also Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598 August 2023

I wonder, is the newer gyrovague-com account because they lost the login for the old one? or was the old one a different person? Hopefully they can clarify, because if there's an account pretending to be them that makes this story even more confusingly weird.

I cannot make head or tail of this but it's more fascinating than the usual internecine bloodbath.

P.S. Shout-out to dang for dropping the flags. I have a small suspicion that their may be some foul play, given the contents...

This seems like a smart thing to do if you had exposed your real name somewhere and wanted to cover it up.

They should probably review existing case around how Finnish courts treat the journalistic exception in the context of citizen's journalism (as he relied on that at least as one of the reasons): https://tuomioistuimet.fi/hovioikeudet/ita-suomenhovioikeus/...

Of course facts are different, but at least two Finnish court seem to require a lot more reasoning from the controller in the context of citizen journalism compared to traditional media when they want to invoke the journalistic exception. No clue which side this would fall into.

Shame, as I was using it alot for archiving different pages.

Edit: after looking at this more closely, I have a counterintuitive (to me at least) take: I think this is interesting enough to transcend the usual categories. That is, we'd normally downweight this kind of post off the frontpage - but in this case there are so many unusual variables that the usual rules don't apply.

I say this despite having zero clue what's going on here. We do have a nose for what the HN community might find interesting (we'd bloody well better after doing this job for so long), so let's override the flags and see what happens.

But without relitigating WWII please.

The first one is money. You need lots of it to run such an operation (servers, IPs, paying to bypass all these paywalls, etc.).

The second one is the legality, as no one wants to be hunted by the FBI, especially not for running a website that is also losing money.

Use Onion version :D

  fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s="+Math.random().toString(36).substring(2,3+Math.random()*8),{ referrerPolicy:"no-referrer",mode:"no-cors" });

But more to the point, so long as the request meets the requirements of a "simple request", CORS won't preflight it. GETs qualify as a simple request so long as no non-CORS-safelisted headers are sent; since the sent headers are attacker-controlled, we can just assume that to be the case. In a non-preflighted request, the CORS "yes, let JS do this" are just on the response headers of the actual request itself.

Since GETs are idempotent, the browser assumes it safe to make the request. CORS could/would be used to deny JS access to the response.

Things are this way b/c there are, essentially, a myriad of other ways to make the same request. E.g.,

  <img src="https://gyrovague.com/?s=…">

robots.txt. It is that simple.

The article is also really appreciative of archive.today. It doesn't feel like a hit piece at all.

Thanks, I must have missed this.

> [...] nobody's going to be "taking them down" over DDOSing an obscure nerd blog.

> If they do go down, it'll be the FBI or equivalent, and it will be publicly justified as some combination of "protecting the children" (cf. WAAD) and/or copyright violations.

Yes, this is exactly what I fear. That we might be playing into the hands of the greater evil by escalating a small, personal conflict.

Internet Archive is a registered non-profit organization. It is more trustworthy and accountable, but it cannot realistically stand against government-imposed censorship. We've seen this unfold before with Twitter and Meta, partly with Telegram.

Archive.today may be similar on the surface, but if you take a closer look, it's actually an underground "evil twin" that has all the right tools to publish information the governments and the largest of companies want silenced.

Ideally, there would be no such information in the first place. However, the reality is that this classification has only been broadened to cover more content since the invention of the Internet, regardless of which political parties are in power. The fact that the owner of Archive.today is chased by the FBI even though the website already blocks archival of the kinds of content all of us would unanimously find disturbing speaks for itself.

archive.today/is/ph is adversarial. It archives things that don't want to be archived. That's why Trump's FBI is trying to unmask it.

But in fact:

1. HN uses a free service that someone else pays for.

2. HN abuses its paywall bypass function, which is not its main function, is not advertised (unlike 12ft).

3. HN creates legal problems for the archive by highlighting and framing the archive as a paywall-circumvention tool first.

4. HN promotes doxing.

Who would be more motivated in reducing traffic here?