There are several other posts made recently on the archive.is blog as well, some of which appear to be quite nonsensical or are otherwise irrelevant to the discourse at hand. They all appear to be LLM-generated. It's all very confusing.
Interestingly, theres an account in that thread claiming to be from Gyrovague, but its not the same one thats in this thread, which has been confirmed to be legit as it is mentioned by name in this latest Gyrovague article.
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.
You can just email hn@ycombinator.com to get help. They can reset your passsword if there's someway for them to verify that you were the owner of the account.
This likely means nothing, but the .is webmaster seems to have some sort of existing issue with Finland (where gyrovague is from), see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011955. I thought I would point it out.
Also, as someone interested in OPSEC and OSINT as a hobby, I find the measures taken by the .is webmaster, especially the dedication to setting up countless fake accounts for each persona, to be very intriguing. I spent about an hour looking into the Nora Puchreiner persona and all the accounts registered to it that I could find. It appears that "Tomas Poder" is another alter-ego used by the .is administrator. Nora also seems to have a sister: "Sara Puchreiner". Again, all very interesting and I can't seem to make a clear picture of the situation.
I think no matter how you slice it though, it's unethical and reprehensible to coordinate (even a shoddy) DDoS leveraging your visitors as middlemen. This is effectively coordinating a botnet, and we shouldn't condone this behavior as a community.
It's definitely interesting to see this roll around since the only individuals that see the CAPCHA page mentioned, are users of Cloudflare's DNS services (knowingly or not).
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...
I use my ISP's default DNS servers and have consistently gotten the CAPTCHA page for weeks now. The CAPTCHA seems to be broken too, rendering archive.today entirely inaccessible.
- Although the blog post only shows an extremely one-sided version of the story by skipping straight to the threats, there are reasons to think that diplomacy has also failed terribly
- The website owner has all eyes of the "thought police" on them, and given the current political situation in Russia, it's more than likely they reside somewhere where it has real power; realistically speaking, who wouldn't be losing it?
- The blog post is preserving information that could aid further investigations even if purged from the original sources, and reveals non-OSINT information in the follow ups
- At the same time, it's, to say the least, hypocritical of the archive.today owner to attempt forcefully taking the original post down, when archive.today itself is an OSINT tool
I don't think there's a way to fairly untangle this mess anymore.
Hence, I'd focus on the possible outcomes: do we want archive.today taken down over this? Who would lose and who would benefit the most from this takedown?
Gyrovague here. As linked in the blog entry, you can view both sides of the email correspondence here: https://pastes.io/correspond
As for outcomes, I'm very much a bit player/spectator in this drama, 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.
> As linked in the blog entry, you can view both sides of the email correspondence here: https://pastes.io/correspond
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.
I don't think that's on the table. I would say use this as your incentive to support archive.org, who has proven much more accountable. Archive.Today is weaponizing their traffic, and reducing traffic is the best way to deal with it. Vote with your feet.
Archive.today does not seem to have worked for people connecting from Finland since mid-January, it just gives an endless captcha loop. Is this related to whatever this drama is?
I’d give it a high probability, especially when the CAPTCHA loop is the bit of the site that causes the DDoS and the fact that the admin seems to consider all Finns nazis.
I didnt flag the article, but anecdotally, I was initially unable to load the article at all. It mentions how it ended up in an adblock list. The article makes it sound like this is a good thing, as it stops the DDOS, but it isn't preventing people from loading the page directly. That may be true for people using an adblocking extension, but my adblocking DNS seems to be blocking it based on that same list. I had to manually tweak my dns-based adblocker to allow the domain in order to read the article.
I looked at the flags and they seem to be legit flags from legit users. My guess is that they thought this was below-the-radar drama that wasn't on topic for HN. (I could make a "people who flagged X also flagged" list a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771900 to support the point, but it's a time-consuming pain so I'd rather not!)
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.
I agree - it's clear that archive.is / archive.ph / archive.today / who-knows-what-else has been a lubricant in many HN threads, letting people read things they otherwise couldn't, and that increases the interest of the topic.
I suppose I should add that we prefer archive.org links when they're available, but often they aren't.
