If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.
original, saw this somewhere else too. ddos stuff. this one blames ru for archive.today mess. sounds about right. didn’ intend it to look like an announcement here. it kind of did. post based on ars story, apparently. who knows
Bypass Paywalls Clean was chased off of the Firefox Add-Ons site, chased off of Gitlab, and chased off of Github via DMCA takedown notices for copyright infringement. It is now hosted on the Russian Gitflic.ru.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn’t suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said “fuck it” in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
We have spent the better part of two decades dealing with the DMCA being used as an outright weapon to silence information that corporations and government find inconvenient mostly because that information is wildly incriminating for them. It works especially strongly because a large amount of the world’s internet has been consolidated to the US and its vast hosting structures like AWS and Cloudflare, putting enormous amounts of the internet under the direct influence of US laws like the DMCA.
Websites like Anna’s Archive, Libgen, and Sci-Hub live because they use hosting in countries that allow them to bypass these kind of restrictions. Russia is one of the most common countries for them to host the data out of due to the lack of enforcement of copyright laws, although it is obviously not the only country that these sites use.
Until we are able to alter international copyright protections to be reasonable instead of their current over-zealously and aggressively abusive nature, we will all suffer having to risk hosting of such sites in countries that are otherwise very unsavory to be associating with.
We live in the kind of world early piracy pioneers such as the original creators of The Pirate Bay were trying to fight from becoming a reality. The American copyright cabal fought tooth and nail to change Sweden’s interpretations of copyright law so they could send these men to prison.
I don’t think the issue is paywalls. I think the issue is the personal actions of the owner. I also really don’t think Russia plays into this. Again, the personal actions of the owner of achive[.]today were the reason it was removed. The site was used by the owner to personally attack someone.
Ironically, when Russia was joining the World Trade Organization in early 2010s, one requirement was for them to do something about pirate sites, namely torrent-sharing ones. So iirc the domain torrents.ru was taken away from what is now called RuTracker, and they blocked many other sites, which stay blocked to this day.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn’t suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said “fuck it” in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
I once made a YouTube video which somehow included a clip from some RT Russian TV bullshit show. (The show was in fact a direct ripoff of Gordon Ramsey’s Hell Kitchen, for which I’m sure they did not get license for.)
Some fucking Russian troll bots then DMCA’d my YouTube video, for using their clip, even though it was clearly “fair use” in US jurisdiction, and YouTube happily sucked their russian dicks and flagged and removed my video.
And my video had probably 15 views, like it wasn’t a big thing.
So they aren’t exactly the Robin Hood of free speech.
Of course they aren’t, they will happily block information that they dislike because it’s embarrassing and incriminating to them. Skepticism should cut both ways, skeptical of those who use Russian connection to delegitimize valuable tools and the people associated with them, and skepticism of why Russia allows those things to persist providing they impact Western countries but not Russia.
Until the Western copyright situation is amended to something reasonable, we have to be skeptical in all aspects of this situation. I’d rather copyright was a reasonable length with reasonable policies so organizations didn’t have to resort to connections with Russia. In the meantime we have to work with the situation we have.
Until further notice: archive.today/archive.is/archive.ph/… is banned from this community for apparently being a Russian DDOS tool
And linked to the /c/ukraine community which posted it.
Also, from the Ars story:
Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia.
In December 2019, The Washington Post reported that Elbakyan was under investigation by the US Justice Department for suspected ties to Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors. Elbakyan has denied this, saying that Sci-Hub “is not in any way directly affiliated with Russian or some other country’s intelligence,” but noting that “of course, there could be some indirect help. The same as with donations, anyone can send them; they are completely anonymous, so I do not know who exactly is donating to Sci-Hub. There could be some help that I’m simply unaware of. I can only add that I write all of Sci-Hub code and design myself and I’m doing the server’s configuration.”
We cannot take for granted that one of the reasons we have access to a large amount of archived information on the internet is often because of unsavory countries who refuse to play by the US governments copyright rules.
We also cannot take for granted how connections with those countries are used to delegitimize people providing valuable services. Bypass Paywalls Clean in particular has had a litany of people assume it’s untrustworthy because of its current hosting situation because they don’t know the history of it and how it’s been kicked off of every other public repository that was stateside.
The archive.today person fucked things up and gave people more ammunition to claim that anything and everything associated with Russian internet is untrustworthy.
I don’t see as relevant a possible connection of archive.today to someone based in Russia.
The only facts that should be relevant are that the manager of it is an egomaniac, andcannot be trusted.
