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Agreed, and if archive.is goes down, archive.org becomes the de facto monopoly in web archival.

That's a problem because archive.org honors removal requests from site owners. Buy an old domain and you can theoretically wipe its archived history clean.

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Alternatively, it leaves a vacuum for an archive site that doesn't take things down like archive.org to exist and a new one takes its place as the defacto one.
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The creator can maintain anonymity. The creator does not deserve to continue being celebrated when they embarked on a DDOS campaign using the traffic of archive.is against a journalist trying to uncover their identity. By these actions, they have shown to be capricious, vindictive, and willing to ensnare their users in their DDOS of others. Whoever they are, they’re terrible.
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Their life is in danger and one particular journalist is making it so
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I had no idea that was the actual situation (journalist trying to hunt them down). Sorta changes the moral calculus, I'll allow it
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If there's ever something a journalist would never ever do, it's destroy someone's life for a headline. Never ever. Totally impossible.
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This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.

Soon the news and the historical facts will be unnecessary. You can simply receive your wisdom from the AIs, which, as nondeterministic systems, are free to change the facts at will.

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>This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.

You are deliberately misrepresenting the situation. The journalists who block archivist traffic are not in any way connected to the blogger who was attempting to investigate the creator of archive.is. You have portrayed them as related in an attempt to garner sympathy for the creator of archive.is.

Here is an account of the facts: https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...

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Indeed. I am highly supportive of archive.is, but let's remember that he hijacked his own users to become a bot net. That should make all us hackers furious. Is a complete violation of trust. Our residential IPs were used to attack someone, meaning he put us all at risk for his own personal goals. It's disgusting behavior and he should be called out for it. But we should also realize he's offering an important and free service to us all. I support him, but this is not something we should just ignore. Trust is very important.
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Review the definition of botnet. That is not what was done.
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> Being left beaten and bleeding in an alley to get a small taste of what life has to offer would do him a lot of good

This is unhinged.

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Start shit, get hit.
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I didn't think I was going to side with the DDoS-er, but considering what happened with Aaron Schwartz, that blogger was trying to get them killed or put in a box forever.
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Thanks for this. I didn’t know about the details, and there are probably mor... but this gyrovague person is clearly being a privileged trouble. Their “boringly straightforward curiosity” is an admittance of their shallow thinking. When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.

You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.

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> When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.

> You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.

To be clear, are you talking about the harm of commanding a botnet (which includes you and me) to attack an investigative journalist for investigatively journaling?

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They're terrible for not wanting to be dox'd?
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They’re terrible for turning all of us into parts of a botnet DDOS someone doing their job. I don’t understand how DDOS is the correct tool for anyone to protect their anonymity.
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Well, if they deserve anonymity, they also deserve to be able to protect it, and they have really few tools against a doxxing, the DDOS was one of them, corrupting the archived article was another, albeit dangerous for their own reputation as an archiver.

The crux of the problem was the doxxing, not the defense against it.

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You don’t think leveraging your site to DDOS someone is a problem?

Do people not also deserve to be protected from being DDOSed? Do people also not deserve to not have their internet traffic be used to DDOS someone?

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> You don’t think leveraging your site to DDOS someone is a problem?

It is, but it's one of the only tools they have to prevent the doxxing site to being reachable.

> Do people not also deserve to be protected from being DDOSed?

You mean the person doing the doing should be protected ?

>Do people also not deserve to not have their internet traffic be used to DDOS someone?

Yes, it should have been opt-in. But unless you doesn't run JS, you kinda give right to the website you visit to run arbitrary code anyway.

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Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.

Of course, never aggressing anyone and transform any aggression agaisnt self into an opportunity to acculturate the aggressor into someone with the same empathic behavior is a paragon of virtuous entity. But paragons of virtue is not the median norm, by definition.

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> Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.

Another basic ethological expectation is that the strong dominate the weak, but maybe we shouldn’t base our moral framework around how things are, and rather on how they should be.

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You don't think non-consensually revealing somebody's identity is a problem?

Resorting to DDoS is not pretty, but "why is my violent behavior met with violence" is a little oblivious and reversal of victim and perpetrator roles.

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> You don't think non-consensually revealing somebody's identity is a problem?

I do think it’s a problem. You are the only one excusing bad behavior here.

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I think this is a weak framing. Lots of things are moral or immoral under specific circumstances. We should protect people from being murdered. I think murder is usually wrong. But we also likely agree that there are circumstances in which killing someone can be justified. If we can find context for taking a life, I'm quite sure we can find context for a DoS.
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And what’s the context for using the internet traffic of your unsuspecting users to accomplish this?
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Using the internet trafic of the persons using your service to protect your anonymity and thus, protecting the service itself.
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So you shouldn’t have to inform your users that their traffic will be used in a cyberattack?
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In most jurisdictions informing them would potentially make them legally liable. The fact they had no knowledge shields them from liability.
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So their desire to not be used to commit a cyberattack doesn’t factor in? As long as they aren’t legally liable, it doesn’t matter?

Also a checkbox that says something like “I would like to help commit a crime using my internet traffic” would keep people from having their traffic used without consent.

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Unfortunately “consent” is a difficult to understand concept for a lot of the web and Silicon Valley.
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I don't have strong feelings about that one way or the other, honestly.
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There's an old legal maxim "in pari delicto potior est conditio defendentis", that is "in a case of mutual fault the position of the defending party is the better one."
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That works better when there is a defendant.
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People do not ever have any sort of moral or natural right to not get hit after starting shit.
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Even if this were true, this does not justify any particular type of action, except maybe an in kind response.

For example, would they have been justified to murder the blogger?

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