Edit: I suppose I should also re-add that we have no knowledge of or opinion about what's going on in the dispute at hand.
Archive.org is run by a registered nonprofit instead of what’s likely a sole maintainer, who while I personally appreciate, does seem to go a little unhinged sometimes (like the dispute with Cloudflare DNS).
Maybe it would be better to check /g/ and /pol/ to find out where the flagging army comes from, because that might be more reliable than guessing what is a proxy and what is not? They initiated the doxxing campaign against the author of the article after all.
This dastardly 4chan users, twirling their butterfly knives while conspiring, in a public forum but without you providing any evidence of it, to flag HN posts. Right.
There isn't one. As far as I know, no one really knows for sure how they bypass all these paywalls. (Most credible theory I heard: They actually just pay for the subscriptions.)
Most paywalls just allow search engines to read their content just fine. Because they do want discoverability, they want their cake and eat it.
There's a few publications that don't even do that though and archive.is is very good at bypassing them so I do imagine they use logins for those, but for the masses of sites it's not currently necessary.
Has people's ability to read messages and formula sensible replies been going down of late? I see this kind of meaningless replies more and more often these days.
Whatever is going on here, is so magnificently complicated: sockpuppeting, doxxing, ddosing, psyops, pirating, FBI, cyberpunk capitalists, Russian hackers and Finnish activists. Somehow it does feel like in the middle of information war.
When I read the original article it doesn't really feel like the Finnish guy is even an activist. He seems to be just a curious nerd who wrote one article about this topic (who's behind this big site that everyone uses) and about a whole load of completely unrelated and non-activist topics like why did Japan stop building subway lines. Then his blog gained some traction because of the reporting around the FBI threats.
The article is also really appreciative of archive.today. It doesn't feel like a hit piece at all.
I reported a few times to the owner of archive.is/archive.today that he was hosting dox of a friend and he never cared. So, too fucking bad that he's the one getting doxed now. A bit of karma.
It's clear the doxxing attempts are getting closer now to his/her real identity. On the other hand, they do something that's really useful to so many, and it will be sad if it's gone.
Their admin is a member of HN but I've never seen them reply to these threads. [edit] Perhaps they could share their perspective on what has been done thus far to mitigate the problem.
I would imagine their technical perspective of what is happening and what attempts were made to mitigate it thus far. That is where the HN audience could chime in. If they have the resources I suspect they do then just about every option is on the table though assisting them may get people on some lists for assisting the Russian Federation.
It's also not clear to me who is attacking who here.
"Gyrovague", the author of the post we're commenting under has for reasons unknown engaged in targeted harassment of the owner of "archive.today".
Now the owner of archive.today is attempting a rather lazy DoS attack against gyrovague.com. A rather mild response to gyrovague attempting to bring the archive.today owner physical harm by spreading potentially identifying information about them.
There's really very little to be said about this whole thing besides that Gyrovague should try to be a less awful person in the future.
Like I said, I can't tell who is attacking who. Archive.is has more money, resources and ASN's than Akamai so surely they can mitigate anything anyone can throw at them. A little forum trying to respond in kind can't really be much of a threat. Archive could just tell their controlling nodes to ignore any requests to mirror the forum which means there is a lot more to this than any of us are seeing. That is why I would like to see the admin of Archive respond for both sides of the story.
> Archive.is has more money, resources and ASN's than Akamai so surely they can mitigate anything anyone can throw at them.
This statement makes me think you're misunderstanding the person above you.
They're saying this blog author, gyrovague, is doxing¹ Archive.is. I am wondering if you are misreading that as DoSing. To "dox" is to reveal the identity of, typically for purposes of harassment. To "DoS" is to spam with requests. Archive.is is not being spammed with requests, nor do I see anyone here suggesting they are except here: "resources and ASN's … mitigate anything anyone can throw at them" … that seems to indicate you're (mis)reading it as "DoS"?
(I.e., gyrovague is doxing the Archive.today owner¹. Archive.today is, in return, DoSing gyrovague.)
(¹I'm not trying to comment on whether that term is being appropriately applied here, or not.)
I don't think there's any dispute on what the story is. The blog post here contains the facts, and a rather clumsy attempt by Gyrovague to justify his bid to dox the operator of archive.today.