As someone who uses Bypass Paywalls Clean, this is so frustrating.
Bypass Paywalls Clean was chased off of the Firefox Add-Ons site, chased off of Gitlab, and chased off of Github via DMCA takedown notices for copyright infringement. It is now hosted on the Russian Gitflic.ru.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn’t suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said “fuck it” in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
We have spent the better part of two decades dealing with the DMCA being used as an outright weapon to silence information that corporations and government find inconvenient mostly because that information is wildly incriminating for them. It works especially strongly because a large amount of the world’s internet has been consolidated to the US and its vast hosting structures like AWS and Cloudflare, putting enormous amounts of the internet under the direct influence of US laws like the DMCA.
Websites like Anna’s Archive, Libgen, and Sci-Hub live because they use hosting in countries that allow them to bypass these kind of restrictions. Russia is one of the most common countries for them to host the data out of due to the lack of enforcement of copyright laws, although it is obviously not the only country that these sites use.
Until we are able to alter international copyright protections to be reasonable instead of their current over-zealously and aggressively abusive nature, we will all suffer having to risk hosting of such sites in countries that are otherwise very unsavory to be associating with.
We live in the kind of world early piracy pioneers such as the original creators of The Pirate Bay were trying to fight from becoming a reality. The American copyright cabal fought tooth and nail to change Sweden’s interpretations of copyright law so they could send these men to prison.
I don’t think the issue is paywalls. I think the issue is the personal actions of the owner. I also really don’t think Russia plays into this. Again, the personal actions of the owner of achive[.]today were the reason it was removed. The site was used by the owner to personally attack someone.
Ironically, when Russia was joining the World Trade Organization in early 2010s, one requirement was for them to do something about pirate sites, namely torrent-sharing ones. So iirc the domain torrents.ru was taken away from what is now called RuTracker, and they blocked many other sites, which stay blocked to this day.
I’m with you on this, but let’s be careful here.
I once made a YouTube video which somehow included a clip from some RT Russian TV bullshit show. (The show was in fact a direct ripoff of Gordon Ramsey’s Hell Kitchen, for which I’m sure they did not get license for.)
Some fucking Russian troll bots then DMCA’d my YouTube video, for using their clip, even though it was clearly “fair use” in US jurisdiction, and YouTube happily sucked their russian dicks and flagged and removed my video.
And my video had probably 15 views, like it wasn’t a big thing.
So they aren’t exactly the Robin Hood of free speech.
Of course they aren’t, they will happily block information that they dislike because it’s embarrassing and incriminating to them. Skepticism should cut both ways, skeptical of those who use Russian connection to delegitimize valuable tools and the people associated with them, and skepticism of why Russia allows those things to persist providing they impact Western countries but not Russia.
Until the Western copyright situation is amended to something reasonable, we have to be skeptical in all aspects of this situation. I’d rather copyright was a reasonable length with reasonable policies so organizations didn’t have to resort to connections with Russia. In the meantime we have to work with the situation we have.
Not sure how this says anything about Russian copyright laws or Russian government.
hey thanks, i had never heard of that bypass paywalls firefox addon
There’s also a version for Chrome if you swing that way.
I do not because I don’t like ads on Youtube, but thx.
Is your comment in the thread about Wikipedia banning archive.today?
edit: I realised by reading other comments that many used archive.today to bypass paywalls, aside from the archival purpose Wikipedia relied on.
Original post title was:
And linked to the /c/ukraine community which posted it.
Also, from the Ars story:
The reason it matters:
It makes people suspect of anything hosted in Russia, which is frustrating because there’s a lot of valuable shit hosted there by people who are not necessarily from there, such as Alexandra Elbakyan founder of Sci-Hub, who has had many accusations tossed her way due to her websites association with Russia:
We cannot take for granted that one of the reasons we have access to a large amount of archived information on the internet is often because of unsavory countries who refuse to play by the US governments copyright rules.
We also cannot take for granted how connections with those countries are used to delegitimize people providing valuable services. Bypass Paywalls Clean in particular has had a litany of people assume it’s untrustworthy because of its current hosting situation because they don’t know the history of it and how it’s been kicked off of every other public repository that was stateside.
The archive.today person fucked things up and gave people more ammunition to claim that anything and everything associated with Russian internet is untrustworthy.
I don’t see as relevant a possible connection of archive.today to someone based in Russia.
The only facts that should be relevant are that the manager of it is an egomaniac, andcannot be trusted.