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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
And now Firefox completely bans it from even being sideloaded.
For anyone curious, I looked into the DDOSing, and what was done is a simple string of JavaScript was added to archive[.]today that made a background request to the blog with a randomly generated search parameter. Every time someone looked at an archive, they unknowingly sent a request to the blog under attack.
Good reminder to donate to web.archive.org
While archive.org is good and more trustworthy than archive.is, it isn’t as useful for bypassing paywalls.
But Wikipedia doesn’t need to bypass paywalls, and you can bypass them yourself with a bit of work.
There’s websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can’t bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.
That doesn’t mean an alternative shouldn’t be found, but we also shouldn’t pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.
That’s good for you, and it is okay for you to use archive.today personally, as long as you block their DDoSing.
But Wikipedia does not need to bypass paywalls, and they don’t require the source to be freely (or easily) viewable to verify the info.
I do hope this move results in more support for the IA/Wayback Machine and helps them to update some of their crawler tech — thanks to the rise of AI, some sites are effectively (thru captchas etc.) or actively (through straight-up greed [coughRedditcough]) blocked from being archived almost entirely, which is frustrating for legit archivists/contributors.
Good reminder to pay for journalism.
The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Tageszeitung and many others need subscribers to stay independent of the oligarchs.
guardian is surviving by slowly becoming a tabloid. not sure if i would have paid for it anyway, and im not sure if this was preventable by paying for it in the first place.
yeah and they’re also transphobic af as a policy. don’t give them a damn cent
https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/guardian-staff-trans-rights-letter
can also find more stuff by just looking up “the guardian transphobia”
Paying for journalism is ideal, but unfortunately makes it difficult to cite/link to a source the way Wikipedia needs as a way to ensure the information remains open and accessible.
Admittedly, I’m not familiar with these outlets enough to know if those paywalls are significant, but the problem with direct article links is that those links can change. Archival services (I suppose not archive[.]is) are important for ensuring those articles remain accessible in the format they were presented in.
I’ve come across a number of older Wikipedia articles about more minor or obscure events where links lead to local new outlet websites that no longer exist or were consumed by larger media outlets and as a result no longer provide an appropriate citation.
Paying for journalism simply promotes that those who don’t pay it don’t get it ie.: more paywalls, not less.
Also remember the journalists that need support the most are local papers and news stations. The big ones have plenty of donors, and while it’s worth the support, they are less likely to completely collapse than the news that is run in your city.
Go look for that independent source. They will report more news that actually affects you as well.
https://lemmy.world/c/ukraine was where i saw this. i didn’t write it. thought lemmy would have linked to the original, was wrong. FYI
That’s very 1984 of them
How does the paywall circumvention of archive.today works?
I guess that they genuinely owned subscriptions for popular paywalled sites.
Okay so, what is the currently going-for alternative that bypasses paywalls?
copy the headline and find the same thing free somewhere else. usually it’s a news site full of unreadable slop. pay walls used to be almost worth bypassing. no more. just another money grab, pretending to protect valuable information. not
Fair point. Very few if any news sites provide unique articles.
i’ve had consistently good luck with the archive.org wayback machine
Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that he only did this in response to a malicious dox attempt.
He only modified archived pages in response to a dox attempt?
And the thing is, the discovery of the modified pages revealed that it wasn’t even the first time he’d modified pages. And he used a real person’s identity to try and shift blame.
Irrespective of the doxxing allegations, if he’s done all this multiple times already, it means the page archives can’t be trusted AND there’s no guarantee that anything archived with the service will be available tomorrow.
Seems like we need to switch to URLs that contain the SHA256 of the page they’re linking to, so we can tell if anything has changed since the link was created.
Actually a pretty good idea.
Only works for archived pages though, because for any regular page, a large portion of the page will be dynamically generated; hashing the HTML will only say the framework hasn’t changed.
Seems like we need to switch to URLs that contain the SHA256 of the page they’re linking to, so we can tell if anything has changed since the link was created.
IPFS says hi
Yes; the problem IPFS has is the same problem IPv6 has.
The hash-in-a-URL solution can function cleanly in the background on top of what people already use.
IPFS has gateways though, so you can link to the latest version of a page which can be updated by the owner, or alternatively link to a specific revision of the page that is immutable and can’t be forged.
Unfortunately, they shot themselves in the foot by responding the way they did. They basically did the job of anyone who wants them taken down and not trusted. It was probably the worst way they could have reacted. Such a tragedy to lose such a valuable website.
As they should since it doesn’t matter.
Yeah, someone being shitty to you doesn’t mean go you full-fledged shitty in return, it kind of proves your lack of trustworthiness to begin with. It’s like Nazis being like “leftists were mean to me by explaining how my politics made me a Nazi, so I’m gonna show them by Nazi-ing even harder! They forced me to be like this!” It kind of betrays the argument that the reason you got that way was because leftists were mean to you.
Who cares why they did it?
It proves they can and do alter the “archived” website, so it’s usefulness as a source is completely gone.
Archiving a site inherently requires altering it, to change embed URLs, scripts, etc. The fact they had that capability was never in question.
Yeah, ESH. His response of editing an archive showed the site to be unreliable as an archive. DDOSing from the site as a counter to the dox attempt caused the site serious reputational harm as well.
It sucks because his site was actually more reliable than The Internet Archive.