> Archive.is has more money, resources and ASN's than Akamai
I assume this is a joke, but Archive.is is a shoestring operation funded through donations.
Hey guys - you both obviously know a ton more about this than I do, but this is the point at which the thread went off the rails. I get that you disagree with each other and that's fine, but please stay within the site guidelines while doing so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I assume this is a joke, but Archive.is is a shoestring operation funded through donations.
I am certain they would like people to think that. They have more IPv4 addresses under more ASN's than Akamai control which anyone who has tried to block them would know. Their controlling ASN's are in the Russian Federation which they make no attempt to hide at least for now and why I must assume they are fine with people discussing it. The GDP of the Russian Federation is somewhere north of 2 trillion dollars. Their nodes both in Russia and spread all around the world would not be permitted by Russia to mirror random sites without authorization to do so. One in or from Russia would not defy Russian leadership for very long.
Yes, it's apparently hosted behind some fastflux setup. That's neither new nor special, nor is it particularly expensive. Such setups are offered on various forums starting from a few hundred dollars a month.
> Their nodes both in Russia and spread all around the world would not be permitted by Russia to mirror random sites without authorization to do so.
This is simply not true. You can absolutely run a website like this in Russia without any authorization. Who would you even ask? The whole idea is bizarre.
> Well, I wish I had one, but at this stage I really don’t. The most charitable interpretation would be that the investigative heat is starting to get to the webmaster and they’re lashing out in misguided self-defense.
I don't think they're lashing out in self-defense. This is a harmless way for them to get attention, which is what they're desparate for because the FBI is after them at the behest of Bezos and other billionaires who control the paywalled media and don't like archive.today's role in making them accessible. The only thing that could possibly save them (though it almost certainly won't), is gathering as many eyeballs as possible from the people who like the service. HN having a super high concentration of those. Almost every paywalled post here has an archive.today link in the comments.
That's also why they posted about it on HN, explicitly under that name. To get HN eyeballs.
It's intentionally harmless because, as you confirmed, it's not costing you any money or resources.
previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740
See also https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/806832066465497088/ladies...
also Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598 August 2023
There are several other posts made recently on the archive.is blog as well, some of which appear to be quite nonsensical or are otherwise irrelevant to the discourse at hand. They all appear to be LLM-generated. It's all very confusing.
Interestingly, theres an account in that thread claiming to be from Gyrovague, but its not the same one thats in this thread, which has been confirmed to be legit as it is mentioned by name in this latest Gyrovague article.
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.
OP gyrovague-com here. Yes, I can confirm that I was also "gyrovague" on HN, but embarrassingly I've lost/typoed the password.
You can just email hn@ycombinator.com to get help. They can reset your passsword if there's someway for them to verify that you were the owner of the account.
Password managers are great for that.
there is also `japatokal`:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It is very possible that `gyrovague` is not `japatokal` but an impersonator.
Macroexpanded: Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 - Jan 2026 (69 comments)
I cannot make head or tail of this but it's more fascinating than the usual internecine bloodbath.
also previously from the owner of archive.is/today: https://archive-is.tumblr.com/tagged/patokallio
This likely means nothing, but the .is webmaster seems to have some sort of existing issue with Finland (where gyrovague is from), see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011955. I thought I would point it out.
Also, as someone interested in OPSEC and OSINT as a hobby, I find the measures taken by the .is webmaster, especially the dedication to setting up countless fake accounts for each persona, to be very intriguing. I spent about an hour looking into the Nora Puchreiner persona and all the accounts registered to it that I could find. It appears that "Tomas Poder" is another alter-ego used by the .is administrator. Nora also seems to have a sister: "Sara Puchreiner". Again, all very interesting and I can't seem to make a clear picture of the situation.
It is academically very interesting to think about this in light of their long-standing dispute with Cloudflare (https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182...) over EDNS, which could have privacy implications attached.
I think no matter how you slice it though, it's unethical and reprehensible to coordinate (even a shoddy) DDoS leveraging your visitors as middlemen. This is effectively coordinating a botnet, and we shouldn't condone this behavior as a community.
