaborated.
Felony contempt of business model.
Turns out, our very user, Saurik, came up with this term!
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaki...
"who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"
I just wish it automagically expanded Wikipedia headers.
But 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.
Well it is of course not possible to 100% prove that Tor protects your privacy.
But the lack of evidence is also evidence. While we have evidence that the gov was able to identify indiviuals using Tor e.g. hosting drug portals, there has been no reports that individuals or companies are able to de-anonymize Tor users.
If the WHOIS records are falsified they'll start looking at payment information.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45835090
The FBI should investigate the "AI" companies and also the demise of Suchir Balaji, a copyright whistleblower who according to a sloppy local police investigation committed "suicide" hours after being seen cheerfully collecting a doordash delivery on CCTV.
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.
Paywall epidemic is a recent phenomenon, internet media managed to exist before that.
We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge).
Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.)
Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.
But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.
DCMA absolutely does apply to European firms selling their goods and services in the US.
Where US law applies varies by which law it is; there are US laws that apply only outside of the US [0], as well as US laws which have application both inside and outside the US.
[0] e.g., the federal torture statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2340A(a), “Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340A
Are they?
I said they're profiting from other people's hard work, a separate concept.
Also Google respects robots.txt. Every site that Google surfaces chose to be in the index.
Knowledge is shared among humanity at a rapid speed. Everyone benefits.
It’s mind boggling how anyone could be opposed to that.
While not all the companies in question may or may not be profiting from these things some of them are, and most if not all of their employees certainly are as well.
I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions.
Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures.
I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.
And arguably I used to think it was the Internet Archive.
It does make this case seem problematic now that I know the details.
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".
Why can't you just be happy for those few who are lucky enough to be able to violate copyright with no consequences? Yes, I know you'd want everyone to be able to violate copyright, but we're not there yet.
There are violations of copyright which are ethically fine, i.e. pirating an old movie to watch.
Then there are violations of copyright which are ethically problematic, i.e. pirating an old movie to sell.
When a big company violates copyright the nature of the violation is always much closer to the latter.
AI is not an attack on copyright, it is an attempt to replace it with something worse.
I'd love to see copyright slowly become irrelevant, but even with that goal we should expect to see large corpos being the last to stop respecting it.
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.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
This is true knowledge socialism.
- ChatGPT is in the "bait" phase of "bait and switch" plan. It is trying to make us dependent on it, so that it can extract maximum profit later.
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 ...
To deny people access to things is one thing, wanting to do it by impossible means is quite something else. Who even has time to scavage the universe looking for possible infringement on their works and also the money to deal with it?
Anything which does that should be legal, and anything that stifles those advances should not.
I'm only angry with them when they pay hush money to IP extortionists.
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. Of course, they still have archive.org sources everywhere, so the objection is not actually to archiving page content.
Tons of claims also seem to be sourced ultimately to thinly-disguised promotional material (e.g. claims of the prevalence of a problem backed up by the sites of companies offering products to combat the problem) and opinion pieces that happen to mention an objective (but not verified) claim in passing.
My main use for archive.is is for sites that somehow cannot be archived (a message will show up mentioning this site cannot be archive or something along these lines).
archive.is is generally pretty good in forcibly attempting to get an archive, if the HTML doesn't work, the screenshot will work fine. Although archive.is doesn't seem to handle gifs/videos.
They respected exclusion requests after they stopped to respect robots.txt. I don't know their policy for new exclusion requests.
It's not that difficult.
https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...
If this is truly a concern then the answer is to have more than one publicly-accessible independent archive service. Archivebro has never taken any steps towards securing a monopoly on archiving things. The FBI are the only ones doing that.
Also not everybody in Russia is on the FSB payroll. News media always stops investigating as soon as there is credible information that somebody or their server is located in Russia because if they learn too much then it becomes difficult to discredit them as "possibly being linked to the kremlin". If you used any other nationality to imply that somebody is acting in bad faith on behalf of a hostile foreign government without additional evidence those same journos would call you a racist and try to get you canceled.
The idea that the permanent record of the internet could hinge on the ethics of one stranger behind a server rack is deeply unsettling.
Knowing the current owner of archive.is doesn't help; we need more full, independent Internet mirrors that can be compared against each other.
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.
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