alt Hacker NewsIt'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?
Replies
> 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.
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.