We know that the impact from that time is far from worked through, but to the extent it shows up here, commenters should make the effort not to fall back into war mode.
You're welcome on HN, and so are the users you disagree with—but you all (i.e. we all) need to stay within the site guidelines when discussing tough stuff. These include: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." -
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. This comment is not just for the user I'm replying to but everyone else who's expressing strong feelings below. It's amazing, and totally human, how alive these feelings are after 80+ years, but at the same time, 80+ years of distance should give us the ability to relate to each other a little bit better than our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were able to.
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.
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 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 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.
> 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.
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 would assume so. I can see from my browser history that i succesfully submitted captures to archive.today on 7th of January, but failed to do so starting from 12th of January. IIRC they contacted gyrovague around the 10th so seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Applies to VPNs as well. Tried first with a VPN located in Finland and it gets endless captcha loop, then with a Swedish VPN which let me through to the front page after solving one captcha.
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.
There are multiple reports of these archive.something sites redirecting users to Russian sites. Personally, I stopped using them after I saw one connection attempt to yandex dot ru
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.
> 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.
This seems like a smart thing to do if you had exposed your real name somewhere and wanted to cover it up.
- 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?
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.
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 doxxed now. A bit of karma.
Yep, I have heard of many such cases and I know someone affected personally. For someone who refuses to take down the personal information of others this is extremely hypocritical.
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.
My tinfoil guess is archive.today is compromised by a state actor. Simply shutting it down would cause too much drama. Instead turn it into villain, and then take it down.
50 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 79.2 ms ] threadWe know that the impact from that time is far from worked through, but to the extent it shows up here, commenters should make the effort not to fall back into war mode.
You're welcome on HN, and so are the users you disagree with—but you all (i.e. we all) need to stay within the site guidelines when discussing tough stuff. These include: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. This comment is not just for the user I'm replying to but everyone else who's expressing strong feelings below. It's amazing, and totally human, how alive these feelings are after 80+ years, but at the same time, 80+ years of distance should give us the ability to relate to each other a little bit better than our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were able to.
I cannot make head or tail of this but it's more fascinating than the usual internecine bloodbath.
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.
Given the content, I find this suspicious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shame, as I was using it alot for archiving different pages.
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.
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.
This seems like a smart thing to do if you had exposed your real name somewhere and wanted to cover it up.
- 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?
Unfortunately Archive.today complies with these attack requests in some situations, but is still usually better than others.
Use Onion version :D
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.
Thank you for keeping this up, whoever you are.
robots.txt. It is that simple.