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Ask HN: Why is archive.is logged into GitHub as user “volth”

9 points by preciousoo ↗ HN
I noticed this when trying to save a page on github. At first I thought my cookies were forwarded in the archive request, then I noticed that all requests [1] were "logged in" as this user.

The profile pic is very uncanny too lol. Curious as to if anyone knows why, but I'll do my own digging too. User "volth" does not exist on github at the time of writing.

edit: I'm not the only one that's noticed [2] edit2: They seemed to be a really prolific github user [3]

[1] https://archive.is/github.com [2] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/58164 [3] https://archive.ph/R5FyM

5 comments

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KomoD
My guess is that it's probably in some kind of "banned" state.

I've encountered it before, here's an example of an account that exists but is also in some kind of banned state: https://github.com/ainslee21

This account was made using TOR, which caused it to get into that state, his was probably banned for violating TOS regarding that archival stuff.

See:

https://archive.ph/1nZ02 https://social.primeos.dev/notice/A2Z8duADM786JykvNQ

preciousoo
hmm i hadn't thought of a ban scenario. A little google led me here https://stackoverflow.com/a/66105692/3875151, it seems like the user will live on as long as github continues to shadow ban them.

Now I wonder what their involvement with the archive.is team is, the nixos folk seem really pissed off by his removal.

Edit I guess the law was involved somehow. Still doesn't answer why they're logged into archive.is, and how archive.is is able to save their account state, even though github 'disappeared' them: https://web.archive.org/web/20210116151808/https://twitter.c...

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-was-this-treewide-pr-perfo...

TechBro8615
(I once saw a Google result for Stackoverflow that included a username in it. I never saw it again or investigated it further, though.)

I don't know what's going on with archive.is, but that service has always struck me as sketchy. Unfortunately since I use Cloudflare WARP as a VPN, I'm not actually able to access archive.is (although technically I believe this is not because of the VPN, but rather due to 1.1.1.1 DNS and its lack of support for EDNS [0]). So again, I haven't investigated it much.

But I've always wondered who has the time and resources to maintain the archive.{is,ph,etc.} websites, which must cost a lot of money for no directly obvious financial gain. But there is some serious intelligence value to knowing who views those sites and where the links to them get posted. And that's not to mention how weird it is that they insist on EDNS (which sends client IP with DNS queries) in the first place.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495204