It's definitely interesting to see this roll around since the only individuals that see the CAPCHA page mentioned, are users of Cloudflare's DNS services (knowingly or not).
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...
> the only individuals that see the CAPCHA page mentioned, are users of Cloudflare's DNS services
I don't think this is true. I run my own recursive DNS resolver, and get a CAPTCHA when visiting archive.today.
I use my ISP's default DNS servers and have consistently gotten the CAPTCHA page for weeks now. The CAPTCHA seems to be broken too, rendering archive.today entirely inaccessible.
Someone has suggested that CAPTCHA is broken for everyone in Finland.
I see the captcha all the time for the Tor onion website as well.
It's a puzzling situation:
- The DDoS was certainly unethical and unneeded
- Although the blog post only shows an extremely one-sided version of the story by skipping straight to the threats, there are reasons to think that diplomacy has also failed terribly
- The website owner has all eyes of the "thought police" on them, and given the current political situation in Russia, it's more than likely they reside somewhere where it has real power; realistically speaking, who wouldn't be losing it?
- The blog post is preserving information that could aid further investigations even if purged from the original sources, and reveals non-OSINT information in the follow ups
- At the same time, it's, to say the least, hypocritical of the archive.today owner to attempt forcefully taking the original post down, when archive.today itself is an OSINT tool
I don't think there's a way to fairly untangle this mess anymore.
Hence, I'd focus on the possible outcomes: do we want archive.today taken down over this? Who would lose and who would benefit the most from this takedown?
Gyrovague here. As linked in the blog entry, you can view both sides of the email correspondence here: https://pastes.io/correspond
As for outcomes, I'm very much a bit player/spectator in this drama, 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.
> As linked in the blog entry, you can view both sides of the email correspondence here: https://pastes.io/correspond
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.
> Do we want archive.today taken down over this?
I don't think that's on the table. I would say use this as your incentive to support archive.org, who has proven much more accountable. Archive.Today is weaponizing their traffic, and reducing traffic is the best way to deal with it. Vote with your feet.
Regardless, archive.today does fine with some sites that blocks archive.org archiver somehow.
Thank you for keeping this up, whoever you are.
Archive sites are very important for freedom due to many different entities out there attacking sites and getting them taken down.
Unfortunately Archive.today complies with these attack requests in some situations, but is still usually better than others.
Why were you trying to dox the archive owner?
This is misrepresentative of the situation, and an unloaded version of the question being asked here is answered within the article itself.
Archive.today does not seem to have worked for people connecting from Finland since mid-January, it just gives an endless captcha loop. Is this related to whatever this drama is?
It seems that the website has been blocked in Finland since at least August of 2023, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011955.
I’d give it a high probability, especially when the CAPTCHA loop is the bit of the site that causes the DDoS and the fact that the admin seems to consider all Finns nazis.
Why is this flagged?
Given the content, I find this suspicious.
I didnt flag the article, but anecdotally, I was initially unable to load the article at all. It mentions how it ended up in an adblock list. The article makes it sound like this is a good thing, as it stops the DDOS, but it isn't preventing people from loading the page directly. That may be true for people using an adblocking extension, but my adblocking DNS seems to be blocking it based on that same list. I had to manually tweak my dns-based adblocker to allow the domain in order to read the article.
I looked at the flags and they seem to be legit flags from legit users. My guess is that they thought this was below-the-radar drama that wasn't on topic for HN. (I could make a "people who flagged X also flagged" list a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771900 to support the point, but it's a time-consuming pain so I'd rather not!)
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.
This is definitely interesting and HN-worthy. If nothing else, archive.today links are posted on tons of HN submissions, so it's topical.
I agree - it's clear that archive.is / archive.ph / archive.today / who-knows-what-else has been a lubricant in many HN threads, letting people read things they otherwise couldn't, and that increases the interest of the topic.
I suppose I should add that we prefer archive.org links when they're available, but often they aren't.
Edit: I suppose I should also re-add that we have no knowledge of or opinion about what's going on in the dispute at hand.
> we prefer archive.org links when they're available
Interesting. May we know why?
Archive.org is run by a registered nonprofit instead of what’s likely a sole maintainer, who while I personally appreciate, does seem to go a little unhinged sometimes (like the dispute with Cloudflare DNS).
Perhaps because the admins of archive.org don't go around DDoSing random blogs I'd reckon.
Instead they execute source page JS and allow it to doctor the archive copy.
[flagged]
You can't attack another user like this here. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.
I will do whatever I want.
How is it an attack if it's actually true?
Maybe it would be better to check /g/ and /pol/ to find out where the flagging army comes from, because that might be more reliable than guessing what is a proxy and what is not? They initiated the doxxing campaign against the author of the article after all.
This dastardly 4chan users, twirling their butterfly knives while conspiring, in a public forum but without you providing any evidence of it, to flag HN posts. Right.
… seems like we the HN community should find a new site to mirror with.
There isn't one. As far as I know, no one really knows for sure how they bypass all these paywalls. (Most credible theory I heard: They actually just pay for the subscriptions.)
Most paywalls just allow search engines to read their content just fine. Because they do want discoverability, they want their cake and eat it.
There's a few publications that don't even do that though and archive.is is very good at bypassing them so I do imagine they use logins for those, but for the masses of sites it's not currently necessary.
What's your problem with that theory?
Has people's ability to read messages and formula sensible replies been going down of late? I see this kind of meaningless replies more and more often these days.
I think there are multiple hurdles that make a new competitor very unlikely.
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.
Whatever is going on here, is so magnificently complicated: sockpuppeting, doxxing, ddosing, psyops, pirating, FBI, cyberpunk capitalists, Russian hackers and Finnish activists. Somehow it does feel like in the middle of information war.
When I read the original article it doesn't really feel like the Finnish guy is even an activist. He seems to be just a curious nerd who wrote one article about this topic (who's behind this big site that everyone uses) and about a whole load of completely unrelated and non-activist topics like why did Japan stop building subway lines. Then his blog gained some traction because of the reporting around the FBI threats.
The article is also really appreciative of archive.today. It doesn't feel like a hit piece at all.
Interestingly, this website exists in badmojr-1Hosts-master-Pro-adblock list
I reported a few times to the owner of archive.is/archive.today that he was hosting dox of a friend and he never cared. So, too fucking bad that he's the one getting doxed now. A bit of karma.
I feel bad for the archive.is guy/girl.
It's clear the doxxing attempts are getting closer now to his/her real identity. On the other hand, they do something that's really useful to so many, and it will be sad if it's gone.
Why does this say it's been posted 8 hours ago but on hn.algolia.com is archived 2 days ago, also I'm sure I already saw it yesterday.
This is a regular HN feature where admins resurrect old posts that did not get the attention they maybe deserved.
... and the resurrection falsly associates the timestamp of the admin's action with the originator's posting. Needs attention.
I'm pretty sure that's intentional because the timestamp used to calculate where the article shows up on the front page.
My greater faith in the integrity of the admins tells me they do not intend this false association. Its a misrep that can seriously mislead.
gyrovague-com: posted this thread, claims to own the blog
gyrovague: claimed to own the blog in the last thread
rabinovich: posted last thread linking to gyrovague.com, identifying the owner as... well... "Masha Rabinovich"
I believe these accounts are all connected.
OP here. As the blog publicly states, this account is Gyrovague, and so is HN "gyrovague".
I have nothing to do with "rabinovich" but I also have no way of proving a negative.
You could specify that you wrote it on the last line of the post, so it clears up any basic speculation.
<https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...>
I do believe the opposite, although I feel that rabinovich is somehow tied to other personas.
This thing is blurry, shady and I hope it will draw some more OSINT eyes on it. I am now curious.
This is the blog of a guy who for whatever reason is trying to dox the owner of archive.today
It's a shame the DDoS isn't working.
OTOH, this all looks so silly it might as well be the archive.today operator trying to push fake dox on themselves.
Their admin is a member of HN but I've never seen them reply to these threads. [edit] Perhaps they could share their perspective on what has been done thus far to mitigate the problem.
What would they possibly say? I don't think one should explicitly have to ask to not be doxed for performing a public service.
What gyrovague is doing here is obviously despicable.
I would imagine their technical perspective of what is happening and what attempts were made to mitigate it thus far. That is where the HN audience could chime in. If they have the resources I suspect they do then just about every option is on the table though assisting them may get people on some lists for assisting the Russian Federation.
It's also not clear to me who is attacking who here.
"Gyrovague", the author of the post we're commenting under has for reasons unknown engaged in targeted harassment of the owner of "archive.today".
Now the owner of archive.today is attempting a rather lazy DoS attack against gyrovague.com. A rather mild response to gyrovague attempting to bring the archive.today owner physical harm by spreading potentially identifying information about them.
There's really very little to be said about this whole thing besides that Gyrovague should try to be a less awful person in the future.
Like I said, I can't tell who is attacking who. Archive.is has more money, resources and ASN's than Akamai so surely they can mitigate anything anyone can throw at them. A little forum trying to respond in kind can't really be much of a threat. Archive could just tell their controlling nodes to ignore any requests to mirror the forum which means there is a lot more to this than any of us are seeing. That is why I would like to see the admin of Archive respond for both sides of the story.
> Archive.is has more money, resources and ASN's than Akamai so surely they can mitigate anything anyone can throw at them.
This statement makes me think you're misunderstanding the person above you.
They're saying this blog author, gyrovague, is doxing¹ Archive.is. I am wondering if you are misreading that as DoSing. To "dox" is to reveal the identity of, typically for purposes of harassment. To "DoS" is to spam with requests. Archive.is is not being spammed with requests, nor do I see anyone here suggesting they are except here: "resources and ASN's … mitigate anything anyone can throw at them" … that seems to indicate you're (mis)reading it as "DoS"?
(I.e., gyrovague is doxing the Archive.today owner¹. Archive.today is, in return, DoSing gyrovague.)
(¹I'm not trying to comment on whether that term is being appropriately applied here, or not.)
I don't think there's any dispute on what the story is. The blog post here contains the facts, and a rather clumsy attempt by Gyrovague to justify his bid to dox the operator of archive.today.
> Archive.is has more money, resources and ASN's than Akamai
I assume this is a joke, but Archive.is is a shoestring operation funded through donations.
Hey guys - you both obviously know a ton more about this than I do, but this is the point at which the thread went off the rails. I get that you disagree with each other and that's fine, but please stay within the site guidelines while doing so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I assume this is a joke, but Archive.is is a shoestring operation funded through donations.
I am certain they would like people to think that. They have more IPv4 addresses under more ASN's than Akamai control which anyone who has tried to block them would know. Their controlling ASN's are in the Russian Federation which they make no attempt to hide at least for now and why I must assume they are fine with people discussing it. The GDP of the Russian Federation is somewhere north of 2 trillion dollars. Their nodes both in Russia and spread all around the world would not be permitted by Russia to mirror random sites without authorization to do so. One in or from Russia would not defy Russian leadership for very long.
Yes, it's apparently hosted behind some fastflux setup. That's neither new nor special, nor is it particularly expensive. Such setups are offered on various forums starting from a few hundred dollars a month.
> Their nodes both in Russia and spread all around the world would not be permitted by Russia to mirror random sites without authorization to do so.
This is simply not true. You can absolutely run a website like this in Russia without any authorization. Who would you even ask? The whole idea is bizarre.
You can take what I said out of context. Apparently OSINT are on it, not my problem.
> Their admin is a member of HN
Citation needed.
> Well, I wish I had one, but at this stage I really don’t. The most charitable interpretation would be that the investigative heat is starting to get to the webmaster and they’re lashing out in misguided self-defense.
I don't think they're lashing out in self-defense. This is a harmless way for them to get attention, which is what they're desparate for because the FBI is after them at the behest of Bezos and other billionaires who control the paywalled media and don't like archive.today's role in making them accessible. The only thing that could possibly save them (though it almost certainly won't), is gathering as many eyeballs as possible from the people who like the service. HN having a super high concentration of those. Almost every paywalled post here has an archive.today link in the comments.
That's also why they posted about it on HN, explicitly under that name. To get HN eyeballs.
It's intentionally harmless because, as you confirmed, it's not costing you any money or resources.